Seven Habits For Spiritual Health

Intro

Welcome to this Legacy Ministry College chapel service. We take as our subject today: Seven Habits for Spiritual Health. What are the essentials for a successful life journey in Christ? It is one thing to begin a journey; it is another to finish that journey. To finish and finish well, you will have to maintain your spiritual health in the years ahead. You will face many challenges along the way. There will be times of encouragement and refreshing in the Holy Spirit. There will be times of elation over lost souls coming into the kingdom. But there will also be times of discouragement. There will be times when others don’t appreciate you the way they should. There will be times when you disappoint yourself. At times you will not understand what God is doing or why he is do it. That why the Bible says so much about perseverance, about the importance of continuing in the faith.

What enables a Christian to manage those ups and down successfully? What enables a Christian to run this race with perseverance and finish well? Paul was able to say at the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8 Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing.”i That’s a strong finish. That’s the kind of finish you and I want. Amen?

Robert Clinton was a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary for many years. He did extensive research on leaders in the Bible, contemporary leaders, and other historical leaders. In that research, he found that less than one-third of those leaders finished well.ii Solomon began well. He had powerful experiences with God in his youth. He received excellent training from his father David. But Solomon did not finish well. A good beginning does not guarantee a strong finish. King Asa began with great zeal for the Lord. When he became king, he tore down the idols in Israel. He commanded Judah to seek the Lord and keep his commandments. When the enemy came against him in overwhelming numbers, he trusted the Lord and experienced awesome miracles. But in his latter years, when faced with similar circumstances, he turned to Syria for help instead of the Lord. He became diseased in his feet, and instead of seeking God for his healing, he put his trust in the physicians.iii Where did he go wrong?

To finish well we must habitually maintain our spiritual health and vitality. We must establish lifelong habits that sustain our relationship with God and guide us in our relationships with others. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus answered, “'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40). Those are the two great essentials of life. All the commandments come down to loving God and loving our neighbor. But to understand those two commandments we must have a biblical understanding of love; we must know how to practice that in our lives. We cannot exhaustively address that today. But hopefully, we can gain insight on how to live in those two commandments and finish well.

Habits are settled, established patterns of behavior. Habits are established by repeating a behavior over and over. It is activity we consistently operate in. Habits help define our lifestyle. And lifestyle defines and demonstrates our destiny. A primary way we know the spiritual condition of a person is lifestyle behavior. The Apostle John put it this way in 1 John 3:7-8: “Little children, let no one deceive you. He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.” The lifestyle reveals the heart.iv Emerson is credited with the saying, “Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”v Seven habits of spiritually healthy people”

I. CONNECTING with God:

We must begin our journey with a genuine connection with the living God. Jesus told the woman at the well, and his statement was generally directed at the Samaritans, “You worship what you do not know” (John 4:22). Their worship was vain because it was misguided. Jesus explained to her that our worship of the Father must be “spirit and truth.” There must be a spiritual engagement with God. Otherwise, we are just doing religion. And religion without genuine relationship with God will destroy you. It will make you think you’re okay when you're not okay. Religion gives people false hope.