Hello and welcome back to Cultivating Growth. I want to thank everyone for joining us again this week. We've got a special guest with us today. Chase Byers, who's a preacher at the Fishers Congregation, is joining us for the conversation today. We, over the past few weeks, have begun a new format in which we're tackling One topic per month.

And so over the past few weeks, you may have noticed we've been talking about building spiritual daily habits. We've talked about prayer, study, meditation, and today we're going to wrap up this topic, uh, with a discussion with Chase. About how we can improve some of our spiritual daily habits and the importance of those things in our life.

So with that, let's get right to it. 

Alright John, thank you for that. It's good to have Chase with us today. We've really been spending, you know, kind of the time over the last, you know, several weeks. Talking about these daily habits, kind of surrounding the idea that if you're interested in having a strong, growing relationship with God, it's going to take communication.

We know that in our physical relationships, whether it be a spouse or whether it be a friend, that continual communication is going to be there. And that's kind of been the foundation for this idea of establishing these, you know, daily habits. Whether it be prayer, speaking to God regularly. Or study, allowing him to speak to you, uh, to us regularly.

And the meditation, in a lot of ways, is kind of a combination of all of that. And we've talked about some obstacles to that, and some tips and techniques that can help. We've talked about, biblically, how God Pushes us in that direction. We've talked about simple passages such as, you know, first Thessalonians five, pray without ceasing.

We've seen examples, uh, such as the Bereans who search the scriptures daily. And we've seen examples from Jesus and the importance of his meditating time, his prayer time.  And others. And so, kind of to wrap all of that up, uh, we'll kind of, maybe in a general way, you know, kind of give Chase a, a chance to kind of talk about those things a little bit, you know, as well.

So, you know, Chase, when we think about kind of, you know, daily habits, specifically in the prayer and the study and the meditation, maybe a little bit about why that's so important maybe to you. And then maybe some, uh, some ways that you go about that, maybe in your own, you know, kind of spiritual walk as well.

Yeah. Thanks, Jeremy. And guys, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be on here today, but I'll tell you guys what, this is a really good topic. I think the Christian needs to realize how these disciplines, they all come together in worship. And that's one of the things I said off air that I wanted to talk about today was just the habit of spiritual discipline and spiritual worship, kind of in private and in your own home.

And one of my favorite Psalms, I didn't understand it for the longest times, guys, but in Psalm 148, you guys might remember, we actually have a hymn that reflects this Psalm. Uh, Psalm 148, this is where, of course, it says, Hallelujah, praise Jehovah from the heavens. Praise Him in the heights. Praise Him all His angels.

But do you guys remember, like, singing this growing up? Sure. Do you guys remember the ones that stood out to you?  Praise Him dragons, you know, stuff like that. And it wasn't until I was an adult, I came back to Psalm 148 and I read it. And I was like, why, why is God calling,  why is the psalmist rather calling on all of these aspects of creation to praise God? 

And it's because these things just being what God wants them to be,  praise God.  And when you look through that list and you finally get to man. being called on to worship God. They're like the one thing that's not like the other.  We were the ones who broke the mold and broke the pattern and weren't what God asked us to be.

And so worship is supposed to center us back in the middle of the universe, but it's right back where we need to be with God. We're. We're just creation, just like everything else. Now I realize we're made in God's image. But this psalm is calling on us to realize that everything God made humbles us and puts us right back down where we need to be.

And so those exact spiritual disciplines that you guys were talking about and have highlighted so well this month, prayer and scripture reading. They all come together in our desire to worship God and recognize he's the creator, I'm the creation, and I have no business being above him or anybody else.

And so that's one of my favorite things about spiritual discipline is it humbles you. It keeps you back where you need to be. Well, I think you make a really good point about the humility that is found in these daily habits. And one of the things that I was thinking about while you were talking was that each of these three that we've talked about with prayer, study, and meditation, all of them bring us back into a better understanding of our relationship to God.

He is the creator. We are the created. And so when we engage with these habits on a regular basis, it's a way of humbling ourselves. And in doing so, it does deepen the relationship between us and God. It brings us into a position of reliance on him. And all of those things are really important if we're going to grow spiritually.

And so the humility component of these daily habits that we've been talking about, I think is a really important part of why scripture teaches us and prepares us, uh, to really engage with these things every single day. Yeah. It may, maybe building on that. Maybe even one more time is, you know, the reality of once we understand that and we're kind of living in that world of I understand who I am, I understand who God is, I understand my place, I understand his place, and we really grab hold of that.

Now, when you start to think about, you know, some of the things we've talked about, whether it be prayer or study or, you know, meditation, it becomes. Unbelievable almost to think about that God is available for me to speak to at any moment of any day. I should relish the opportunity to do that. Or  he has provided his word to me in a complete way.

It provides everything that I would ever need every answered in it. Any question that I would ever have, I would then be propelled to, to grab it and to want to be in it just all the time. And certainly meditation, you know, goes with that as well, that if we really understand then my place in God's place, who he is being with him and surrounded by him, uh, by way of communication daily, we're jumping at that opportunity.

Yeah. And. Whenever you think about the discipline of scripture reading and just daily getting into it, when you go through texts, sometimes you feel it in your bones where you're like, I want to respond to God now. I want to break out in a prayer or break out in a song. And that is why worship I think is really where all these things beautifully come together.

And that's not something we have to do only corporately. Uh, meaning like all together on Sundays or Wednesdays, you know, whenever we meet with our church family. But worship is something we can do individually, and I would even say it's something God wants from us. Um, I don't know guys, I was thinking a little bit more about Ephesians chapter 5.

I think there's um, there's a part of the, the singing that we sometimes overlook. In Ephesians 5 verse 19, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music with your heart to the Lord. Sometimes we forget that when he says Psalms there, he is talking about a book of the Bible.

There's 150 Psalms there that we can go back to, to use and aid us in prayer, scripture, reading, uh, meditation, but then also worship.  One of the more helpful ways I've heard the Psalms described is they are. Kind of like a feelings wheel. You know how, like I remember in elementary school, there was like a color wheel that had all the different colors, right?

You have feelings wheels, and those also correspond to certain colors. You know, you think about anger, you think about red, think about sadness, maybe think about blue and for every human emotion we might experience, there is a Psalm. That directs our heart right back to God, which I realized might be something you guys already talked about in previous episodes, but that is a good discipline to get into as we're talking about, uh, you know, daily reading, start working through the Psalms and as every Psalm you read.

Assign a genre to it, assign a feeling or emotion to it, and have a running list of these emotions so that when you feel them, you can go back to those and find a way to constructively bring those emotions back to who God is. And I think what you're describing there is something that is only going to become a part of who we are over time.

You know, if you're brand new to reading the Bible, you know, maybe that's going to be a challenge for you to do something like that. But if you begin Reading Psalm 1, and then the next day you read Psalm 2, and you just take little chunks of it at a time. You're not going to be very far down the road before some of these things start to become much more obvious to you.

And you're going to be able to relate with how you're feeling or things that you're going through with some of the words that David pens, for instance, or any of the other biblical writers. These things start to become ingrained within us, and we start to relate to Scripture on a much deeper level. As we progress through this and really what it takes to, in order to develop these habits is to start and to be consistent with it and then watch as those things start to grow within us.

And over time, the more we dedicate ourselves to reading the Bible each day, to praying to God, to worship in some capacity,  The more we're going to miss it on days where we don't do it. And when we start to miss it, and we've talked about this in some of the previous episodes, that is when you can start to identify these have become habits now in my life because I miss it.

If I don't do it one day, and that's where we want to get to. We want to get to the point where every time I, I feel joy, or I feel sadness, or I feel anxiety, or I feel any emotion that we can imagine, our minds immediately go to scripture. You know, that, that's where we want to get. And it's, it's going to take some time to, to really build that within us, but that's the whole idea of building daily habits is that they're there all the time within us.

And if we are away from it for a period of time, we, we missed it and we can't wait to get right back into it. Yeah, that's a really cool point. What, what you just said, John, it kind of reminds me of what it says in John 4 when Jesus had that talk with the woman at the well. He said in John 4, uh, verse 14, whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again.

In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life. There's this really cool idea that Jesus gives that when we When we go and we consume the well that he's offering, that well then is inside of us. And anytime we have a craving, we'll go right to it because it's right there.

It's so accessible. And that's the beautiful thing about Bible reading and prayer and all of these things. It's just how at our fingertips they are. And so that discipline immediately gets to the point where you're craving it. And that's a, that's a beautiful part of all this. I mean, Jesus will use in Matthew chapter five, and you know, In the, towards the middle, I guess, of the Beatitudes, you know, the idea of hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

Now, you know, that's him talking about spiritual, some, hungering and thirsting for something spiritual. But the connection is what we understand of hungering and thirsting physically. And we understand the importance of eating and drinking. daily, right? We understand the importance of that. Well, Jesus is now making that correlation that, you know, for the Christian, for the disciple, his disciples specifically, you know, from, you know, from the Sermon on the Mount, is the one that hungers and thirsts for righteousness.

And so now you're making that correlation of this is the sustenance that I need on a daily basis physically. And now Jesus is making that move to this is the sustenance that I need to deal and to live daily. Spiritually. And in a lot of ways, those are the things that we've talked about, and we've used psalms.

You know, multiple times  already today. It to me, a good saw me word is the whole heart, right? That is throughout the book of Psalms. It is the whole heart in a lot of ways. That's where we're trying to get to right is to be able then to provide to God everything that I have. And so it, you know, to John's point, whatever it is that comes up in my life, my first step is God in whatever capacity to listen to him, to talk to him, to think about him.

That is my first step. And it is something that does have to be built. It's something that does have to be worked on. Whether you're a brand new follower of Jesus or you've been a follower of his for a long time, it's still something that we have to constantly be thinking about and constantly working on.

One thing that came to mind as you were saying that, and it's something that we've talked a little bit about but I think is worth repeating, is when it comes to these daily habits of prayer, study, meditation, anything else that we may be considering as a spiritual habit, it's something that's done intentionally.

You don't accidentally stumble into spiritual habits. There's intentionality behind it. And I think, you know, Chase, you made the point earlier about, you know, the way we approach worship, whether that's individually or collectively, you know, worship is something we see in scripture, always intentional.

It's never somebody accidentally worship. That doesn't happen. There is a purpose behind it. There is intent to do so. And it conveys a certain message to God and it's a benefit to the individual as well. It's, it's, it's intentional and our prayers should be intentional. Our studies should be intentional.

Our meditation should be intentional. And the more we recognize the importance of that, the more meaning we're going to find in these things. It can't be something like, Oh, I've got five minutes. Um, Oh yeah, I forgot. I need to read my Bible real quick. And you just kind of stumble into it. That's never going to develop into a healthy habit.

Now, it may be something you do periodically, but it's never going to develop into a healthy habit because there's no intentionality behind it. And so we've got to be really, it's got to be really important to us to make sure that we have a plan for these things. We know why we're doing it. We know why they're important.

And we approach these things with intentionality. One of the things I'll say too, we mentioned, Private personal worship. Uh, one of the things I found helpful just in my, not almost, not always daily, but weekly meditations, uh, there was someone who once gave me the advice to treat our songbook at church, treat it like a devotional.

And so I got a copy of the songbook that we use at our church. I realized everyone's church has a different songbook, but I took it home with me and I made it a practice just once a week, sometimes multiple times a week, and just start on page one of the songbook  and I would just start reading through the lyrics.

You know, sometimes you get to some songs you're familiar with, sometimes you don't.  But I'll tell you this, every single time I turned a page to a new song or a song I was familiar with, there was always something in it I'd never realized before.  And so one of the disciplines I got into was not only reading through them, but then chasing the scripture in them.

Trying to go back and find what was in the lyricist's mind whenever he wrote this. What passages was he thinking about? And then if it was a song I didn't know, I would look it up on YouTube or, you know, on Spotify. And I would sit there and I would sing through it on my own time. Let me tell you all, not only was that real worship right there by myself, but that really brought those songs to life whenever we met with the local congregation the next time we sang it.

And so that was one of those disciplines that I got, I kind of got into, uh, not realizing, realizing just how much benefit there was to just reading through the psalm book.  Kind of going along with that, we mentioned Ephesians 5 that we sing to one another with the Psalms.  There are multiple psalters out there.

When we use the word psalter, what we mean is people who have taken all 150 psalms and they have arranged them to either their own music or to tunes we'd be familiar with. And there's actually a psalter I'd like to recommend. Um, it's not one I wrote, by the way. Sometimes, this sounds like Plug your plug in or something.

Yeah, yeah, you're going to plug it. It's not a paid advertisement. Yeah, absolutely not. No, uh, I, I I do not have the skills to write music or to do this kind of thing. But there's a brother in Christ who's went on to be with the Lord, uh, but his name is Matt Basford. And, uh, through Truth Publications, he published a Psalter.

It's called Worshipping with the Psalms. And so if you Google Worshipping with the Psalms, Matt Basford, it'll pop up. But he put all 150 psalms to music we would be familiar with. And so that was another discipline I got into. Once I got a copy of this, I just started every day. Reading through the Psalm and then singing through it using the Psalter.

And so there's some great resources out there that help us do that kind of thing. I think that's a really important point to make is, you know, there are, there are great resources available to, to help us and, and those resources should point us back to God and his word. Certainly there are other books and things out there that are, you know, written by men and some of those things can be helpful.

Uh, but when we're talking about the things that we focus our time on each and every day. day, we want to make sure they're pointing us back to God's word. And something like the tool you just referenced, it takes us right back to the words penned by David and the other Psalm writers and inspired by the Holy Spirit.

And it brings us to God and to his word. And that's what those types of resources should do at the end of the day. Is, is help us in different ways to focus on God and His word. And so putting things to music and, and things of that nature do that. They, they help us remember things better. Uh, they bring out meaning in different ways when we, uh, engage with things like that, but they always take us back to God and His word, and that's where the true value of all these things is found.

Yeah, you know, in the last few minutes that we have here, maybe segue just a little bit, we've talked a lot about really over the last several weeks about developing, you know, habits, but doing so daily, right? Daily, it's important for prayer. Daily, it's important for study and meditation. But there are other habits that may not be daily habits that are still good and helpful and strong, even spiritual habits that, you know, that we need to be developing and to be thinking about.

And so maybe for the last couple of minutes, we can talk about a few of those. I'll kind of get the ball, you know, rolling and it's kind of popped up, you know, a little bit already in this conversation and has in others as well. But you know, it is that public worship, worshiping  with brethren on the Lord's day. 

That should be something that we develop into a habit. To your point, John, something we would miss, it would hurt if we didn't have it. And even though it doesn't happen daily, it happens, you know, certainly periodically, once there on the Lord's Day. But at other times there are, you know, collectively we are together, whether it be in the middle of the week.

to study from God's word, but to understand the importance of those and to develop habits of being with the brethren regularly is, I think, something else that is important to think about. I also think about spiritual, uh, just taking a spiritual inventory. Just looking at how well do I know the Bible? How well do I know these books that I feel like I've been reading my whole life?

Um, I think one litmus test for that in Hebrews chapter five, there was a rebuke. He actually gave to the brethren there. He said, by this time, you all ought to have been teachers. And he goes on to rebuke them because you guys are still on the milk and not on the meat. And so maybe just every few months, just ask yourself.

Have I taught anyone anything lately? Because if I'm learning something, I should probably be teaching somebody. Like, if I'm learning these spiritual truths, then I ought to be teaching. And so that's a good litmus test as well, is how I'm growing spiritually and how much I'm actually teaching. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the other things that came to mind, Jeremy, as you were talking, and Chase, as you were talking about kind of testing yourself, Uh, against the scripture.

There's other things such as hospitality and the love we show for others and the care that we have, the compassion we have for other people. You know, these are, these are important, uh, aspects of who we should be. We should form them into habits. Am I regularly, habitually having people into my home?  Am I regularly checking in on people who may be sick or in need in some way?

Am I giving of myself on a regular basis, intentionally so? All of these things that the scriptures teach us should be important to us. We should be developing those into habits where We do them regularly. They are important to us and we would miss them. If we don't do those things, we would feel as if we're missing something important in our life.

And so all of these, all of these things should in essence, become habits for us, and they should do so because we recognize just how important we are or they are, and we never want to be without. them. God, God has encouraged us and taught us to do all of these things and to be the kind of people he wants us to be, because he knows that's what's best for us.

We are at our best. We are thriving when we are living into the reality of being the person God wants us to be. And so we need to make sure all of these things become habits for us over time. Yep, there's no question about that. Well, before we close, I'll just kind of open it up one more time. Chase, anything else you want to add?

Or John, anything else that you want to go with? No, I'm good. Thanks guys for having me on today. This was fun. Absolutely. As always, we, uh, like to close with a passage, and we'll do that, uh, here. And that passage will be Psalm 1, verses 1 and 2. Let's read it together. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful.

But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day. 

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Thanks again for joining us this week and we'll talk to you again next week.