Examine Your Life Carefully . . . Each Day
What matters most, however, isn’t the adoption of one particular form of daily, prayerful self-examination. Rather, in a way that fits our unique personality and situation, we can learn to pause each day so that, with God’s help, we might examine our lives carefully.
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Examine Your Life Carefully . . . Without Your Technology
Today I want to get very practical by suggesting one way you can stop so as to examine your life. Here it is: Put down your tech! Now, I realize this is a bit ironic since it’s likely you are reading this devotion with the help of technology. So I don’t mean you have to drop your smartphone or shut your laptop right this moment. But I do mean that if you want to stop the busyness and craziness of life long enough to examine carefully how you’re living, you’ll need to become unplugged from tech for a while at some point.
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Examine Your Life Carefully . . . by Stopping
We also need to stop moving, to stop hurrying on to the next thing so we can take time to think about how we’re living. I’m not suggesting we have to overthink everything. But I do believe we need to pause regularly so we might examine carefully how we’re living in the present moment and where we’re headed in the next moment.
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Transformational Leaders are Always Prepared
The time between the initial glimpse of a promise and God’s fulfillment of that promise can be agonizing. We often wonder, “what is God doing?” and, “why does it take God so long to fulfill what he said?” We may not mind waiting days or weeks, but months or years seem unfathomable. Transformational leadership is rarely about today and almost always about tomorrow.
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Parable of the Sower: Learning to Follow
Seeing the genesis of our leadership as a seed is helpful in a number of ways.
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Prayers for Workers: Avoiding the Pit
The Lord, who is known by his acts of justice, calls you to seek justice in every part of life, including your daily work.
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Time Management: Examine Your Life Carefully
Ephesians 5:15 begins, “Be very careful, then, how you live.” A more literal translation of the original Greek might read, “Examine carefully how you are living.” Sounds quite a bit like Socrates, doesn’t it? This verse doesn’t tell us to live carefully so much as it exhorts us to pay close attention to how we’re living. It wants us to examine our lives so that we might live more intentionally and more fully.
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Time Management: A New Perspective
You might be surprised to learn that Ephesians has some wisdom about what we would call time management. (Ephesians would talk about time redemption, actually, but we’ll get to this later.) You can find this wisdom in chapter 5, verses 15-16: “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.” Most literally, where the NIV speaks of “making the most of every opportunity,” the Greek original says we’re to be “redeeming the time” (exagorazomenoi ton kairon). That’s a first-century Christian version of time management.
Or to put it more bluntly, this is God’s version of time management.
Remembering Your Place in the Story
Have you ever been reading along in a compelling novel—and then for a few days or weeks your attention was directed elsewhere? By the time you finally got back to your book, you had to sit back and remember the story you had been reading, perhaps even reviewing some sections to refresh your memory. You knew that if you were going to enjoy the richness of the narrative, you had to have its broad sweep in mind.
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Your Labor is Not in Vain
In this Life for Leaders devotion, I want to focus on labor, that is, on the work we do. As I was thinking about what to write for today, I was reminded of a verse in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (15:58).
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Moving, the Unknown and Self-Discovery
Following the Lord just might move you from a place of familiarity and onto a transformational journey filled with uncertainty and discomfort.
Abram (later named Abraham) set out for a foreign land and fulfilled a mission that God had given him and his family. Leaving the familiarity of Ur, and later Haran, must have been difficult. Notice how the text doesn’t record the Lord specifying the destination to Abram, though we know it to be Canaan from our vantage point thousands of years later. It is even more challenging to follow God when we aren’t told where we’re headed but simply commanded to “go.”
Being a Mat Carrier at Work
Regrettably, the community of faith plays a vanishingly small role in most Christians’ work lives in the modern West. Even if we receive help and encouragement for the workplace from our church, it is almost certain to be individual help and encouragement. In earlier times, most Christians worked alongside the same people they went to church with, so churches could easily apply the Scriptures to the shared occupations of laborers, farmers, and householders. In contrast, Western Christians today seldom work in the same locations as others in the same church. Nonetheless, today’s Christians often work in the same types of jobs as others in their faith communities. So there could be an opportunity to share their work challenges and opportunities with other believers in similar occupations. Yet this seldom happens. Unless we find a way for groups of Christian workers to support one another, grow together, and develop some kind of work-related Christian community, we miss out on the communal nature of faith that is so essential in Mark 2:3-12.
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Mark 2:1-12 paints a powerful picture of how you and I can care for the people in our lives who are suffering. This story begins with Jesus preaching in a house in Capernaum. His popularity has grown to the place where the crowd exceeded standing room only. People were even jammed outside of the door, trying desperately to hear Jesus.
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A Whole New Life and a New Whole Life
Jesus is not just in the body-healing business. Nor is he just in the soul-healing business, though this is surely central to his work. Rather, Jesus seeks to make us whole in every dimension of life.
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Prayer and Purpose: The Two Go Together
In recent devotions, we have seen how Jesus remained faithful to his purpose, even when that meant disappointing the crowds who were clamoring for him. I have suggested that you and I need a similar focus on our main purpose(s) in life.
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