Here are ten questions I used to help me create a personal rhythm of spirituality, or rhythm of life. Maybe you will find them useful.
- What’s your image of God? How do you relate to Him, and how would you like to relate to Him better, e.g. as Father, as Lord, as Husband, as Spirit?
- What practices help you meet with God, and enable you to know Him better in these ways?
- What Christ-like qualities do you most want to develop? E.g. faith, hope, love, etc.
- What measures do you have for each of these, i.e. how do you measure your growth in them? How do you know when you’re doing well, or know that you’re failing in them?
- What practices develop or deepen these Christ-like qualities in your life?
- When and how can you incorporate the practices from answers two and five regularly into your life? Are there things you want to be doing daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc?
- What addictions or negative behaviour patterns do you fall into regularly, that pull you away from God and that you want to eliminate from your life?
- What are the triggers for these behaviour patterns? And what can you replace these patterns with?
- What is the negative narrative that Satan would have you believe about your life? He comes to steal, kill and destroy, and does that by accusing, lying and tempting? What are the accusations and lies he throws at you most regularly?
- What is the narrative that your Father in heaven would have you believe about your life? Much of this may well be a counter narrative to the lies from above.
Doing this takes a lot of time, and often takes more than one sitting. You can create initial answers to some of these questions, but may want to keep coming back to the questions every couple of days over a period of a couple of weeks.
If you persevere with it, you can come up with your own personal rhythm of life that features a Godly narrative you can regularly remind yourself of, a series of practices that will deepen your spiritual life, a series of measures for how well you’re doing, and a list of alternative practices to take up whenever you feel triggers towards sinful, addictive or negative behaviour.
Once you’ve created your Rhythm of Life, regularly follow the daily, weekly and monthly practices you’ve set for yourself. And hopefully you’ll find yourself growing in God, and growing in faith, hope, love, etc, and growing towards Christ-like maturity.
Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.