Practical Faith

Today I want to address four common questions to help you in leading your family’s daily devotional times.  The goal is not perfection, but progress – and practice makes progress.  

When our kids were 9, 8, and 5, Dianna and I decided to make our family vacation into a family spiritual retreat by adding a special devotional experience into each day. Here's what we did:

In today’s episode, I will provide a sample one-week plan that you can use to guide your family’s daily devotional time on vacation.  Each day will include simple instructions for training your kids how to spend meaningful time alone with God, followed by age-appropriate questions for debriefing your experiences together afterwards.

With just a little extra planning and intentionality, you can also make your family vacation into a family spiritual retreat.  

There are as many different routines for one’s devotional life as there are followers of Jesus!  My hope here is to provide one example that might help spark you to develop your own personalized routine.

If you don’t have any idea where you are on this journey of redemption & salvation – and you just kind-of checking Jesus out – and you are just exploring to see if this faith-in-Jesus thing is for you – that’s okay!  That’s great, actually – just keep on exploring.  Jesus Himself invites you to!

Today, let’s look at the alternative to sanctification: what if we are “only justified”?  What of those who “get saved,” but then don’t really do anything else?  Aren’t they still saved? 

The life of walking with Jesus, learning from Him, listening to Him, practicing obedience, learning to live by the power of His Spirit – it’s a lifelong process known as sanctification. It's hard work, but so worth it!

So here we are, in this in-between time. For those of us who have trusted in the saving work of Jesus on our behalf, we live between new birth – and earthly death. And some days, it is so hard.  And other days, it is more amazing than we ever dreamed possible! What’s going on? Why does it feel like this? What's happening in the Christian's life between salvation and heaven?

Salvation is so much more than just forgiveness from sin and the hope of heaven.  Salvation through Jesus certainly includes those wonderful things – but it also includes so much more!