Bible Gateway Blog

This is the thirty-fourth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

Available now: Prayers for Our Lives: 95 Lifelines to God for Everyday Circumstances by Mel Lawrenz.

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).

This passage says that there are a variety of ways the word of Christ goes deep enough to dwell. Teaching is paramount, so we need to keep searching like eagles for teachers, authors, and Bible study leaders who explain and apply the word faithfully. “Admonishing with wisdom” suggests a flow of quality conversation among believers about what they are learning from God. “Singing” praise is another powerful way the word of God is carried deeply into our hearts. Singing “with gratitude in [our] hearts to God” is a way that the crusty and hardened exterior of our lives gets cracked open, and seeds drop deeply in, and they begin to live and grow.

Here is the connection between Bible study and worship. Why sing? So the word will dwell richly. Why a variety of sounds (psalms, hymns, spiritual songs)? So the word will knock on every door of our hearts that is the least bit cracked open. Why teach? So that the word will be clearly explained and powerfully applied. Worship is not the span between the start and the end of singing, but this great and varied advance of the word of God on our souls. God takes up as many fronts as he needs to so that we will stop and listen.

And then there is meditation—a method of reading Scripture in such a way that it has a chance to get planted. Meditation is a word the Bible uses to describe a way of holding and pondering God’s truth so that it sinks in. It is wise, pensive concentration.

At the edge of the promised land, Joshua told the people they were going to need real spiritual muscle. Wars lay ahead. Three times at the Jordan River he said: “be strong and courageous,” and then: “Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful” (Joshua 1:8).

The Psalms speak about meditating on the word of God, and continuing that meditation through every pulse of life. Psalm 119 describes a committed discipline of taking the word in:

• “I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways” (vs. 15).
• “Though rulers sit together and slander me, your servant will meditate on your decrees” (vs. 23).
• “Let me understand the teaching of your precepts; then I will meditate on your wonders” (vs. 27).
• “I lift up my hands to your commands, which I love, and I meditate on your decrees” (vs. 48).
• “May the arrogant be put to shame for wronging me without cause; but I will meditate on your precepts” (vs. 78).
• “Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long” (vs. 97).
• “I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes” (vs. 99).
• “My eyes stay open through the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promises” (vs. 148).

Okay, now, be honest. Did you just skim over those verses, or did you ponder them? If you’re like me, then you will find yourself occasionally reading over quotations of Scripture instead of reading through them. How hurried we can be!

That’s what Christian meditation is all about—turning hurry into rumination. Slowing from a run into a walk. Tasting and digesting instead of devouring. It’s the only way to build spiritual muscle for the good times and the tough times.

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Prayers for Our Lives: 95 Lifelines to God for Everyday Circumstances by Mel Lawrenz.

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[If you believe this series will be helpful, this is the perfect time to forward this to a friend, a group, or a congregation, and tell them they too may sign up for the weekly emails here]

Mel Lawrenz (@MelLawrenz) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s minister at large. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel is the author of 18 books, including How to Understand the Bible—A Simple Guide and Spiritual Influence: the Hidden Power Behind Leadership (Zondervan, 2012). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay.

This is the thirty-third lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

Helping Our Kids Stay Connected to God: A Book of Prayers for Kids by Mel Lawrenz (a perfect gift for the kids you know and love).

Devotion is the conscious commitment to doing those things that will fill our lives with what is good and right. We were designed to be filled by the God who created us. That is how love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control become the shape of our character.

In its simplest form, devotion means dedication. So one person may be devoted to auto restoration, or fly fishing, or bowling. Someone else may be devoted to collecting music or dog breeding. We can be grateful for the cardiac surgeon who doesn’t take the profession half-heartedly, but is devoted to the highest level of competence when he or she takes people’s hearts apart and puts them back together.

Devotion is a word, however, that we more often use for commitments that go well beyond our vocations or avocations. And for good reason.

Devotion runs deep in the human heart. It is about commitments that arise out of the strongest affection and the deepest longing. It is an essentially spiritual motion in the direction of God himself.

Devotion patterns are those habits which develop over time and will bring our longing right to God himself, and the filling begins and continues. Those habits include prayer, worship, and reading and studying Scripture. They are the habits of devotion that the first Christians knew were the spiritual exercises that would make them strong. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42).

Before even beginning to talk about the specific methods of devotion, however, we need to pause and think through our motives. Actions of devotion with the wrong motives are dangerous. Any one of the following is all it takes to turn devotion into something either powerless or reckless:

1. Try to impress God. Our devotion will never be impressive to God. Devotion is supposed to be as natural to the spirit as breathing is to the body. If a kid tried to show off to an adult about how well he was breathing, the adult may be amused, but not impressed. God wants us as friends and sons and daughters, not performers.

2. Try to impress others. We could try to gain points with some people with public piety, but just a drop of pride will begin to poison our spiritual lives. That is why Jesus so absolutely insisted that we do “acts of righteousness,” like making our offerings and praying, in secret. The actor (the meaning of the word “hypocrite”) plays to the public, and receives the appropriate reward, applause on earth, but no reward, only silence, from heaven (Matthew 5).

3. Try to impress yourself. You won’t convince yourself anyway, so why try?

4. Try to make yourself feel better about yourself. It is not wrong to want to feel right with God. But we need to know as deeply as we know anything else that our relationship with God begins and ends with his loving grace and our openness through faith. Prayers do not take away sin—God does. Bible reading is not the knowledge of God; it is the way we get knowledge of God. Acts of worship do not give us joy, but are the ways we are opened to the movement of God’s Spirit, which does result in joy and, for that matter, brokenness, illumination, affection.

5. Try to have occasional bursts of devotion. Devotion is not a matter of going to one spectacular conference a year, or going to church at Christmas and Easter. You can’t build a marriage on going out for your anniversary each year and being indifferent toward your spouse the other 364 days of the year. Devotion is the accumulating effect of many small acts. It is a rhythm in the background that keeps us in step with God.

So then, what is devotion?

To put it positively: devotion is love. The motive behind prayer and worship and all the rest has to be at its start and at its end an affectionate longing to know God better. What will move us in that direction? The inspiration, naturally, is God’s abundant love for us. This is how one of the German Pietists of the 17th century, Count von Zinzendorf, put it:

Lord, when my eye confronts my heart, and I realize that you have filled my heart with your love, I am breathless with amazement. Once my heart was so small in its vision, so narrow in its compassion, so weak in its zeal for truth. Then you chose to enter my heart, and now in my heart I can see you, I can love all your people, and I have courage to proclaim the truth of your gospel to anyone and everyone. Like wax before a fire, my heart has melted under the heat of your love.

We can be very glad that we don’t need to figure this out on our own. We can follow the lead of others who are wiser than we are, as the apostle Paul put it: “Join with others in following my example, brothers, and take note of those who live according to the pattern we gave you” (Philippians 3:17).

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We thank all our children’s ministry pastors and directors, teachers, etc. for what they do for our kids. LEARN HOW to use this resource for your ministry.

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[If you believe this series will be helpful, this is the perfect time to forward this to a friend, a group, or a congregation, and tell them they too may sign up for the weekly emails here]

Mel Lawrenz (@MelLawrenz) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s minister at large. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel is the author of 18 books, including How to Understand the Bible—A Simple Guide and Spiritual Influence: the Hidden Power Behind Leadership (Zondervan, 2012). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay.