Keeping Your Flame Aflame

Our Pastor preached a sermon last Sunday entitled “Flamed and Flickered” from Colossians 4:14-16. I won’t re-preach the whole thing, but I wanted to talk about his third point: 

Under that point, my notes read: 

Remember as a kid singing Read Your Bible, Pray Every Day? It’s a cute little song, but it also has some hard truth in it. Because if we don’t read and pray every day, we don’t grow, grow, grow, as the song goes. Likewise, there are many simple truths and commands in the Word, but there aren’t many easy truths and commands. Reading and praying are simple ideas. Simple concepts. Simple, Biblical disciplines. But any discipline takes … well, discipline, and that can get hairy. To add one more thing to our schedules can seem daunting. I know what it’s like to be a Mom of toddlers who seemingly snatch away every second of the day. Shoot, I’m not even a Mom of toddlers anymore, but somehow, it’s possible to let an entire day slip away without reading a single verse or whispering a simple prayer. 

I have to be intentional. 

Set a time. 

Make a date.

Show up for the date. 

In our age of distraction, whatever gets put in front of our faces is what gets our attention. And the Enemy is going to work to put anything and everything before us – and then convince us that the anything’s and everything’s are an emergency. That we must answer the texts, pronto. That we can hit the snooze button a few more times. That we deserve to chillax and watch a movie. Anything to pull us away from the top priority.

So we work at telling ourselves no. At nixing the distractions and instead reading our Bible and praying every day. If we don’t, we minimize the God of the Word and in the process, stunt our growth. We become famished, malnourished, and puny rather than well fed, strong, and armored up (Eph. 6:13-18). 

Susanna Wesley, who bore 19 children, ten of whom survived, understandably had trouble finding time for prayer, so she invented a signal that the children were required to respect, no matter what (unless there was blood, I’m sure). Whenever she had pulled her apron over her head, she was not to be disturbed, so she could pray. 

Nineteen pregnancies, nine infant deaths, and ten living children. Oh, and an incredibly difficult husband who often left her for months at a time. I cannot even begin to fathom her every day duty list. But she made a determination to pray every day, and I suspect read every day. And God honored her obedience. It is recorded that she spent two hours a day with that apron pulled over her head. One does have to wonder if at least some of that time didn’t morph into snoozing instead of spiritually plodding. But the point is, she was dedicated, and out of that dedication came John and Charles Wesley. John preached the Word to nearly a million people in his day, and Charles wrote over nine thousand hymns, many of which we still sing today. 

Her work was not in vain. 

She did not minimize the God of the Word, and she saw the fruit of her labors. Her circumstances were not easy, but she found time for the Word of God, and she found time to talk to the God of the Word. 

How inspiring, convicting, and encouraging. 

The Enemy will keep up his relentless distractions and he will continue to woo us toward other seemingly better or more important matters. And even though we keep saying we want to read and pray, it’s not enough. We can’t merely want to. If we want our flame to remain aflame, we have to, as Nike says, Just Do It. 

And use an apron, if we must.