This week, we will take part in another Spiritual Renewal Conference. It is a time of great spiritual enrichment organized to help us further our walk with Christ. It is an important time together as a church that allows us to calibrate our hearts spiritually.
Growing up, I loved playing the Wii with my siblings. Mario Kart and Wii Sports were two of our favorites, however, we would sometimes run into our Wii remotes not working properly. Where we would point our remotes would not line up with what would happen. The process to fix this was going to the pause menu and recalibrating the Wii remote to the sensor bar. Over time, it seemed to need to happen every 10 minutes for the remotes to work properly.
Likewise, you and I often need times of spiritual recalibration. Colossians 3 expresses it this way: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” All of us need times of reorienting ourselves to the Biblical reality that Christ has freed us to enjoy. But our sinful hearts often move us away from focusing on that reality.
This week gives us the opportunity to lay everything else aside and ask, “Where are my affections?” The busyness and opulence of our American culture creates competition for my heart’s affection. If we aren’t careful, spiritual items become what we cut in order to allow our earthly affections to reign supreme. Paul is calling us away from that reality, and that takes work!
In Romans 12, Paul reminds us it takes a renewing of our mind in order to operate in a way that glorifies God. Why? Because our mind’s natural thinking is rooted in our sin nature. We all can easily default back to living in alignment with our sin nature. So, it is important to have times of recalibration where we allow God’s Word to search us and reveal how we have allowed sin to take root or the ways we have shifted our affections.
This Spiritual Renewal Conference is an opportunity for us to recalibrate just like those Wii remotes my siblings and I had. Those remotes would not work properly, and we could never be successful in the game if they were not calibrated. If you and I are not properly aligned with God and in our affections, we cannot be the successful Christian that Christ desires us to be.
I want to encourage you to take some time today to read through Philippians to prepare for our conference starting tomorrow morning at 10 AM. Prioritize taking twenty minutes and allowing the Spirit to work in our hearts and minds, drawing us closer to Him.
Pastor Derek