Lent is just a month away. Wednesday, March 5th is Ash Wednesday which begins a forty-day period of spiritual preparation for Holy Week and Easter Sunday. I want you to consider taking on a challenge. During Lent, it is my prayer that we will examine our journey with Jesus. That journey can include prayer, devotions, and active service. During Lent, we will have a special Lenten Devotional, and the Upper Room Devotional, available to you so that you might develop a stronger practice of living out your spiritual life through the grace of devotional times.
From the “Devotional Life In The Wesleyan Tradition” by Steve Harper, I want to set the stage for a practice of your devotional life. “We take a giant step forward in Christian Devotion when we see it more as a life to be lived than just as a time to be observed. Consequently, we can appreciate John Wesley’s guidance more through his spiritual practices. We speak of a devotional life learned through a devotional time. When we study John Wesley’s spirituality, we see this coming through loud and clear. John Wesley never divided his life into compartments. For him, the essence of life was spiritual. All of it could properly be called devotional. In our modern time, Henry Nouwen expressed the same idea in these words: “If I cannot find God in the middle of my work, where my concerns and worries, pains and joys are, it does not make sense to try to find him in the hour set free at the peripheral of my life. If my spiritual life cannot grow and deepen in the midst of my ministry, how will it ever grow on the edges?” This is a good question for all of us to consider.
We have been taught that devotions are the first movements of the morning and last minutes of the evening. Devotional booklets are sometimes geared to tell us how to spend the in-between minutes each day. It is appropriate to have a quiet time with God at the beginning and end of each day, yet we must not see that time as equal to devotional life or separate from the rest of our day. John Wesley sought ways to express his spiritual life throughout the day. A spiritual life learned in educational practices with devotional time. He found it in what he called the means of grace. These were spiritual disciplines that people use to express their faith and receive God’s grace.
When we receive God’s grace, it will become evident in our life when we practice the things that Jesus has taught us. We learn these things in devotional times that come from our devotional habits. We must learn during the times set apart and then use what we have assimilated into practices of living as we share God’s grace with others in a spiritual way.
In the weeks to come, maybe even starting sooner than the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, we commit ourselves to receiving means of grace through devotional time. Yes, it is times in the morning or evening, or sometime during the day, that we set aside a quiet time of devotion, and it becomes a practice for living our days sharing God’s grace with others. When we do this, we grow in grace and our spiritual life becomes interwoven with the happenings throughout the day as we walk with Jesus Christ our Lord and savior.
Live in Peace and Joy,
Pastor Gary Peterson
Claybanks United Methodist Church 