Sunday, July 01, 2012

Easy answer but more difficult to apply

On Friday I was teaching a group of leaders. The teaching was going fine until I started to talk about spiritual disciplines in the life of the believer. After some time the group told me it is essential for a Christian to always be praying. Great! I was quite pleased with this answer. However, I wanted to test my students so I asked the question... How often should we pray? Of course, they gave me the bread and butter answer, "without ceasing". So - I took it a step further and asked a student how many minutes he had prayed so far today (5 pm). He responded with a total of 10 minutes. I continued with the next spiritual discipline of reading Scripture, daily. They all agreed it is necessary and essential. So I again asked how many chapters they had read that day so far. Three of the people admitted they had not read anything and one man said he read just 2 chapters. They told me they had been busy preparing for the meeting... So I asked how many had the time to eat lunch before coming! They all raised their hand...interesting.

This is a group of people that are leading the church but like so many of us they struggle with the basics. If only we would take serious the words of Jesus, to "seek first the kingdom of God".

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