In our men’s Bible study this past Saturday morning we talked about ‘fear and love’ in the Bible. I wondered out loud to the group,
‘Do we truly experience a daily tangible relationship with God?‘.
I said, I’m sure we have all had times where we felt close to Him (and multiple heads shook in agreement) but do we have an intimate connection with him daily? If we did, we probably would better understand what it means to ‘fear’ breaking that relationship with Him.
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I suspect that, despite our efforts, there will always be some days when God feels distant. As He did to David, when he wrote Psalm 22, and to Jesus when he used it while on the cross:
My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
2 O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear;
And in the night season, and am not silent.
But these are likely times of trial in which God is teaching us something. The problem I have, is that I bring upon myself a dryness (as Gordon MacDonald described in our last post) and this is something I want to try to address.
You see, I’ve been going through a period of discouragement and I desire a closer walk with God. I want to know His presence more and have a more intimate relationship. I want it to be more tangible as it was with Moses, David and especially Jesus.
I know a closer walk means both more discipline and more actually walking (doing His will). Therefore today, I resolve to journal for 40 days starting this coming Sunday, November 11th, through to Friday, December 22nd. I can’t think of a better way to prepare for the coming of Christ on Christmas!
I have talked to multiple people about this already and some people have agreed to join me, without any prompting. Therefore I wanted to open this challenge up to all of you. To our blog readers, our followers on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. The members of the Westchester Men’s Ministry and the church congregations of Westchester, especially Community Bible Church of Yorktown, NY.
If you would like to join us, make a resolution to do so. You don’t have to make it public but we recommend you do. You can leave a comment on this blog post or you can share it on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/NYMensministry
Then keep an eye out for more details on resources to help you during your journaling/quiet time. In order to make it easier, any resource we use will be available free on-line. You can use a simple notebook but if you would like to buy a slightly nicer journal, this one is less than $10. http://www.dayspring.com/cross_leather_christian_journal/
God Bless!
The 40 Day Journaling Challenge by Westchester Men’s Ministry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at https://nymensministry.com/2012/11/06/journaling-challenge/.
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