training against nothing

Opening Prayer: O Lord, if we want to live life with and for you, it will not just happen accidentally, we must be both purposeful and intentional.  We must learn how to train ourselves for the purpose of godliness.  Give us the strength and the grace and the courage to do so.  Amen.

Scripture: 1 Timothy 4:7

Journal: What does it meant to train yourself to be godly?  How are you currently doing that?  In what ways/areas are you not?  Why?  What is your biggest obstacle?

Reflection: You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”

     And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off. (The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis)

Pray

Closing Prayer: Lord God, do not let us be led astray by the power of Nothing.  Instead, help us to train ourselves to be godly.  Help us to do whatever it takes every single day to make space and time for you to grow and shape and mold us more and more into your image.  Amen.