Using Your Tools
Lately, I’ve been making a point of parking myself in a book of the Bible and staying there until it’s language has become my prayer. The miracle of Scripture is that it is constantly active, consistently applicable, unchanging, and yet always new and relevant. Hanging with a book, verse, or series of verses until they permeate your life brings revelation, multiple perspective shifts and tremendous and sneaky healing of reactions, mindsets and assumptions about the nature of God and about other people and their motives and behaviour. We seem always to jump to wrong or jaded conclusions, and ingesting and speaking the Word has a profound impact on our ways of truly seeing the lives of others and allows our thoughts to be flooded with the Compassion, empathy, wisdom and love of Jesus. He is a gentle Guy, but He also takes no crap, and we have access to the entirety of His being...He lives to inform and to heal our lives in impactful and real ways. Becoming steeped in Scripture is the jumping off place. Jesus is the Living Expression of His Father. He is the Word, alive, active and sharp. He is true nourishment and comfort. He wants nothing more than to befriend and speak to us via His Word and it is a veritable miracle that we can pick up, read, absorb and apply the very character and nature of Jesus to our own lives, in real time.
I wanted to share a practical hack that I use in order to bring Scripture into my own personal ecosystem and to allow it to inhabit me in an authentic, real and utterly next level miraculous way. Like I said, I’ve taken to just being in the presence of His wisdom without ripping on to the next verse or ‘ daily reading’. Please don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with using a guide or daily devotional, but right now, I am passionate about Jesus as The Word living in my Spirit, my mind and my mouth, so I’m staying put until it organically lives in me and I actually feel it changing me for the better, becoming my language and bringing clarity to my eyes and my brain. The original feeling of ‘slogging through’, or being bored by the Word dissipates almost immediately and I am utterly captivated by the story of the Life of our world and beyond.
Since September 7th 2020, I’ve been speaking Psalms 51 and 91 over my family. I’ve been meditating on the Proverbs daily. Verses and books have added themselves to my roster and I’ve fallen in love. Daily reading and daily asking for these scriptures to hit differently and resonate more deeply have changed my life. I’ve delved into different translations, I’ve finally paid serious attention to all of the little numbers next to seemingly no-brainer words and let myself be amazed. Declaring Psalm 90:1-2 daily can’t help but place you in a state of utter awe: “Yahweh, You have always been our eternal home, a hiding place from generation to generation. Long before You gave birth to the earth and before the mountains were ever born, You have been from everlasting to everlasting, the one and ONLY TRUE GOD.”
Here’s how I’m perceiving/praying the book of Colossians after I’ve sat with it for a month:
God, today I’m choosing to be a carrier of the unshakeable expectation of awesome things, regardless of what I see/read/watch/hear about what may be going on. I choose to be completely energized with the explosive power of Jesus. I’m a receiver of the pleasure of God over my life and the lives of my partner and kids. I want to be a reservoir of wisdom, discernment and understanding. God, please give me willingness to be totally open to knowing You and experiencing You fully, joyfully and gratefully, minute by minute today. I am restored, reconnected, miraculously full of Peace, flooded with the expectation of Glory, embedded in Hope, awake and wrapped in the tremendous comfort of heaven.
I choose to be open to revelation and connection with You, Holy Spirit. I will be present, infused with strength, encouraged in every way, super firmly established in faith and enriched by devotion and worship. I want to be awake, alert and overflowing with the fullness of God. I place myself and my family under the Authority and Kingship of Jesus of Nazareth. We are raised, nourished and sustained by the same outrageous Power that raised Jesus from death. We are resurrected, forgiven and ALIVE!
God, I am free and qualified. I’m going to hold onto the True Source and access Your vitality! I am unfettered by Religion or ritual. I focus on, feast on and fill my thoughts with Your kingdom reality, alive and one with You in Glory, dead to sin, vice free, full of pure, authentic focus and praise. I am a completely new creation. I love You, Jesus. I speak this over myself, my family, my neighbourhood, my city, province, country, etc...today. Amen.
This has become such a deep part of my life. Daily, I am excited to apply the Word to my family, to myself and to my world. All of creation groans and waits for us to partner with a Divine God in order to release it from it’s futility, not from a place of religious obligation, but from a place of Wonder and Peace. These aren’t just words! They are Power! They shift realities. We all have a critical part to play in releasing the truth of the Beauty Realm and it can be exactly what you’re capable of today. Start with the Lords’ Prayer. I always brushed it off as boring, Sunday Schoolish stuff, when in reality; it’s JESUS TEACHING US TO PRAY! That’s HUGE! We often feel reticent about changing scripture to just regular, personal language, but He loves when we make it our very own and speak to Him in His language from our own mouths, spirits and minds.
So, right now God, I release passion and zeal for You as Your Word right now! Give us such a sense of honour and wonder for it and make us truly amazing and authentic stewards of Your language and Your beautiful heart. For those who have preconceived ideas or misconceptions about it based on lies they’ve believed about it, give them curiosity and lead them further up and further in. Give us zeal for research. Display Your kindness, sweetness, intensity, reliability and wildness in the pages where You promise You’ll be found and guide us to the exact right spots today. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
