It’s Free Friday! Today is the day you let go of the things in your life that keep you down or hold you back. To celebrate, I’m giving away a copy of “Fresh Air: trading stale spiritual obligation for a life-altering, energizing, experience-it-everyday relationship with God” by Chris Hodges. Keep reading to find out how to enter.
Two years ago, I was losing weight. I had adopted a better diet, began to exercise more and controlled the portion size of the food I ate. For weeks, the pounds came off. Five pounds. Ten pounds. Fifteen pounds. Twenty pounds. Twenty pounds. Twenty pounds. I got stuck. I couldn’t lose any more. I hit a plateau at twenty pounds lost. I wanted to lose more, but nothing I did pushed me past it. I are healthier. I exercised more. I ate smaller portions. Nothing worked. I was stuck. Eventually, I quit trying. I adopted the mindset that this was my ideal weight.
It wasn’t long before I allowed junk food to slowly enter my diet. I began to exercise less. Holidays came around and I justified the larger portions. I put on one pound. Two pounds. Four pounds. I began to drift backwards. “When I get to ten pounds, I’ll go back to that healthy lifestyle,” I told myself. I became stuck in this limbo of wanting to lose weight, but not really doing anything about it. I plateaued again.
I find that the same thing happens to us spiritually. We desire to have more of God in our lives. We want to be a stronger light for Him. So we read our Bible more, pray all the time and find ways to share our testimony. We make a difference in one life. Two lives. Five lives. Ten lives. Ten lives. Ten lives. We hit a plateau in our spiritual growth and the lives we influence. We read more. We pray longer. We look for more people to talk to, but nothing changes. We then adopt the idea that this is where God wants me to stay.
It’s not long before we read less, pray few times a day and quit looking for opportunities. We get caught in a spiritual limbo. The problem is that checking off spiritual boxes like reading and praying will produce some growth, but not a sustained growth. We’ve got to break down scripture into bite sized chunks to understand it deeper. We’ve got to spend silent time in prayer listening to the voice of God to communicate with Him. We’ve got to do things differently than we’ve done them if we want to break through those plateaus.
We’ve got to quit settling for where we are spiritually if we really want to grow. We’ve got to change how we study and pray to get to that next level. We’ve got to get to past living a life of rules and checked boxes if we truly want to experience who God is. Sustained growth comes from the inside out, not the outside in. You’ve got to want it more than anything else and then make the sacrifices that will produce the results you’re looking for. “Draw near to God and (then) He will draw near to you.” You’ve got to make the move first. You’ve got to do the work that draws God to you. His desire is to be constantly moving closer to you. Break free of the plateaus today and climb that mountain. You will experience new life and fresh growth if you do.
If you would like to win “Fresh Air” by Chris Hodges, all, you have to do is go to my Facebook page here and “like” it. I will randomly pick one person tomorrow (February 1, 2014) who has liked my page. If you have already liked my page you’re already entered. If you enjoy reading these daily devotionals, please invite your friends to like my page so they can receive encouragement from God’s Word too.
