The word ‘liturgy’ describes the rituals or practices of the people of God as they gather to worship. But what we often don’t realize is that we all have a personal liturgy.
You have an order to your life and the things you do are doing things to you.
The habits you practice every day are forming you into a certain type of person. The small decisions you make in an ordinary day of your life have enormous impact on the quality of your life. The things you do do things to you. Your habits and practices shape who you become.
According to Jeremiah 17:5-8, two types of life are possible for us and the things we do in the ordinary rhythms of our daily existence will largely determine which type of spiritual life we are experiencing.
The Blessed Life: Humans were designed to get resources and nutrients from God. There is a life available to us when we walk with God in such a way that we are never moved from the life and nutrients that make us thrive.
- Jesus is the model of the Blessed Life. He depended on the Father perfectly. He existed with a settled disposition of fullness and joy that was not lacking in anything. Jesus stayed connected to His Father in a such a way that when the very worst circumstances came for Him—when the heat and drought came—He did not wither.
- Jesus invites us to this Blessed Life. Jesus invites us into what He had (John 7:37-39). Jesus came to put the blessed life inside of us so that the river of God’s spirit could live in our hearts and we could experience a vibrant spiritual life that feels like a tree planted by water.
The Cursed Life: The cursed life is characterized by the desert. As a society, we lack purpose, hope, and joy. We have intentionally cultivated life in the desert without even realizing it.
- 5 Enemies Contributing to the Cursed Life (that particularly tend to attack Americans’ lives):
- Apathy: not caring about things God created you to care about
- Distraction: being unable to focus on God and others because your attention is taken by less important things
- Self-Reliance: living your day-to-day life depending primarily on your own strength and resources
- Cynicism: a posture of skepticism that leads you to doubt God’s presence and activity in your life
- Self-Absorption: being preoccupied with your thoughts, feelings, desires, and concerns above all else.
These five spiritual enemies will be focus points in our series for us to fight against together. If it is true that we have unknowingly cultivated these things into our lives, then we have to start working against them. We have to fight them.
For the next five months, we are all together trying to create a personal liturgy that puts these enemies to death and helps us become the kind of people God designed us to be.
Each of the five sections in our series will help us to intentionally fight against one of the five spiritual enemies. Each section will have a daily challenge that we will all do together in order to practice becoming people who are transformed by God. Research says that it takes about 21 days to start a new habit so we are praying that a lot of these challenges that we do together become habits we do over the long haul that lead us into the life we were made for.
To help us keep up with these daily challenges, we created an app for the series. The app is called “Personal Liturgy” and for the next 120 days, it is going to have a specific and daily challenge for us to complete.
Our challenge for the first few weeks is simply to journal every single day to fight apathy in our souls. It’s to start a simple habit of opening up the app and honestly answering the questions for each day, and training ourselves to think more deeply about our lives so we can intentionally engage with God.
To learn more about the “Personal Liturgy” app, check out this short video where one of our pastors, Brandon Clements, walks through how to use the app:
If you don’t have a smartphone or would prefer to receive the challenges via email, you can sign up here: