Sep. 9, 2009 - Maintenance
If you live in an apartment you call the maintenance man when your garbage disposal stops working. The maintenance man visits your home regularly to replace the filter in your air handler. And the maintenance man is always checking your AC and heater to make sure they are running well. When you drive a car, somebody must check and change the oil, do regular tune-ups and check all kinds of levels and pressures. This is all maintenance. It’s done regularly. It keeps things running as well as they can. We even perform regular maintenance on our own bodies. We brush our teeth and hair. We take showers or baths to clean off the dirt. We see our doctor or dentist to screen for illnesses we cannot detect on our own. As homeschool moms we have other forms of maintenance that are just as important. We must maintain our homeschool program. We must maintain our relationships with our children and our husband. Most of all we must maintain our relationship with God. I believe these are more important than maintaining your home, car, or physical body.
Maintaining Our Relationship with God
In my house, we call them quiet times. These are times when you worship the Lord, read The Word, and pray. This needs to happen every day. The first and second commandments tell us to have no other god before Him and to worship Him only. The psalmist admonishes us to meditate on the Word. Certainly, what was true for David when he only had The Law is true for us today. Most of the apostolic writings talk about prayer. Jesus himself taught his disciples how to pray. Every one of these disciplines is important.
When we start by worshipping the Lord we are not only blessing Him, we are reminding ourselves who is The King. Worship draws us closer to God’s very heart. King David, a man after God’s own heart, wrote more of the Psalms, by far, than any other author. The Psalms are all about worship. Even the ones where he cries out to God for help, he worships God. Worship is an opportunity to open up our heart and bear it to a loving God who knows all that it contains. The act of bearing it to Him shows so much about us. When we are in the moment of truly worshipping God, we are doing exactly what we were meant to do. That is why we are here, to worship God. Just like any machine or medicine, which works best when it is doing what it is meant to do, we work best when we worship. We feel better. We look better. I wouldn’t be surprised if scientist could one day discover that when we worship the Father, our bodies function better. I personally have seen and experienced healing as a result of simple worship. Daily worship is a great start for your maintenance routine.
Reading The Word is indispensible for our maintenance routine. When we read The Word, we find out exactly what God has to say about … well … everything. When we read The Word repeatedly we actually begin to remember exactly what we have read in the past. When we continue reading The Word, year after year, we eventually realize that we have memorized scripture. Once we have memorized scripture we are able to mediate on it at any time, whether we have a Bible handy or not. This whole progression begins with daily reading. When we read through Psalm 119 and we find several instances where the writer is meditating on the Word, the Law, His precepts, and His promises. All are found in The Word of God. This is how we can learn as much as humanly possible about Jesus. God reveals Himself through the scriptures. By opening our Bible and focusing our entire mind on what we are reading, we allow Him to speak to us at a level not available otherwise. The Word of God is powerful, sharper than a two edged sword. We must never neglect it.
In Philippians 4:6, Paul tells us, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” In James 5:16 we read, “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” Every book of the Bible contains something about prayer. Prayer is how we talk to God. Prayer is how we tell Jesus how thankful we are. Prayer is how we ask the Holy Spirit for guidance. This is a great opportunity to tell God about our joys and frustrations. We can pour out our hearts to the most sympathetic listener, who will never gossip about what we have said, and will often offer us answers in a way that we can handle them. Prayer is where we can put into practice some of the insights we gained while we were reading The Word or while we were worshipping God. Not only is praying suggested and commanded in the Bible, it’s a good idea. Daily prayer is even better.
When we daily put into practice these things we’ve discussed, we find that our walk with the Lord improves. We also find that our walk with other people improves.
