Urban Reformation

Do you wonder if God will find faith on the earth? Luke 18:8

Prayer this week and conversation with some other brothers have had my heart heavy ( in a good way ) with our Spiritual Disciplines book by Don Whitney. I’ve read 3/4 of the way through the chapter and I hope to have it finished by today. That said and being transparent here, I long for our group not to just be reading through these chapters with a cursory glance but thoughtfully meditating on how these things draw one toward Christ as we really implement them in our lives.

One of the biggest hindrances of evangelism is an inauthentic Christian life. How many of you long, desire with all your heart to be more like Christ and less like you? I know that I remove the credibility or power of God, in a sense, by my own lukewarmness in the different areas/disciplines in my life. I really don’t want to play church or christian but I desire as God grants me the ability, to live it…

Let me give you an example, the first one of worship, but it could be any of these disciplines, prayer, bible intake etc.:

John Piper says:

“Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man . . . worship abides forever”

And yet practically sometimes I look at my life and ask myself do I worship? Do I really worship, does my worship line up with how they worship in God’s word?…. and if this is the way I worship God, sometimes I wonder why anyone else would want to worship if they would examine my worship. This is not to say I never worship, only pointing out that there is always room to improve my heart affections toward the God who saved me.

Again this is just one discipline but how many of us see the disparity between what we are studying and that which is ‘actual’ in our own lives in regards to these disciplines.

So my question is how do I/we get there?

The fact of the matter is we need to get there together…..

This is why Christ used the imagery of a Body describing how each piece needs the other to function as a whole body(1 Corinthians 12), and we were not meant to go through the Christian life sustaining ourselves in our own self sufficiency as the day is drawing near.

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. – Hebrews 3:12-14

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near .- Hebrews 10:23-25

Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. – Proverbs 27:17

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