Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all
your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
Mark 12:30

Mind, mental health
Heart, emotions, relationships
Body, good and bad
Today, spiritual health, soul

This is what it means to flourish in your
Christian life, to be a growing healthy believer.

Honestly, feels a little odd to talk about spiritual health as something different, because everything is spiritual!

if you’re not healthy in body, mind, emotions, relationships, then it’s inevitably going to affect your spiritual health as well.
if you’re not spiritually healthy, then it’s inevitably going to affect every other area of your health as well. In fact, any other kind of health is temporary at best.

But if everything is spiritual, then how do you go about talking about spiritual health? It’s about as broad as it gets.

Looking at Paul’s letters to the churches, his children in the faith, he almost always starts by telling the people how thankful he is for them, and how he’s praying for them. Look at what he says to the Colossians believers…

For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Colossians 1:9–14

A good list of what it looks like to have a spiritual life that’s thriving…

filled with knowledge of his will
wisdom and spiritual understanding
walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him
bearing fruit in every good work
growing in the knowledge of God (×2)
being strengthened with all power
great endurance and patience
joyfully giving thanks to the Father, BECAUSE…
enabled you to share in saints’ inheritance
rescued from domain of darkness
transferred into the kingdom Son he loves
in him we have redemption, forgiveness sins.

Love him with all your soul, and to living to please him,
a walk that’s worthy of being a son/daughter of the King.

Transferd into the Kingdom, inheritance, child of the King!

Again, good, but broad. I want to get practical this morning. How do we love him with all our soul? How do we walk pleasing to Him?

We started the year in 2021 (2 years ago!) with a series called Rhythms: Practicing the Way of Jesus…

Bible intake
Bible study
Prayer
Meditation
Fasting
Silence & Solitude
Worship
Giving
Service
Fellowship
Evangelism
Celebration

We’re not gonna cover all that ground this morning, but we are going to focus on some of those habits, those means of grace.

The Means of Grace

That’s a really good term, better than the term normally used for these habits, spiritual disciplines, because it gets at the heart of the matter.

We’re talking about loving the Lord, walking with him. Putting ourselves in a place to receive the grace he wants to give us.

I can flip a switch, but I don’t provide the electricity. I can turn on a faucet, but I don’t make the water flow. There will be no light and no liquid refreshment without someone else providing it. And so it is for the Christian with the ongoing grace of God. His grace is essential for our spiritual lives, but we don’t control the supply. We can’t make the favor of God flow, but he has given us circuits to connect and pipes to open expectantly. There are paths along which he has promised his favor.
David Mathis, Habits of Grace

Before turning our focus to “the means of grace,” and the practices (“habits”) that ready us to go on receiving God’s grace in our lives, this much must be clear from the outset: The grace of God is gloriously beyond our skill and technique. The means of grace are not about earning God’s favor, twisting his arm, or controlling his blessing, but readying ourselves for consistent saturation in the roll of his tides.
David Mathis, Habits of Grace

1. Hear His Voice

He answered, “It is written: Man must not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Matthew 4:4

If that was true of the Son of God, how much more is it true of us?!

Remind them of these things, and charge them before God not to fight about words. This is useless and leads to the ruin of those who listen. Be diligent to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed, correctly teaching the word of truth. Avoid irreverent and empty speech, since those who engage in it will produce even more godlessness, and their teaching will spread like gangrene.
2 Timothy 2:14–17

Read
Study
Memorize
Meditate
Obey

The goal is not to get through it like another chore, another thing on our todo list, a chapter a day to keep the devil away.

If you’re not a reader, be a listener. YouVersion

2. Have His Ear

But the news about him spread even more, and large crowds would come together to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. Yet he often withdrew to deserted places and prayed.
Luke 5:15-16

If that was true of the Son of God, how much more is it true of us?!

If I never talk to Kay…

I can think of nothing great that is also easy. Prayer must be, then, one of the hardest things in the world. To admit that prayer is very hard, however, can be encouraging. If you struggle greatly in this, you are not alone…
Tim Keller, Prayer

not a to-do list designed to increase your guilt,
but an invitation to experience more of God’s grace.
not about drudgery, it’s about delight in walking with our God.
not about perfection, it’s about practice.

The Father is not standing there with an angry look on His face, with His hands on His hips, going, “Been a while, hadn’t it, Luke?” and demanding an explanation for my absence. That’s a harsh god of my own imagination, not the loving Father revealed in Scripture.

Prayer is spiritual warfare.

Pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and
stay alert with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints.
Ephesians 6:18

See where you’re at.
See who you’re talking to.
See what access cost you.

J.D. Greear said one of his heroes in the faith told him that he almost never prayed for longer than 20 minutes at a time, but he never went 20 minutes without praying.

When all is said and done, our hope is not to be a skilled Bible reader, practiced pray-er, but to be the one who “understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth” (Jer. 9:23–24). And so our heartbeat in the habits we develop for hearing every word, speaking every prayer is Hosea 6:3…
David Mathis

Oh, that we might know the Lord!
Let us press on to know him.
He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn
or the coming of rains in early spring.
Hosea 6:3

Ask the Spirit to reveal to you where you need to become more healthy.

Hear His voice.
Have His ear.

All our hope is in him.