Key scripture- “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1, ESV).

I have a challenge for you this year. Have you thought about what this new year holds for you? Are you longing for something new, better, different? Are you tired of flipping pages on the calendar and going through the motions of your life? Want to make a choice that will transform 2018 from dead to lively, from flat to full, from just another year to your best year yet?

If so, start spending time with God in His Word.

Pastor, James McDonald points out that this isn’t just another task or meeting. This is an invitation to spend time with the King of the universe, listening to His voice in the pages of the only Book on the planet that will transform your soul. This isn’t a book club. It’s not an appointment with a personal trainer who might help you marginally reshape your body. This is God, who spoke the universe into existence, and who will speak to you personally if you open the Word and listen.

If you are wondering, “How does that work?” By doing it simply and methodically. By opening your Bible, and following these three steps.

Step 1: Discipline

Here’s the spiritual workout plan: I challenge you in Jesus’ Name to discipline yourself to spend thirty minutes in God’s Word every day for a month. During those thirty days, set aside the first half hour of every day—before you shower, before you dress for work, before you drink a cup of coffee (or while you drink it). Commit to this: “I will not do anything else until I get thirty minutes with the Lord in His Word.”

At first, it’s going to feel like hard work, but it won’t stay that way for long. It’s like when you start working out on a treadmill with no fitness base—grueling at first, but over time it grows easier and eventually becomes addictive. Get up in the morning, and make yourself do it. Get a friend to hold you accountable. Check in with each other. Go after this choice that will change your life forever: thirty minutes for thirty days. It starts with discipline.

Step 2: Desire

Over time, God’s Word will become your desire. This step involves another thirty days. No longer will reading the Bible just feel like a discipline. You will find that you look forward to it, that you can’t wait to spend time with the Lord. Like David, you’ll say, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1). You’ll wonder how you lived without it. You’ll recognize how famished and impoverished your soul was and how difficult the Christian life felt because you were running on empty. No longer will it feel like a burden or obligation.

After thirty days of discipline and thirty days of growing desire, you’ll conclude, “I want it. I desire it. I hunger for it.” After these sixty days, you’ll say, “I chose God’s Word as my authority, and my life has been changed forever.” Then you get to move on to step 3, which will blow your mind.

Step 3: Delight

In the third, thirty-day step, you will begin to experience what David observed about the blessed person, whose “delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2). David didn’t tolerate God’s Word, the way we do brussels sprouts. He didn’t gut it out, the way we do dental cleanings. He loved God’s Word. “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97). And we can get to that place too.

When you begin to delight in God’s Word, the time spent in His Book will become your favorite time of your day, the best part of your week, the most treasured moments of your life— being alone with God, digging into His Word, being fed by His Spirit, and the effects will seep into every part of your day so that you will find God’s Word running in the background of your thoughts constantly.

King David experienced this delight. So did the prophet Jeremiah, who wrote, “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts” (Jeremiah 15:16). So did the disciples, who “said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures’” (Luke 24:32)?

So can you, if you choose God’s Word. Start with discipline, and watch as discipline gives way to desire and grows into full-blown delight. This can be the defining choice of 2018 for you.

I dare you. I double dog dare you!

Pray this – Our Precious Heavenly Father, I want to experience more of You and more of the knowledge of God in this new year. I long to be more, by Your grace, and I know that the key catalyst for my soul change is time alone with You in Your Word. You don’t force me, but You do invite me, and I choose today, this year, to accept Your invitation. May I learn to delight in Your Word. Would You teach me, speak to me, and make me more like Your Son, Jesus, in Whose Name I pray, and Whose yoke I take up, Amen.

Credit: The Holy Bible
Psalm 42:1
Google Images

All rights reserved to their rightful owners. We do not profit from anything shared on this page.