40 Days of Spiritual RebootSample

As we begin today, praise God for the week ahead and tell him that you’re anticipating great things from His Word and by His Spirit. Tell God that you believe He has lots in store for you and you are eager ‘to receive from his hand’.

We are on the theme of Worship this week and asking God to renew our passion for personal worship and the practice of His presence. It is easier to be part of an event or service where someone is leading us in worship. But I want to challenge us to lead ourselves in worship. Our biggest example is the psalmist David. And many others spent time with God and expressed their love to him in songs, words and tributes. Mary’s song is a great example and Isaiah too made his contribution.

How would I gauge my personal time with God? How would I measure the temperature of my worship? Would it have more to do with how I feel or how God feels about it? Is this time about me or about God? These are some key questions to ask ourselves before we get started. In following days I will give more practical guidance.

Personal worship sessions could be a couple of minutes of praise prayers going all the way to an hour of worship. It depends on you, your time availability, your intention and your planning. What I urge you is to not let it be at the mercy of the moment, where the events of your day, the aches and pains, the impending guests arrival, the kids yelling, the ‘busy part of the morning’ when the vendors and house helps begin to arrive etc... where these take over and dictate how much and how deep your worship time is. Personal worship is most often part of your daily devotion. But you may catch yourself sitting in your car or on the metro, or anywhere for that matter, while washing the dishes, cleaning the house, cooking, etc… and your thoughts are guided by the words of the song or a memory is triggered of the goodness and providence of God. Your heart engages in worship as you express gratitude to God, indebtedness to God or complete reliance on God.

The matter I want us to give attention today is the discipline of worship in setting time aside for this with God. This is over and above those ‘inspirational moments through the day’ or ‘Sunday services when the worship was good’, or the five minutes right after 'he saved you from an accident' or 'provided a big bonus'. I’m talking about making it a discipline so that the habit of magnifying him produces the by product of minimising ourselves. I don’t mean making ourselves small. I’m talking about ensuring we don’t make HIM as small as us. Hope you get my point. This is not masochism or self effacement. You please stay your own size and worth. But magnify Him in your heart so that your own perspective is restored as to the greatness, magnificence and glory that is due Him. Most of the crisis in faith that you and I experience is because of our perspective of the size of our God. He has either become too small, too distant, too incompetent or just dead. Now your faith is hanging by a thread and some tragedy has to strike and suddenly ‘there is NO GOD’!!! And by tragedy I mean a flat tyre, or you missed the plane, or the mall was closed in an urgent situation.

A disciplined worship habit will maintain the size of your God and keep your life, problems and people in perspective. This is secondary goal of this discipline. The first of course is that God is worthy of your worship and you were made, designed and created for worship. When you are worshiping him, you are at your shining best.

PRACTICE OF WORSHIP

1. Position yourself for worship and give him your full attention. Combat any disturbances or urgent needs. You can deal with them later.

2. Use scripture or worship songs or a song book to jumpstart your spiritual offering of worship today. Listen to a couple of songs or read through the words of some songs in the chorus book. Let these stir a joyful response. Agree with the writer or singer and present your heart to God like a hamper of praise products. Lift it up to him with both your hands. Don’t bother talking about yourself. How insignificant or small or whatever you are. Don’t! No need! Gaze into his glory and lose yourself to his presence. Be willing to be irrelevant to this world for a few minutes, Disconnect from your body and emotions and memories and discomfort and mental storms. Just give him the glory. No ifs, no buts, no when you do this or when you do that. Nothing.

3. Don’t bring God down to you. You go up to Him. Ask the Spirit of God to transport you into his presence. His Spirit lives in you. His Cathedral is a prayer away. You just have to close your eyes and shut off from your body and your spirit is right there… in his glorious presence. Jesus said… I will send you another like myself. He will be with you and He will be in you. One day when you die… and your spirit leaves your body and heads to its real home… it will be super familiar. It won’t be new. It won’t be scary. Death will just be the last time need to do this. Because now you’ll be permanently in his presence… forever…. your ‘practice' is now perfected.

Read. Breathe. Read

Psalm 150 (NKJV) 150 Praise the Lord! Praise God in His sanctuary; Praise Him in His mighty firmament! 2 Praise Him for His mighty acts;Praise Him according to His excellent greatness! 3 Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet; Praise Him with the lute and harp! 4 Praise Him with the timbrel and dance; Praise Him with stringed instruments and flutes! 5 Praise Him with loud cymbals; Praise Him with clashing cymbals! 6 Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord!

COME CLEAN

Resolve in your heart an issues you might have with the God’s sovereign will and actions. Because often times when you are upset with God about how things have happened in your life, worship becomes difficult. You know what I mean?