Work at living in peace with everyone, and work at living a holy life, for those who are not holy will not see the Lord.
1 Peter 1:13-16 (NLT)
So think clearly and exercise self-control. Look forward to the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. So you must live as God’s obedient children. Don’t slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn’t know any better then. But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.”
We spent the latter part of last week talking about holiness. We’ll continue that conversation this week. As we saw before, the scripture above lays out some basic principles in regards to holiness that we’re going to spend a few days diving into. The first is thinking clearly. If we’re going to be a holy people, we must have clear minds.
So how do we make sure our minds are clear? There are three ways that we’re going to discuss here:
- Take care of yourself physically.
- Take care of yourself spiritually.
- Let God take care of the rest.
We discussed taking care of yourself physically on Friday so we’ll move forward to the next two today. This is not something new. We’ve discussed how to take care of ourselves spiritually but luckily this is something that I don’t think we can hear enough.
There are three basic yet vital aspects to taking care of ourselves spiritually:
- PRAY – We must spend time with God in prayer. We have to work at a relationship with God the same way we work at a relationship with a friend here on earth. We talk to Him. Constantly. If you want to get to know a person better, you spend time with them. You have deep conversations with them. It’s the same way with God, our Father. The more time we spend just talking to Him, the more intimate our relationship with Him will become.
- BIBLE – We must spend time reading and studying God’s Word. He has given us a book of letters that reveal His heart and His character. The Bible is our ultimate guide to who God is and if our goal is to fall in love with Him and give our lives to Him, we need to know Him at least a little bit, don’t you think?
- PEOPLE – We must spend time with our Christian brothers and sisters. The easiest way to do this is to get plugged into a church family. Here at Refuge, we do little things to make sure that we have time to hang out. On top of the time we spend together in worship, we eat breakfast on Sundays, dinner on Wednesdays, and have LifeGroups to connect us even deeper. This is vital to your spiritual health. Don’t go it alone!
The last way that we make sure our minds are clear is to take care of ourselves physically and spiritually and let God take care of the rest. Check out what Paul tells us in Philippians:
Philippians 4:6 (NLT)
Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.
There’s not much that I can add to this. We serve a BIG God. He is bigger than we can even imagine. Yet it is so easy to lose perspective and see the problems that life throws at us in a bigger light than we see God in. There is a way to conquer this defeated thought process and that is delivered to us by Paul above.
“Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.”
Holy people think clearly. Let’s be holy.
