Monday, September 14, 2009

A 100 Day Journey…

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Romans 12:1-2 (The Message)

We are surrounded by the presence of God, though if we are honest…most of us go through our day unaware of Him at best, and feeling abandoned by Him at worst. C. S. Lewis said, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.” Yet even in our redeemed state, we are often a distracted people. The busyness and chaos of life rob us of the comfort and power of knowing He is near.

What if there was a way to quiet our hearts and hear His voice? What would happen in and through us if we became a people that lived so that our focus and concern in every situation and relationship was “God Only”? We as a church body at FBCK are going on a journey. Over the next 100 Days it is our hope and desire to become a people of “reflective movement”, seeking to live continually aware of His presence and attentive to His invitation to join Him in His activity in the world around us. A people that live with a daily “rhythm” that empowers us to connect to the divine amidst the everyday. A “rhythm” that counters the chaos and disorder in our lives and creates space for us to become more aware of the nearness of God. In discussing a particular type of rhythm called a “rule of life”, Adele Calhoun says…

“A rule for life is a simple statement of the regular rhythms we choose in order to present our bodies to God as our “spiritual act of worship” (Romans 12:1). Each rule, or rhythm, is a way we partner with God for the transformation only he can bring. Rules keep our lives from devolving into unintended chaos. They aren’t a burdensome list of do’s and don’ts, enumerating everything you might do in a day. Life-giving rules are a brief and realistic scaffold of disciplines that support your hearts desire to grow in loving God and others.”

As we become accustomed to the rhythm it fades into the background and we are free to enjoy His presence, hear His voice, and know His heart in any situation and circumstance. Over the next 100 days we are seeking to develop a rhythm of worship. That rhythm is:

Who He is — Who I was — What He’s done —
Who I am — Who He is in me

Over the next week we our journey will pause each day on one movement in this rhythm. I am hoping to blog along the way to share thoughts and stirrings from the journey.

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