The Rhythm of Your Life

There are things that you do everyday brush your hair (if you have any!), make your bed, go off to work, and the list goes on.  Most of these things you do without much thought, they’ve simply become an ingrained habit that you don’t pay attention to until your routine is disrupted by vacation, retirement, the end of the school year, or sickness.  We live such busy lives that it is easy to sleepwalk through them doing the same thing day in and day out. 

Where does God fit into your routine? Where is God in the daily rhythm of your life? Time and again in Scripture, we hear the desire of God to be a part of our lives.  In creation, God didn’t make people like everything else He created, we are uniquely made and designed for relationship. Even after Adam and Eve (and each of us) chose to make a way apart from God, He came looking for us.  God wants to be a part of your life!  Where is God in the daily rhythm of your life?

Below are a few approaches (one stands out as better than the rest) we sometimes try to make God part of our lives.

Adding Jesus: In our attempts to make God part of our lives we often try to ‘add Him into the mix.’ We go on living normally but tack on a couple of minutes to pray or read a devotion and Scripture. These are good things, we should be in the Word and prayer! But it is approached as a duty—just another thing to check off our list for the day—we add in God when it is convenient for us. But God wants to be more than just an ‘ingredient’ we add to flavour our lives. Jesus used the image of yeast in Matthew 13:33 as the picture of how He gets mixed into the whole of our lives—He leaves nothing untouched!

Including Jesus: In this approach we acknowledge Jesus as important for our daily lives but we stop short of allowing Jesus to fully be Lord of our lives.  We spend time with Him in Word and prayer and seek out His leading but we ultimately have the final say; we hold onto ‘veto power’ over anything that God might want to do with us.  Jesus is allowed to be part of our life but we don’t completely surrender all to Him. 

Attending Jesus: Whereas the first two approaches to being more mindful of Jesus in our lives focused on what we allowed, this approach is more passive. When we attend Jesus we watch what He is doing all around us; we understand our whole day to be worship and honouring to God.  With this mindset, it is not about what we are doing but what Jesus is doing in and through us.  The more we’re attentive to Jesus, the more our lives will look like Him: time in prayer and the Word become vital to us as we meet Jesus in those moments, our interactions with people become meaningful because we see Jesus at work in all we say and do. It is like the yeast that doesn’t just add a little flavour but completely changes the substance of the mixture; the effects of the yeast are abundantly obvious in the final product.
As we grow in our walk with the Lord, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we should naturally be growing toward the third approach of attending to the work God is already doing in our lives. But don’t fret if you’re not yet there (I’m not either!) This is a growth opportunity as we continue to grow in the grace and love of Jesus that he lavished upon us. 
Watch for Jesus! He is at work in you right now. Be attentive to the work of the Holy Spirit forgiving, loving, and calling. Go boldly with Jesus ingrained in the rhythm of your life! 

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