Faith For This Moment Devotional By Rick McKinleySýnishorn

Day Six

Telling a Different Story

Scripture: Philippians 1:6

Recovering a way of practicing our faith in both public and private, individually and collectively, will have the same preserving, sustaining, and life-giving effect that it did when the Israelites were in exile in Babylon. 

Spiritual disciplines enable us to bear witness to the gospel of Christ in ways that both bless our neighbors and resist the powerful culture that seeks to assimilate us. Resisting Babylon through these practices becomes prophetic when we tell a different story with our lives, a story that points to Jesus, who is King over all things. These practices are meant to set us free from Babylon’s power and to help us experience life in deep and meaningful ways. 

In Faith for This Moment, I explore five practices that are meant to help us remember and participate in the story of God. The centering practice, to which all the others are connected, is to hear and obey. When we have an underlying commitment to hear God’s Word and to listen to the Holy Spirit with the intention of obeying what we have heard, our posture changes from that of a spectator to that of a participant. The other four practices overlap one another in an interconnected pattern that weaves itself through our lives. Hospitality, generosity, Sabbath, and vocation intersect with most areas of our lives. If we intentionally and worshipfully give ourselves to Jesus in these areas of our lives, the dynamic that occurs is transformational. The power of Babylon gets broken, and the power of Christ breaks in. 

God uses the ordinary experiences of time, money, eating, and work to fill the large space in our lives between Sundays. He allows us to be both a faithful presence and a prophetic witness while being sustained and formed by his Word and Spirit. Through spiritual practices, we can see the power and the sacredness of what we are giving ourselves to, and He redeems our ordinary activities by weaving them into His story and making us participants in His purposes. 

By turning around (repentance) and seeing that everything we are doing is already a part of God’s story, we can adjust our focus and our energy to experience the freedom God has for us in that story and His power to sustain us in Babylon. 

When has a particular spiritual practice helped you see God’s power in your life?