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Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World

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Mike Cosper

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“You must remain in the Word. Five minutes of nibbling on a verse in the morning won’t fill you up and fuel you through the other 1,435 minutes of the day. You need a continual feast to carry you through long fasting days. First Thessalonians 5:17 tells you to “pray without ceasing.” If praying is talking to God, then reading God’s Word is listening. Let’s make the conversation a continual feast! Read and pray, then read and pray some more. Let your fasting days propel you into a feasting life.”

“The reward for giving and praying and fasting is found in the giving and praying and fasting. Because fasting and praying and giving allow us to experience more of Him. And He is everything. Our reward is the intimacy forged in prayerful conversation with the One who stitched us and knows us and sits enthroned within us and over us.”

“Scottish minister Andrew Bonar said, “Fasting is abstaining from anything that hinders prayer.” Not just food. Anything. As a matter of fact, Bonar often fasted from reading in order to spend more time with the Lord. Reading! His example ought to challenge us to consider what else might be hindering our intimate friendship with the Lord. If we want to experience His sustaining hand in our lives, it may be a good idea to take a season to set aside anything that might be in our hands. I like to say it this way: We abstain so that He might sustain. This isn’t just about food. We don’t just run to the pantry—we run to online games, we run to romance novels, and we run to Starbucks too.”

“So many of us have found that it is quite helpful - essential to our well-being, in fact - to craft and actually write down a rule of life. The purpose of this rule is to keep us clear and attentive, to enable us to live contemplatively in the midst of activity. The temptation, of course, is to to be overambitious and to set ourselves impossible goals - and then to fail. I think of this as the "first week of Lent syndrome": what begins a bracing change of pace and priorities turns into a real drag after about two weeks. There is also the danger that the structure will become an end in itself so that our spirituality becomes joyless, life-denying, and self-centered. Particularly in regard to "spiritual disciplines," less is frequently more. A good rule can set us free to be our true and best selves.”

“[My students} ... presented me with thoughtful and candid papers. They had examined their use of time and energy, reflected carefully on their relationship with those whose lives touched theirs (including the difficult and incompatible ones), scrutinied their performance as custodians of God's creation. All in all, it was exemplary work except for one thing: these were grim, dreary schedules that allowed no place for fun. No room for holy uselessness or the joyous and restorative wasting of time, a spiritual discipline that bears absolutely no resemblance to guilt-producing procrastination or avoidance of whatever the next step might be. If they were able to live out the plan that they laid out for themselves, they would be exemplary citizens, conscientious prayer-ers, and ecologically beyond reproach. but they would never have any fun.”