Living the Disciplined Life

Our lives are filled with habits. The challenge is how do we keep good habits and lose bad ones?

I have thought about discipline a fair amount. I am often trying to improve the way my life works and am daily putting in effort to hold on to habits I am trying to acquire. There is always a period of time where certain habits require real work to make them a part of our life. It is during this time period in which most people lose the fight. It requires mental toughness it add a new habit to your life.

I like talking in concrete terms so I will share where I am seeing success and where I need to do some work. I have succeeded in making exercise a fundamental part of my morning routine. The truth is, the way I am wired, I need 45 minutes of aerobic exercise every morning in order for my life to work properly. At this point this habit takes very little mental toughness to keep, as I just do it five days a week without thinking much about it. I am also doing well about spending time in the word every morning and praying as well. These habits seem to be critical to my overall success, so I am glad to have them in place. Hygiene has become a higher priority in the last couple of months, as in brushing my teeth a second time during the day and flossing, as well as adding palmade to my hair to make it look nicer. They still take a little mental toughness- there have been a few occasions where I have had to drag my rear end out of bed to brush my teeth and floss, but I haven't missed days and I am pretty happy about how it is going.

As far as habits that need changing... my work affords me a lot of flexibility as far as when I work, so I struggle getting to work as early as I like. My diet could use to have more fruits and vegetables in it. It would be good if I did more cooking - I admit it, as far as the food I eat, I am little lazy. I do some cooking for breakfast, but it really isn't anything elaborate. I don't eat out too often, which is good, but still my diet could use some work. It would be nice if I made a habit out of cleaning out the interior of my car. Yes, I am going to try and change these things over the months and years to come.

The number one secret to making change is to do it slowly. You can try to change it all at once, but once your emotional fervor dies down you probably won't have the capacity to hold on to it. Pick the most critical habit for your success overall and go after it. The key here is consistency. You need to retrain yourself so that doing whatever this habit requires every day becomes standard procedure. If it was reading your bible in the morning, just read for 15 minutes to start with. Don't try to read for a really long time at the beginning; you don't want to set the bar so high that it disuades you from following through the next day. A little bit of patience goes a long way- don't expect to get amazing results right off the bat.

My prayer for you is that you will put the effort in to add new disciplines into your life. Good habits go far toward helping you sustain success when it comes. And the habits you have will dictate the character that is in you. If you are single, you will bring joy to your life through good habits and it will help you attract a mate. If you are married, upgrading your habits will help sustain your marriage and make your mate more content that they chose you. You might even like looking in the mirror more, enjoying who you are becoming. I pray that you will agree with me that the disciplined life is the way to live!

Your companion in Christ,
Sean

Perspective

I think a great challenge in life is to keep perspective. The problem with perspective is that it is internal- it is hard to tell when we've lost it and have got sucked into some problem or circumstance in our life that has wrecked our perspective. It often takes an outside source to point out to us that we've lost perspective.

The beauty of perspective is that it allows us to relax. The truth is we should live in a restful state with God that keeps life in a right perspective, even when difficulties do come. We should be able to enjoy life, realizing that our true treasure is in heaven and everything good that happens to us on this earth is just icing. Or maybe it is less than icing- maybe it is just the frosted writing on the cake that says "I love you" from God. Regardless we should remember that heaven is our home and that God loves us passionately. We can just allow God to work through our lives and let go of any desires that aren't necessary for our calling.

My prayer for you today is that you would give a quick glance at the way you are looking at life and ask "Have I lost perspective? Am I living in a restful state? Are the fruit of the spirit evident in how I am conducting myself, or is it some other kind of fruit? If it is some other kind of fruit, why is my perspective out of whack or lost?" Please take some time and think about this. You never know what might come to the surface. Regain your perspective today!

Your companion in Christ,
Sean

How to Build Closer Friendships

For some reason I seem to have a knack for building close friendships. For whatever reason, I think I am generally the exception- at least as far as men are concerned, I can't speak for women. If you would like to build deeper friendships, I might be able to help.

There is a skill involved that I am not sure I can give complete justice to. I think it is the timely ability to share personal information as the relationship deepens. I think this means it is okay, at least between people of the same gender, to admit struggles that are common to that gender relatively early on in the friendship, probably in a general fashion. This amount of transparency gets the ball rolling and allows for deeper discussions later on.

As I talked about in my friendship wisdom post, it also makes sense to be selective about who you make friends with. Some people aren't very good at sharing who they are, where they came from, etc. And some people will always be that way. A good way to see where a person is at is to experiment talking about something closer to the surface, like politics or theology, something where a personal opinion is required and there is some risk of disagreement. If they can handle this, then there is hope. If not, then there is reason to believe this person might find it quite difficult sharing anything really personal. I wouldn't try too hard making it work if after hanging out several times all you can talk about is sports or a common hobby.

I can't stress enough the value of listening. It is something that we don't realize how much it is worth until we begin to wonder why people don't really enjoy hanging out with us. Learning how to be a good listener is really governed by motivation. When I realized that listening was the only way I can learn anything new, that was a big help for me to stop thinking about what I want to say next and just pay attention to what they are saying now. If you want deeper relationships, listening will be instrumental in your success.

I think one skill that has been very helpful to me is the ability to ask good questions. When you ask about their week, ask "What happened this week? Did anything new happen? Why was it a good week?" Any question that requires more than a one word answer will help. Even talking about our lives and how things are really going in something more specific than "fine" is progress towards getting to know each other. The goal is to get the other person to share about themselves whatever they feel comfortable sharing so that the bonding process is moving on.

I wish you all blessings as you go try to build deeper friendships. If anyone out there has some thoughts on this, please post in the comments as I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this one. Maybe my repertoire could be expanded! I would love to get even better at building good friendships, and I hope you feel the same way.

Your companion in Christ,
Sean

Being Filled With the Love of God

I must confess, there is something I have a passion about. Don't be surprised if you see more posts along the lines of the topic of this post.

I know the reason why we struggle. Oh, we may not be disciplined. We may not be spending the time necessary with God, or whatever. When it comes down to it, though, ultimately you will only really have success in the Christian life as much as you believe and have received the love of God.

I am not talking about whether or not you believe God is loving. People the world over believe that, in some kind of theoretical way. I am saying you need to live off of it. You need to experience it. You need to be transformed by it. When it comes down to it, what we do is based on what we really believe. If you believe that God is your critic you will always be trying to impress him by doing more, which really doesn't impress him at all. If you believe he is distant you will always wonder what he's thinking and will be trying to get his attention. If your life isn't deeply rooted in the love of God, your life is likely to go one of two directions: you will either fall to some kind of addiction, depression, etc. or you will become increasingly religious with little tolerance for the weakness in others. Either way you are on dangerous turf.

Having got your attention, I have thought long and hard about how best to convey God's love to you so that you can experience it for yourself. You see, I am talking about the ultimate lover. This is a person who can turn someone who is as wounded as I was and make him into something of a minister. In order for you to believe that my life is something of a miracle, I need to tell you a little about my history. You see, when I was growing up I was serially abused by my peers in school. I learned to hide behind my intellect and my pride. More than anything in the world, I hurt. Badly hurt. And then in came this wonderful man Jesus. There hasn't been anyone in my life like him! He is just so gentle. No matter where I was, whether I was angry or crazy he has always been there. He is just so patient. At last I met someone who accepted me at face value, who loved me with my ideosyncracies, who just enjoyed hanging out. The truth is, he is the love of my life. Through him I received a ton of healing and that has helped me become a much better friend to my friends. Through his love I have matured tremendously.

The truth is, you have to experience it for yourself. You need to hear his voice on your own. A good book to read is "Dialog with God" by Mark Virkler. It will teach you the fundamentals. It is possible I may decide to reread that book and do some posts on hearing God's voice- if you are interested in this, send me an email and that will show me it is worth the effort of rereading it. If there is anything I can impress upon you, it's that knowing God intimately, hearing his voice, and knowing his love is absolutely critical for you to do what you are called to do. Don't live another day without it!

Your companion in Christ,
Sean

Think about it...

I want to challenge you, the reader, to think more.

You see, there is an epidemic in the church today. It is called "Dogmatism". It is the art of taking other people's thoughts and calling them your own. This kind of thinking isn't thinking at all- it is thought avoidance. The truth is, people are lazy. Maybe you aren't, and maybe I am not, but there are plenty of people out there who believe what they believe because it is popular, or because someone they admire thinks that way, but not because they came to the conclusion themselves. This sort of cop out from genuinely testing information to see if it holds up under scrutiny is for those who don't really want to invest the time and energy to come to unique conclusions. After all, if you think something different than your friends, you might become an outcast, or who knows? Your simplistic view of life might be disturbed.

You wonder what the harm is, in believing something for some other reason besides being firmly convinced through research and thorough thinking about it and finding it is true. There are several issues at hand. First of all, you won't be able to relate at all to people who spend lots of time thinking. True thinkers hate dogmatism; it is really an escape from reality. Another consequence is the inability to see things from other people's perspective. Dogmatism tends to trap the person being dogmatic, so that they can only see one point of view. This will deeply hinder a person's ability when relating to someone with a significantly different viewpoint.

The truth is, we live in a very complex world. Dogmatic people, I think, ultimately are trying to evade this simple truth. They want to believe the earth is only 6,000 years old because that keeps everything within reach, understandable. The truth is often too complex to be fully understood, and rather than face the ambiguity they want to keep it simple enough a child could understand. This is wrong. And you should care enough about what you choose to believe to put the time and energy into considering various viewpoints on topics too complex to understand at first glance. Please do us all a favor and really think about what you believe.

Your companion in Christ,
Sean

Joy

Joy can be an elusive fruit of the Spirit. If you are not experiencing joy, then it might be a good exercise to see if you can find out why.

Now when I say joy, I don't necessarily mean that you are in a great mood or that you are happy. Even in difficult emotional struggles, if your relationship with God is in a good place joy can be there too. While it is true that not every reason for not having joy is necessarily bad, I would say that at least 75% of the time, if you aren't experiencing joy it is either because there is sin, or you did not get what you needed from God in your time with him. Joy is generally a sign, therefore, that there is peace between you and God and that you are have received the love you need from God on that day.

Not having joy is a signpost, a warning. Please take it seriously. If you live seperated from the joy that comes from God long enough, you may try to fill this need some other fashion- either through overdoing your hobbies, placing extra unnecessary expectations on friends and the people you live with, or giving in to addictions. All kinds of sin are readily available to the one who isn't filled with God, and what you might consider an unlikely temptation now might easily beguile you in an unexpected attempt on your part to meet unmet emotional needs. And just because the sin you choose is socially acceptable doesn't mean you will get off scot free with God...

May your life be filled with the joy that comes with surrendering to God and living in the presense of his love. If you have some sin in between you and God, please take care of it now. It will take time to get your joy back, and you owe it to yourself to get your joy back.

Your companion in Christ,
Sean

The Normal Christian Life

Have you ever wondered what the normal Christian life is like? That is the subject of one of my dreams. Not all my dreams are so spiritual- last night I dreamed that my father was teaching me how to rob banks- and no, my dad doesn't really know how to rob a bank. :-P Where that came from, your guess is as good as mine. Anyways, I woke up thinking about the normal Christian life. What is the normal Christian life? How hard is it supposed to be? What exactly would my life look like if it was normal, based on what God defines as normal?

I think my blog so far in many ways is an attempt to show what should actually be normal. It should be normal that we would be placed in positions where God had to follow through or we would be in trouble. It should be normal for a person to be building their relationship with God every single day, without ever taking a day off. These things should be normal. Spiritual gifting should be normal. I should even be excited about how God might use me on any given day. Maybe I'm off on this, but I'd like to think that every day we could have at least small adventures, where we could discover new facets of God. Although, I am also convinced there is definitely a place for discovering that our emotions don't have to be titillated and we don't have to "feel great" all the time in order for things to be going right in our life. There are seasons where we just need to follow God inspite of not having all the emotions there to help us do what we are called to do. Can the two of these things mesh together and both be true? I am not sure, though in some respects they are two different things and not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I also have another question. Could my life be just a little bit boring in part because I am not allowing myself to be in faith-challenging circumstances? Places where there is real need. I'm not saying there is no ministry in my life, that is not true. The truth is that I am doing very well with what God has given me, and I am always trying to improve. But maybe you, and definitely I am little bit bored because there isn't enough ministry in our lives. I'll have to think about how to fill that gap... and maybe you should too, if that is where you are. It is nice to make a difference in someone's life...

Your companion in Christ,
Sean

One day at a time...

I am having the dawning realization that success in the Christian life requires daily work. You know, I have heard plenty of sermons about reading my Bible every day and praying every day and although the fruit of this message might involve that, this message is not about that directly. It is about this- the idea that we can take even a single day for granted, or let up even for a moment.

The truth is our enemy is always at work. Our enemy, the devil, doesn't take days off. It's almost as if we think he does- like we can fool around with an undisciplined attitude because we don't feel like taking our relationship with Christ seriously on some given day. I am telling you- if you want to succeed, you are going to have to fight on your hands and knees every day to have it. If you slack off, our enemy will shred you to pieces at an unexpected moment, like a farmer waiting for a pig to get fat before the slaughter the enemy will wait for just the right time to destroy you. Beware- the Christian life is fraught with peril. It is a daily fight that does not ever really let up. It seems to me the reason why the church has so many problems is simply because we let down our guard on some days, not walking with God every day, not seeking the grace we need to live sin free every single day of our lives. If you want to see victory in your life, you need a persevering perspective of taking each day by the horns and not letting up until you are completely asleep... then wake up the next morning and start all over. Don't be caught asking God for longterm success- that can be just another way to dodge the responsibility of following God today. Daily grace is needed to win this fight...

Your companion in Christ,
Sean