Developing a Disciplined Walk With God

As the title says, the lesson tonight was about developing a disciplined walk with God. 

No one really likes the word "discipline", whether it means punishment or forcing yourself to do something unpleasant. But Scripture tells us in Psalm 2:12 to embrace discipline. The definition of embrace, according to Webster's 1828 dictionary, is "to seize eagerly, to lay hold on, to receive or take with willingness that which is offered". (emphasis mine) 

Developing a disciplined walk with God means embracing discipline eagerly and willingly, and even more, embracing Christ eagerly and willingly. 

Consistent Bible reading and prayer is very important. Just as it's important to eat every day so we don't starve to death, it's also important to feed ourselves spiritually so that we don't starve our relationships with God to death. 

As Jael said last meeting, in the weeks before presenting a lesson, we have to be living it out. Last month Jael and I challenged ourselves to spend an hour with God each day for the rest of the month. I missed a couple days, but other than that, I did it... but then in October, I stopped. I'd finished my "goal time", right? Then I looked at the topic of the lesson I was supposed to be presenting (hmm, does this sound familiar?) and realized that this was a bad time to quit! 

Both last month and this month, it hasn't been nearly as hard as I thought it would be. God's been helping me in many ways! One night I knew I should be doing devotions, but I started to mess around online instead... the only problem was, for "some strange reason", my Internet browser wasn't working properly. The one site it would load was the one my Bible reading plan was on! Strange, huh? ;) 

Another night, I decided not to do my full hour of devotions because I was too sleepy. 

Guess what happened that night. 

Right... I didn't sleep! I was tossing and turning, coughing, sneezing, anything but sleeping! In the morning I was exhausted... and Psalm 127:2 kept running through my head. It seems that God puts high emphasis on having himself as number one priority! 

When you look at the lives of Christian "heroes" of the past, just about all of them practiced incredible discipline: George Mueller, Jesus (the ultimate example!), and Fanny Crosby are a few examples. 

But Bible reading and prayer are not the only things we need to discipline... our thoughts, words, and actions must be disciplined as well. Our thought life is very difficult to tame, but we are commanded to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ"! (2 Corinthians 10:5) 

The activity tonight was making paper snowflakes! It was supposed to go along with the lesson on God's design, but we got a little mixed up in our lesson order, so we did them this week instead. ;)

Jael brought her violin this week, and will be bringing it to every meeting in the future, due to popular request. ;) It added sooo much to our singing time, and was a lot of fun at the end when she started playing fiddle tunes for us!