Getting ready for Sunday - SHIFT in my role models.

There are 168 hours in a week.  If we sleep 7 hours a day (49 hours a week), then we're awake for 149 hours.  If we're in worship, growth groups (Bible studies), and in our private devotions then perhaps we setting aside another 10 hours or so on time specifically set aside for God, for his Word, and for prayer.  That leaves us with 139 hours in our week.  Who are you listening to during that time?

Paul Tripp writes: “No one is more influential in your life than you are because no one talks to you more than you do. You're in an unending conversation with yourself. You're talking to yourself all the time, interpreting, organizing, and analyzing what's going on inside you and around you.”

Kind of a scary thought, isn't it?  More than anyone else in my life, I'm preaching to myself.  I'm preaching to myself in my private devotions.  I'm preaching to myself when I'm at work.  I'm preaching to myself wherever I go and whatever I do.

Whose word are you preaching to yourself?  What message are you preaching?  What are you telling yourself?  Who influences the sermons you preach to your heart?

More than a little scary, isn't it?

That makes my time in God's Word all the more important.  It needs to go with me even when I'm not devoting all of my energies to meditating on it and praying about it.  God's Word needs to flow from my heart into my ears all day long.  It needs to be the thing I chew on all day long. The time we spend in God's Word on Sunday, in growth groups (Bible studies), and in our private, personal devotions are so important.  We want our Father's voice, which is loud and clear in the Bible, to be the voice ringing in our hears through our days.

That makes our friends so important, especially our closest friends and our advisors, especially our role models.  We need them to be speaking God's Word to us and redirecting us to the one thing needful, one thing true and certain, the one thing powerful and saving.  Our friends, our role models, our advisors and counselors, are so important.

This Sunday we will consider Hebrews 10:19-25 and remember why it's so important for us to keep showing up.