Friday, March 19, 2010

3 daily questions

“Life is tough, but it’s tougher when you’re stupid.” – John Wayne

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Have you ever struggled with inconsistency in your personal relationship with God? Times where you bounce back and forth between times of being spiritually disciplined and times of being spiritually lazy. You may have decided that you were going to read your Bible cover to cover over the coarse of a year when you hit Numbers mid-February and lose your motivation. You may have made the commitment to spend time in honest, intimate prayer before bed when life gets busy and tiring and you seem to prematurely fall asleep every night watching TV on the couch.

If you have ever struggled with being disciplined in your relationship with God, I feel you. You are not alone. I have gone through my ups and downs over the years.

Like John Wayne said earlier, “Life is tough.” I am pretty sure that applies to all humanity – rich, poor, educated, uneducated, Christian, not Christian, etc. What’s even worse is when we have to face this tough life without the tools to be more successful, or as John Wayne so eloquently puts it, “when you’re stupid.”

Some of us (I’m talking to myself here) try having a personal relationship with God without having a clue how to have it. When I gave my life over to Jesus, I was never handed the manual of how to have a close, daily relationship with God. You ever feel that way?

I wanted to encourage you today by giving you three questions to ask yourself everyday that might help you raise your spiritual radar and help you maintain a more consistent, honest relationship with God. Ask yourself these three questions before you go to bed every night:

1.WHERE DID I SEE GOD TODAY?
2.WHERE DID I MISS GOD TODAY?
3.WHERE DO I WANT TO SEE GOD TOMORROW?

That is it. Answer those questions, journal your answers, find one person you can answer those questions to everyday, and be brutally honest. What a simple way to be more aware of the work God is always doing in our lives that we so often miss.


Try answering these questions everyday for a couple of weeks and see if it doesn’t help in your personal relationship with God. Remember, your relationship with God is not about perfection and figuring it out, it’s all about putting forth effort and trying.

Mother Teresa puts it this way, “God doesn’t require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.”

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