Saturday 25th April – day 33 of first lock down
Acts 2:42 is a great verse and one that I talk about a lot. It says this:
“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer”
Key words being, ‘they devoted themselves’ it was all on the believers to devote themselves to what was on offer. In other words, it takes effort to grow a life in God. If you are a professional athlete, the work that has to go into winning medals is staggering. I had a look at a typical training schedule for someone training for the 100 metres (around 10 seconds of a race)
An easy training day: – 8am – 6 mile run;
3pm – 2 hour spin class;
9am – 5 mile run
A hard training day: – 5.30am -80 minute swim
10am – 1 hour swim
3pm – Bike intervals – 90 mins
Wow! That makes me sweat just reading it! Athletes know about devotion to a task.
Another great scripture is in 1 Timothy 4:6-10
“If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. 7 Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. 9 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. 10 For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Saviour of all people, especially of those who believe.”
Train yourself for godliness – train yourself – but not just for this life, but for the one to come! When I first read that, it got my attention. Won’t we all be the same once we get to heaven? This suggests not, this suggests that I need to train myself on earth as it will hold promise for the life to come. You see, it’s me that’s going to heaven – I won’t turn into someone else when I get there. There are rewards in heaven for the lives we live on earth.
Devote yourself, train yourself. It goes back to building your life on the rock doesn’t it. When you build on rock, you’re giving yourself THE best chance of winning when a storm hits!
So, during this lock down, we all have a great chance to become wiser. We train our bodies so that we don’t get wider! Haha! Plus we can devote ourselves to prayer, teaching, breaking of bread – I know we can’t do the fellowship part right now!
Think about your kitchen. Some times, I have a mad clean out. I get to the back of the cupboards and inevitably find a jar of pickles that went out of date last century! Everything gets pulled out, shelves get cleaned, the in date stuff gets put back. When it’s done, it feels great! Let me suggest doing that with your life. Search and see if there is anything lurking in the ‘back of a cupboard’ that you need to ditch. Set time aside every day to sit with God. Devote yourself, train yourself and you’ll be ready for any storm!
After thought – 28th November 2020
Here we are coming to the end of yet another lock down, although if you’re in tier 3, it doesn’t really feel like we’re coming out! At least we can begin to do our Christmas shopping, if you haven’t already! Could we ever have imagined on the 25th April when we talked about the above, that we would still be here 7 months later! The above message hasn’t changed. And I trust you are still training and devoting yourself. I hope you are reading your Bible, I hope you are going to church, I hope you’re getting wiser and not wider.
Since the 25th April, John and I have been busy working on a website. You will find all kinds of things there but I wanted to bring your attention to last weeks podcast because we spoke about storing up treasures in heaven which fits nicely into what is written in this blog. The link is below and the link for our website is below that.
Don’t let anything get on top of you, get on top of it!
See you next time, D x
Podcast link
https://anchor.fm/deb-bullock/episodes/Store-up-your-treasure-in-heaven-emsj6q)
Website link
debbullock 