As believers, our goal is to love God with all we have and are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We discussed in a previous blog how that comes only when we see how much God loved us first. Unfortunately, we often only know intellectually that God loves us; we may struggle to truly believe it functionally. To bring truth from our heads to our hearts, we need to chew on it. So we also provided some questions that can help. Lastly, we talked about how chewing on the Gospel is a primary means for convincing ourselves that God loves us with all He has and is.
Today, we’re going to look at a short tool we can use to grow closer to Christ.
In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about how goals set the direction of where we are going, and then we need to just focus on the system of doing. If we make incremental changes frequently, we will far exceed our goals. While his book references daily and work habits, the same principles apply to our walk with God.
To be fully convinced of God’s overwhelming love for me, below are 7 steps that I use every morning that have completely transformed my life. I’ve set a daily 15 minute appointment on my calendar, which I call Gospel Break to remind me to complete this exercise.
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What is the Gospel?
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What would have been different if I had believed the Gospel since the last time I took a Gospel Break?
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What will be different by believing the Gospel after this time?
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What’s true about sin that I can hate?
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How does Christ replace what sin is offering and actually do it better?
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I need to beg God to give me the gift of repentance.
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I also need to ask God to enable me throughout my day to do all He has called me to do today, fully dependent on Him.
To be clear, the first few times you do this template, it may take longer than 15 minutes. However, the more you do it and the more you push yourself to dig deep and connect, the faster this process goes. You might even find that the time restraint brings a level of focus. The goal isn’t necessarily to connect to God fast, but rather to make the most of any 15 minute break in your day.
If you are someone that wants to take your time going through this, please do. We are just trying to create a system that can be done in 15 minutes or less for when we are busy and know we need to be dependent on Christ.
If it helps, you can break this template down into one question at a time. So literally just ask yourself the first question for a while. Then when you want to do more, add another question until you get to complete the template.
Even better, come up with your own template tailored to you once you get the swing of this one.
If you would like to see how I answered this template for myself earlier this week, read here.
I would love to hear how this goes for you.
Chew On This:
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How would following a template like the Gospel Break Template above change you?
The 1st Principle Leadership brand was created to equip Christian heads of companies to live in congruence with Christ and grow thriving businesses that truly glorify Him while functionally putting Christ and their families ahead of the business.
*This blog is an amalgamation of a few different clients. No client is being singled out.
