Disciplined out of Devotion

Have you ever found yourself determined to pray or read the word daily, only to find that a few weeks in you’ve already fallen off the bandwagon? So you reset, put a reminder on your device or create a habit tracker and again commit to praying or reading the word daily. However, yet again you find that after a month or two, you’ve fallen back off track. 

You ponder why you cannot stay on task- Do you need a visual to-do list? Should you do these activities at the same time each day? Do you need a dedicated space to engage in these practices? Perhaps you think you need a new Bible, new highlighters, or a new study journal to motivate and excite you. 

While there is nothing wrong with these practical measures, what if the root of the issue isn’t your systems? What if the root of the issue is your heart?

When we go to God in prayer or spend time in the Word it should be from a place of relationship with God that fosters a genuine desire to commune with Him. We should look forward to the time we get to spend with Him in those moments and seek to hear from Him during those times.

It’s our relationship with God that allows our hearts to be transformed by what we read in the Word and how God speaks to our hearts in prayer. 

When our heart posture is rooted in anything other than love for God and relationship with God, prayer and reading the Bible simply become religious practices done out of obligation and duty. Anything that our heart is not deeply tied to can easily be let go. 

The discipline of spending time in prayer and in the word daily is best built out of our devotion to God. 

When I looked up the word devotion in the dictionary it is defined as, “love, loyalty, or enthusiasm for a person, activity, or cause.” Should that not be the posture we come before God with? Love for Him, loyalty to Him, and enthusiasm to spend time with Him because of who He is and how He cares for us. 

Think about it- We get to talk to and hear from the God who created the Heavens and the Earth. The God who created us and knows everything about us including our past, our flaws, and our mistakes finds pleasure in spending time with us. His love for us runs so deeply that in His perfection He took the torture and humiliation of dying on the cross so that sins we had yet to commit could be forgiven and so that our connection to Him could be re-established. We are not worthy of His time, yet He longs to be with us.

How could you not desire to meet with Him daily? How could you not feel excited to hear from Him regularly? How could you not want to honor Him with your time consistently? 

It is our longing to know Jesus more intimately that will naturally become the fuel that fires our prayer life and our Bible study. As we yearn for more of Him and seek His face, we are filled with more of Him which leads to a deeper longing for Him. It becomes a continuous cycle of communion that stems from a heart of love and devotion. 

Spending time with the Lord is not something we have to do, it’s something we are privileged to do. If we can begin to approach our time with Jesus from this perspective then we can fortify our connection with Him and build consistency in our daily practices.