Romans 12 urges us to pursue a transformative life with God in what we do and how we live the details of our lives. The invitation is to offer our hours and days and bodies and lives as living sacrifices because God has demonstrated that life with him is worth taking hold of once and for all. We can only sustain that kind of lived sacrifice if our way of living is rooted in meaningful and true belief in and about the God who raised Jesus and who will raise us with Jesus.

We wrap our series on spiritual disciplines with two reminders: We must clear new paths for lasting rhythms of spiritual disciplines in our lives, and disciplines will not satisfy us. They are a gift to tether us to Jesus, who satisfies us.

We were created to do life together. Christians ought to have the best friendships with another, especially in the local church. Hebrews 10 gives us three different ways in which we can practice Spiritual Friendship with one another and help one another live the life God intends for us.

In the parable of the sower, Jesus warns that for some people, “as time passes, the daily anxieties, the pursuit of wealth, and life’s addicting delights outpace the growth of the message in their hearts.” He’s talking about most of us. We complicate our lives with busyness, chasing and spending money, and other unnecessary pursuits that reveal we aren’t truly seeking the Kingdom first or maybe even trusting God will give us all the good things we need unless we secure them ourselves. How do we acknowledge and repent of this lifestyle and find the simplicity of the life God made us to live?

Dallas Willard says submission is the highest level of fellowship because it involves humility, complete honesty and transparency, and confession and restitution. Yet many of us resist the concept completely because we’ve experienced such distorted versions of it. How do we understand and practice the Bible’s notions of mutual submission and spiritual authority?

If you follow Jesus, the Bible is essential to you knowing who you are and why you exist. The whole Bible. As God’s people, we must root ourselves regularly in the Scriptures, which remind us of who God is based on his history and who we are based on our history and also empower us to be who we were created to be as God’s people now and in the days to come. More than making that argument, this sermon highlights two biblical themes to illustrate how the breadth of the Bible shows us where God is and who we are in every circumstance of our lives.

Of all the gifts that Jesus offers to humankind, perhaps the one most needed by the present generation is the gift of Sabbath rest. Sabbath has always been a defining characteristic of God’s people.  Christians engage in Sabbath because of the rest that was built into the 7th day of the creation story, because of the story of Gods redemption of his people, and because of the promised eternal Sabbath that Christ is ushering in.

Confession is our acknowledgement that we’re ever-dependent on grace. We cannot be above ongoing, intentional acknowledgements of our weaknesses, faults, and sins and still be a part of the movement of grace and healing among God’s people. But that’s the good news: the other side of a deliberate move into confession as a discipline is the power that heals.

Prayer is a language that must be learned.  We need to be taught by the saints who have gone before us how to pray in a way that forms and transforms us. When we look to them, and to Jesus himself, we find a daily practice of stopping at fixed times to recite prayers, psalms, and scriptures. Through this practice, we are formed properly as Christians.

We are meant both to pray fervently for the things of God’s Kingdom here and now and believe that God is building a Kingdom that isn’t always going to fit our grid of what should happen — even maybe what the purpose of my life is or what the purpose of your life is. But the scriptures are clear: Your prayers matter to God, and they matter for you.