The miracle of the Christian proposal is that we can encounter God every day; the mortal meets the immortal, we abide in the Lord’s presence. Christianity is not simply a philosophical concept, but a friendship with our divine creator. If we understand Jesus’ teachings as no more than a moral code, we will quickly find that its demands lie beyond our natural ability. Relationships are built on trust, moral codes on obedience enforced through punishment. The first gives rise to love, the latter only to fear.

All athletes know the importance of diet.* As Christian athletes our diet is to feed from God’s Word, the bread of life, consistently and appropriately (John 6:35). Paul describes our life as participating in a race, with a prize for the winner. It’s easy to lose focus once life’s many responsibilities demand our adult attention.

Spiritual formation aims to equip us to grow up. We can stubbornly refuse Christian adulthood and keep chasing childish distractions, whilst refusing to accept personal spiritual responsibility. There’s a distinction between childlike behaviour to enter the kingdom (Matt. 18:2–5) and being childish. Jesus invites us to live with the confident trust a child can invest in a parent.

We associate the mind with thought. Having been trained to think, I easily live in my head, a place I’m comfortable in. Conceptually I interpret and comprehend many things; my challenge is doing something useful with my thoughts. The mind is, ‘the part of a person that makes it possible to think, feel emotions, and understand things’.

In 2020, the Guardian newspaper reported that the proportion of students awarded first-class degrees in England increased by 90% in eight years.* Grade inflation or increased consumption of brain food, who knows? The same year saw 23% of undergraduate entry coming from ‘low participation neighbourhoods’, up from 14% nine years earlier.

The word ‘heart’ occurs over one thousand times throughout Scripture. It describes the core of our being, providing the engine room for our intellectual, physical and emotional life (Prov. 27:19). We are invited to hide God’s Word in our heart (Psa. 119:11) and it is by exploring our heart that we grow familiar and learn to understand the complexities of the inner life of the Spirit within us.

The basis of Christian maturity is clear: ‘fear God and keep his commandments’. It’s why we maintain a discipline of reading Scripture daily, and is the reason for Every Day with Jesus. Scripture informs our decision-making. So, to learn more of God and His ways helps us to make good, God-centred choices.

When we make a decision we settle something. It offers us the opportunity to choose between two or more opportunities, and then to live on the basis of our decision. Our human nature often prefers to postpone decisions for they appear so final. We wonder what might have happened had we made an alternative choice.

The Christian proposal turns on the fact that mortal life is not the same as our existence. Rather, an eternal creator God establishes the basis for a route of recovery from sin, which obstructs human access to God. What we experience on earth is just a brief sojourn outside paradise, which is presented in Scripture as the original state of God’s creation.

Early in Scripture, God asks the critical question we face every day, ‘Where are you?’ Like Adam we may feel we can hide from God’s scrutiny, but there is nowhere we can go to escape God’s gaze (Psa. 139:7–12). Indeed, the question requires an answer on two levels: one where we describe our physical position; the second, far more challenging, our metaphysical condition, or what is the real meaning and purpose of our life?