A rule I have had for years: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. He is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but it is He Himself we have. DL Moody
My morning routine recently blew up! A person living in Europe came on my work team of people mainly in North America and me. I’m naturally a night person and previously happily volunteered to have numerous evening Zoom meetings, but to now best fit in timewise, I became the one with the early morning calls, sometimes starting at 6am, 6.30am, 7am…I was whacked by the time several consecutive meetings were done. Groggy mornings, messing up everything from eating breakfast to long-held spiritual routines.
Thoughts from Ian’s 4 May sermon on becoming more like Jesus (Colossians 3:1-10) kept ringing in my ear: what was I trying to achieve as I struggled to reintroduce routines?
Ian had asked us, do you want to
· run a marathon, or be a runner?
· read 10 books, or be a reader?
· read the Bible in a year/memorise scripture/pray for hours, or be a person of the Word/a person of prayer…?
It’s clear that to have my identity as a person of the Word and prayer, I’d need to desire to build up my holy habits again, in new timeframes. I’m still working on this.
But I realised this week that I’d fallen into the trap of focussing on ‘doing’ spiritual disciplines in my efforts to get reestablished. That’s important, but Colossians 3:10 reminds me of my identity, Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him. DL Moody’s quote reminds me that it is in ‘being’ in relationship with Jesus that I have He Himself, my friend to walk the journey together of knowing him and becoming like him.
Sue McQuay
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