A marvelous devotional book came out last year from one of my spiritual mentors, Scotty Smith.  Originally, he broadcast these as emails to his blog subscribers and then Baker Books had the good sense to publish 365 under the understated title, Everyday Prayers   Reading through these prayers again, especially as I begin my day is a needed exercise in recalibrating my thinking and reorienting my heart around the truth of God’s eternal and exhaustive love of me in His son Jesus.  May these prayers do the same for you.  Here is January 5th’s entry, which I thought particularly helpful to me at the beginning of the new year.

Dear Father, the health clubs and fitness centers are packed with postholiday traffic.  Yesterday I had to wait twenty minutes before I could even get onto my favorite elliptical machine.  Once again, scores of us seem ready to leave the sugar/butter/carbohydrate binge of the past six weeks for the purge of exercise and sweat.  This is a good thing, for stewardship of our physical hearts and bodies does have value, and it does bring you glory.

Yet, I’ve never been more aware that spiritual formation based on the “binge and purge” cycle simply doesn’t work.  Our spiritual hearts need to be strengthened by the grace of the gospel daily, all year long.  We cannot afford periods of “cruise control,” when we leave the banquet of your love for a buffet of comfort foods, fast foods, and junk foods.  Just like the physical hearts you’ve given us, our spiritual heart muscles will atrophy if we don’t take care of them.

So I thank you for the “means of grace” – the good gifts you’ve freely given us to help us grow in grace and the knowledge of Jesus.  Thank you for the Bible, your written Word, through which you reveal yourself and feed us with the riches of the gospel.  Thank you for prayer, meditation, and corporate worship, by which you meet and fellowship with us.  Thank you for the sacraments of baptism and Lord’s Supper, these tangible expressions of your covenant love and grace.

Father, you won’t love us more or less based on our use of these good gifts.  But we certainly demonstrate and deepen our love for you as we do so.  By the convicting work of your Holy spirit, let us be far more concerned about flabby, faceless hearts than bigger love handles.  Because you love us, don’t let us get used to being spiritually lazy.  May we come to the point where we’d sooner avoid oxygen and water than the means of grace.  Certainly gospel sanity is to be preferred over personal vanity, all the time.  We offer our prayer in Jesus’ loving and faithful name. Amen.