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“EVERYDAY INTIMACY: THE DAILY DEVOTIONS OF THE FULLY DEVOTED”Catching FireSeptember 1, 2013Cornerstone Community ChurchOne of the responsibilities of all parents is to help their kids build healthy daily habits. Certain habits kids are resistant to, which I can understand, but other habits, to my way of thinking, shouldn’t be all that tough. For example, many years ago when our kids were in the potty-training stage, we would often try to help them by reminding them when to go to the bathroom. The morning seemed a particularly good time to remind them of this event. But all three of my kids would on occasion make the following comment to me when I reminded them during breakfast time to go to the bathroom: “But I already went yesterday.” So even though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I had to teach my kids this lesson, I had to explain to each of my three children that going to the bathroom is something you do every day. “I know it’s inconvenient and a waste of precious time that could be spent in front of the television watching cartoons, guys, but that’s just how our bodies work.” And what’s even more embarrassing to admit is that my parents had to make that exact same speech to me once upon a time.Do you remember when our parents tried to get us in the habit of brushing our teeth every day? Do you remember how resistant we were to that whole concept? When our parents would ask us as we were heading out the door if we brushed our teeth, we would complain that we brushed them yesterday or the day before; why do we have to do it again? And so our parents explained that there are some things that require daily attention, and one of those things is our teeth. Mom and Dad said something like this to us: “Do you eat every day? Do you drink every day? Then you need to brush your teeth every day.”Every one of us over the years has tried to build certain habits into our lives, with varying degrees of success. We have tried to develop the habit of exercising every day. We have tried to develop the habit of learning a new word every day. We’ve tried to develop the habit of eating better on a daily basis – the experts tell us to eat two cups of fruit and three cups of vegetables every day, and for a day or two or three we gave it a shot. But donuts and pizza and cheeseburgers just taste so much better than kiwi and kale, so we gave it up. But the one daily habit we would most like to build into the lives of our children and into our own lives is a habit Jesus taught his disciples 2000 years ago. In Luke 9:23 Jesus startled those who had expressed an interest in following him with these words: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” That one verse tells us volumes about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. It tells us that following Jesus requires our full devotion. Here’s how one Bible scholar has paraphrased Jesus’ challenge to his listeners: “If you want to be my disciple, you must put your head on the chopping block every day.” Following Jesus isn’t for the half-hearted or the undecided or for people who don’t want to get their hands dirty. When Jesus calls us to follow him, he calls us to be fully devoted followers. And part of being a fully devoted follower, Jesus tells us, is to follow him every day. Following Jesus isn’t a Sunday morning deal or a Christmas and Easter deal. Following Jesus is something Jesus calls us to do every day. In this series we call “Catching Fire” we are trying to learn how to get close to God. We are trying to discover exactly what it means to be intimate with a God we cannot see but who we believe loves us with all his heart. We are trying to understand how to live out what Jesus said when he taught us that the most important thing we can do with our lives is to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength and all our mind. One of the things I’ve observed about a relationship with God is that it’s more like riding in the Tour de France than it is climbing Half Dome. Many of us have the impression that a relationship with God is something we achieve. In our minds God is sitting at the top of the mountain, whether it’s Half Dome or Mt. Ranier or K2, and our job is to climb the mountain and reach God. And once we’ve climbed over all the rocks and reached the top of the mountain, we’ve arrived. We have tracked down God. There’s nothing left to do.But the truth is, as we all know, that a relationship is not static; a relationship is active. It keeps moving. A relationship, including a relationship with God, is more like a bike race than a mountain climb. The Tour de France is the most famous bike race of all. Every July about 200 of the world’s best bikers race approximately 2500 miles through France, Spain and Belgium. The race is held over 23 stages with two rest days – a total of 25 days. This year Chris Froome of Great Britain won the Tour de France. Notably, Froome is the first winner of the race ever to be born in Africa. Now let’s imagine God is in the Tour de France, and you want to stay close to him, to develop a relationship with him. You want to develop an intimacy with God you’ve never had before. So you get on your bike and start riding next to God along Stage One, a flat stage of about 125 miles. You have a great day with God, talking and laughing and really getting close to him.But the next morning comes a little too soon. You’re tired, so you sleep in. In fact, you decide to take the day off. So you rest, and shop and watch some French TV. Now it’s Day Three and you’re ready to ride again. But where’s God? You want to ride with God again. You ask the race organizers where he is. “God,” they tell you, “is 150 miles ahead. He’s already in Spain.” And then it hits you – you can’t take a day off in the Tour de France. This is an everyday sort of thing. If you want to stay close to God, you’ve got to get on your bike every day and ride with him every single day. God calls us to follow him. When someone says “Follow me,” you know they’re going somewhere; you know they’re on the move. God isn’t sitting on top of a mountain. He’s on a mission. He’s going somewhere. And if we want to stay up with him, we have to follow him every day. Being a fully devoted follower of God is an everyday affair. This morning I want to be as practical as I can as we talk about how to follow God every day and how to build an intimacy with God we’ve never had before, how to catch fire in our walk with God.Step One – Decide To BuildSo let me suggest three steps we can take to develop intimacy with God. All three steps are simple, and all three steps are hard. The first step is perhaps the hardest of all. The first step is this – decide.For example, the first step in racing the Tour de France is to decide you want to race. A lot goes into that decision, of course. You have to evaluate what the cost of the race is, the cost in terms of your time, the physical cost of training for the race, the monetary cost, the feasibility of entering the race, and what you’ll get out of racing the Tour. But the first step to actually racing is to decide you want to race. No one just happens to race in the Tour de France. No one accidentally races in the Tour de France.Over the years we’ve had a number of police officers in our church. None of them became police officers by accident. None of them woke up one day and found themselves wearing a bullet-proof vest and a badge and a uniform and really cool sunglasses. Each one of them made a very deliberate decision that they wanted to do what it takes to become a police officer.One day Jesus spotted Simon Peter and his brother Andrew in their boat in the Sea of Galilee fishing. Fishing was their career, their life. And then Jesus called them. In Mark 1:17 we read that Jesus walked up to Simon and Andrew and said these words: “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They had a decision to make. Do they keep doing what they’re doing, what they’ve been doing all their lives, or do they leave it all behind and follow Jesus? This was their moment of decision. This was the time to literally fish or cut bait. The next verse tells us their decision: “At once they left their nets and followed him.”Now maybe you're thinking, “I made that decision a long time ago. I became a Christian last year. I remember it well. I got down on my knees next to my bed and I prayed and asked God to come into my heart and to forgive my sins. That decision was long since made.”But that’s not the decision I’m talking about. Think of it this way. I made the decision to marry Brenda a long time ago. We’ve been married for over 33 years. But there have been times during our marriage when we haven’t been particularly close. And during those times we had a decision to make. It wasn’t a decision about getting married or even staying married; we had made that decision once and for all a long time ago. The decision facing us was whether we wanted intimacy and not just coexistence. That’s the decision I’m talking about this morning in terms of your relationship with God. You may have already asked God into your life and experienced his forgiveness of your sin. But intimacy isn’t a one-time event; intimacy is experienced every day. And so the decision you need to make is whether you want to build intimacy with God. Do you remember the movie “Field of Dreams” starring Kevin Costner, that came out way back in 1989? In that movie Costner was a farmer in Iowa, and a big baseball fan. One day while he was out in his cornfields he heard a voice whispering to him: “If you build it, he will come. If you build it, he will come.” At first Costner thought he was losing his mind, but he eventually came to believe that this voice was telling him to plow under his crops – which he couldn’t afford to do – and to build a baseball field on his farm. But who was the “he” the voice referred to? Costner at first thought it was Shoeless Joe Jackson, a great baseball player who was banned from the sport in 1919. But after Costner decides to build the field, and after Shoeless Joe and other former baseball greats come back to play the game they loved so much on Costner's “field of dreams,” Costner discovers who the “he” really is. It’s his father, the father he loved but who died during a time when they had a falling out. “If you build it, he will come,” the voice said. So Costner made the decision. He plowed under his crops and went into hock to build a baseball field in the middle of his farm, and sure enough, “he” came. His father came.The Bible makes us this promise. “If you build it, he will come.” If you decide to do whatever it takes to develop an intimate relationship with God, then you can be sure the Father will come. If you make the commitment to spending time reading God’s Word and praying, if you commit yourself to being a fully devoted follower of God’s Son, Jesus, he will come. If you commit yourself to being an everyday follower of Jesus, he will come. And it starts with a decision. “If you build it, he will come.”Step Two – Plan To Build OK, so we’ve decided to build it. We’ve made the decision that we want to experience intimacy with God, that we want to stay close to him, that we want our relationship with God to catch fire. We’ve decided we’re going to do whatever it takes, that we’re going to make the ride with him, that we’ve going to follow wherever he takes us. What’s next? Practically speaking, in real world terms, how do we go about building intimacy with God?Once Kevin Costner decided to build his “field of dreams,” he had to develop a plan. Once we decided as a church 17 years ago to build classrooms in two of the old movie theaters, we had to take some time to develop a building plan. We had to develop a plan to level out the floor and to construct a ceiling and to ventilate the classes and to put sinks in the classes. Our electricians had to come up with a wiring plan. Once you decide to build it, you have to develop a building plan. If you watch any of those renovation shows on DIY Network or on HGTV, you know that once the homeowner decides he wants to remodel his kitchen or his bathroom or his yard, the next thing he has to do is to draw up a plan.Let me suggest how you need to think through your plan to build intimacy with God. In one way it’s pretty simple. The key ingredient to building intimacy with anyone is time. To build intimacy with God requires spending time with God. So the issues we need to address in order to develop our plan are these: (1) How much time am I going to spend every day building a relationship with God? (2) When during the day am I going to spend this time building a relationship with God? (3) What am I going to do during the time I spend with God?Other than what we’ve already said – which is that following God is an everyday affair – please understand there are no right answers to those questions. The Bible doesn’t tell us we have to spend 2 hours twice a day with God – once at 6:00 a.m. and once at 9:00 p.m. Some people actually spend that much time each day with God. Martin Luther used to get up at 4:00 a.m. and spend the first four hours of every day praying. And while logically the more time you spend with a person, including with God, the closer your relationship is going to be, practically speaking there are very few people who are able to devote that much concentrated time to talking with God.How much time you devote to spending alone with God is up to you. It is from that word “devote,” by the way, that we get the word “devotions.” Maybe you’ve heard Christians use that word before and you didn’t know what they were talking about. A “daily devotion” is the habit of devoting a certain amount of time every day to spend with God. Let me suggest a plan of daily devotions that might be useful for you. First, if you’ve never been in the habit of devoting some time each day to God, let me suggest you start out with no more than 10 minutes or 15 minutes. What is most important is that you spend some time, no matter how long, every day with God. So let’s say you have decided to spend 15 minutes a day with God. The next question is when? Some people have their devotions first thing in the morning, some have them at lunch, and some have them just before they go to bed. When I was first learning how to build time with God into my daily life, one of my pastors gave me this thought on when the best time is to have devotions. He said, “When is the best time for the members of an orchestra to tune their instruments – before they play or after? Before they play, of course. So the best time for me to make sure I’m in tune with God is before I start my day, first thing in the morning.” And that makes a lot of sense. But I will be quick to acknowledge that not everyone can have their time of devotions first thing in the morning. Some of us just aren’t all that with it first thing in the morning, or we’re too distracted or too sleepy. Some of my friends find it works best for them at lunch time, and some of my friends find it works best right before they go to bed. So when you set aside time to be with God is up to you. Again the point is to have a plan, to decide ahead of time when you, as a fully devoted follower of Jesus, are going to devote yourself to being alone with God. So let’s say you have decided to spend 15 minutes a day with God, and you’re going to do it at lunch, right after you finish reading the comics or checking the stock market. For 15 minutes you’re going to shut the door to your office, and devote yourself to God. Question three – what are you going to do?Here’s one plan I used when I first began the discipline of having daily devotions, a plan I heard Billy Graham suggest. Billy Graham noted that the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament has 150 chapters, and the Book of Proverbs, which follows Psalms, has 31 chapters. Billy Graham suggested that if you read about 5 chapters in the Psalms each day and 1 chapter in Proverbs each day, you will read through the Books of Psalms and Proverbs once a month. Try doing that for one year, he suggested. Reading 5 psalms and one chapter of Proverbs will take you about 10 minutes. Then for 5 minutes, talk to God. Tell him you love him. Tell him thanks for what is good in your life, and ask him to help you with the things that are hard. And after you have prayed for 5 minutes, stop. Or instead of reading Psalms and Proverbs, try using the Daily Bread devotional that we always have out in the lobby. You’ll read a couple of devotional paragraphs, and then read whatever the booklet says is the passage for the day – it takes maybe 5 or 6 minutes. And there are many other things you can do to build the habit of spending time alone with God every day. You can download the YouVersion Bible on your phone or tablet, and it will come with a variety of suggested reading plans. You can listen to the Daily Audio Bible that Andrew has mentioned before. But here’s the point – you have to have a plan. No one gets close to God by accident. You’re not going to trip and land with your nose in the Bible. So if this isn’t something you’re doing already, take some before you go to sleep tonight to think about when and where you’re going to meet with God and what you’re going to do when you’re with him. Come up with a plan to build your relationship with God.Begin To BuildFinally, once you have decided to build an intimate relationship with God, and once you have developed a plan to build intimacy with God, there is only step left – to begin. Get started. Shut the door, turn off the TV, pull out your Bible, and get started. And remember – “If you build it, he will come.” If you build it, the Father will come. Don’t worry that you will go to all the trouble of setting aside time to be with God, and buying a devotional guide and reading the Bible, and that God won’t show up. God will come. There is nothing God wants more than to spend time just with you. God doesn’t want to co-exist with you. God doesn’t want to be an acquaintance, a person you wave to as you pass in the hall. God wants to be intimate with you, to know you and be known by you. If you build it, if you commit yourself to spending time every day in the pursuit of intimacy with God, you can be sure of this – he will come.We’re going to close this service and this series with another habit Christians have engaged in for 2000 years; it’s called “communion.” This is something we engage in at various times throughout the year as a way of connecting with our God, the God who loves us so much he’d rather die than live without us. It’s a very special way we tell God, “Lord, just as you gave your life for me, I give my life to you. I am grateful for the sacrifice you made on the cross for me, and now I want to recommit myself to taking up my cross every day and following you.” So let’s take a moment right now and prepare our hearts for communion. ................
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