Do your devotions ever become monotonous, dull, repetitive and painful? You are not alone. Something needs to change otherwise your prayer life and spiritual life in general can become a burden rather than a joy. This podcast addresses this issue.
EM Bounds said that “Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things. It is the simplest and the most sublime, the weakest and the most powerful. Its results lie outside the range of human possibilities; they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.”
Spending time in personal devotions and will cultivate your heart toward the transcendent things of life. Is the world evangelizing you and altering your views of life, sex, work, clothing, etc. or will God’s word be evangelizing your heart? Weeds don’t need work to grow, they grow when you neglect your garden. Your soul is your garden. The world comes in like weeds, if you do not cultivate it, before you know it you will become indistinguishable from the world.
I try to make time daily, to bathe my mind with his Holy word. Our God is a consuming fire and his word is a lamp in our lives. Let that fire and light refine and purify our thoughts and desires daily.
Solitude is important. But change the way you have your quiet times. If you do not, you end up with monotony. Stuart Grassian, a board-certified psychiatrist and a former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, has interviewed hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement. In one study, he found that roughly a third of solitary inmates were “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” Why? Because doing the same thing over and over will make us insane!
The human minds needs variety and diversity—this applies to our personal devotional and prayer times.
How we have our prayers and devotions matters. What I mean by “how” is not only the posture of our heart, but the posture of our bodies as well.
My children, AnaKaterina And Daniel are 6 and 7 now. One day when they were told to bow their heads to pray, my son said “Daddy AnaKaterina kept her eyes open when we prayed!”
I asked him “And how did you know she did not close her eyes”? He did not even attempt to answer as he realized he was doing what he complained she was.
Now on a deep level why bother to bow our heads and pray? It does not matter does it? In some sense it does not matter because God sees our hearts. But we are bodily beings and how our body behaves has a great impact on our psyche. If you stay in your pajamas all day when you work at home it will have an effect on your work.
How you dress when you come to church or to the beach says something about what you value or hold to be worthy of your attention, even on a subliminal basis.
In the Screwtape Letters, Letter IV, C.S. Lewis has the demon write this to his nephew on how to destroy Christians. He said
“At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls”
To have effective devotions, you need to provide variety. Change the way you do things, when you do things and how you pray.
Let us consider the historical account of the burning bush incident of Moses in the book of Exodus chapter 3.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, renowned Orthodox Priest gives us this illustration:
And God says two things to Moses. First of all he says: “Remove your shoes” Shoes, are made of leather from the skin of dead animals. So spiritually shoes signify what is lifeless, dead. This way God’s command at the burning bush means strip off the deadness of...
