Quiet Time Conversations | Practical Discipleship

Time with God - A Noticeable Shift in Your Heart

Karen A. Season 2 Episode 17

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0:00 | 6:18

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Christian brother/sister disclaimer:  

What I say here is not theology.  It is a retelling of my times spent with the Lord and what I feel I have learned from Him. I am not always correct, but as I continue to seek Him, He will eventually correct me.

We are all in different places in our walk.  Some are babes.  Some are wiser.  We can be babes and wise at the same time, just in different areas.  A wise Christian will recognize that someone more milky is sharing and be patient with where they are.  A more milky Christian needs to understand that not everything everyone shares is necessarily for them or necessarily correct.  It is best to make Jesus your shepherd and spend time with Him every day so He can teach you.  (This is what I do.)  ❤️  Love you!

SPEAKER_00

Good morning. Why is quiet time necessary? Time with the Lord. Here's a perfect example this morning. I get up, it's a regular day. I'm not really wanting to do quiet time. Yeah, there's other things that I could do. But I'm committed. So I get my coffee and I sit down in my chair and I feel nothing. And I just start talking to the Lord. I just start talking and I'm praying. And I always remember this enter his courts with thanksgiving and praise. So that's always my default. Enter his courts with thanksgiving and praise. Well, I want to enter his courts this morning. That's how I'm going to do it. Thanksgiving and praise. So now I just sit in my chair and I begin thanking him and praising him. Thank you for this. Thank you for that. I praise you for this. I praise you for that. I keep going until something changes. I feel different. I feel something. Um I don't know how to explain that, but I go from feeling nothing to feeling him, feeling something. Like, I don't know. You'll know if you try this out. And it probably took 10 to 15 minutes of I thank you and I praise you. And I'm really, I'm not just saying words, I'm really thanking him and I'm really praising him. And so then once I get over that hump and I start feeling him, then everything changes. It's now all God focused, whereas a minute ago, it was all me focused, and what am I going to do with my day? And the whole thing has just shifted. Um, and not permanently, but while I'm doing this, it has shifted. And I thought, you know, daily I am reminded that you are everything. That's the difference. You know, it shifted. My my what what is it? My spirit, my soul. It went from everything is here on earth, and it flipped over to you are everything. You give me everything, you provide everything, you're my life, you're my love. I mean, it's you. And from one minute to the next, it was it's a complete change. I see this a lot in David's Psalms. I David's Psalms, a lot of times they will start out with his complaint, where are you? I can't hear you, I can't see you, people are after me, where are you? And then there comes a time in the psalm where the net the very next paragraph, he's like, Thank you. You're amazing. You're gonna do this, you're gonna do that. And what happened between one paragraph and the next? The flip, the switch. That's what happened. This the internal faith switch, it switched, and now instead of being completely alone, feeling alone in all of the stuff that I'm having to go through, I I just don't, I don't feel it anymore because it has I have moved into the courts. I'm in his courts, I'm with him now, and everything just looks different over on this side. And then I thought, you know what? It's not daily that I'm reminded that he's my everything. It's when I spend time with him. Because there's a c there have been a couple of mornings uh this week that I had something to do and I didn't spend time with him. And the the day, the flesh, it just takes over. It just takes over. When I don't spend time with the Lord, I become my everything. I'm the one that I have to depend on, or my husband is the one that I have to depend on. And when he doesn't do something, if he does something that doesn't make me happy, I'm mad at him. He is the one that did something wrong. Or my kids become my everything, or my job becomes my everything, or my bank account, or my stocks, or um my drugs. Can I say that? I've never been on drugs, but can I say that it becomes your everything? Or my alcohol becomes the thing that's going to get me through the day? Anything else will fill that blank for you when you don't spend the time, spending any time with the Lord. So I realized this morning that when I don't spend time with him, I or something else becomes my everything for the day. It's the thing that gets me through the day. And I want to say this I want to continue my faith journey to live in a place where my heart is with him all day, that it doesn't take a quiet time for me to be in this place where he is my everything. I'm striving for that. He's gonna teach me how to get there. Today, I don't know how to get there, but he teaches me something every single day. And we're headed there, and I'm excited about it. And I think it is just natural to the flesh for something I see and hear to become my everything. It's it's in front of me, I can see it. I can't see God. I can't, sometimes I can't feel God. For a lot of people, I can't hear God because we're listening intellectually and not faith. You know, and intellectually, that's not where he speaks. He speaks in our hearts. He lives in our hearts, he has set eternity in our hearts. That's where he speaks. So that's where you have to learn to listen. And how? By sitting down with him and spending time with him. If you want to hear him, you have to spend time with him. I mean, that's just how it goes. So it's it's harder for something you don't see to become your everything. That's all I wanted to say today. I encourage you to give it a try. We'll see you next time.