How to Improve Your Personal Devotional Worship–Part 5

“Your mind was given that you might understand how to work. Your eyes were given that you might be keen to discern your God-given opportunities. Your ears are to listen for the commands of God. Your knees are to bow three times a day in heartfelt prayer. Your feet are to run in the way of God’s commandments. Thought, effort, talent, should be put into exercise, that you may be prepared to graduate into the school above and hear from the lips of One who has overcome all temptations in our behalf the words: ‘To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne.'” (Ellen White, Vol. 6, Testimonies, 297, emphasis added.)

Reading, Studying God’s Word–In the Noontime Lift Your Eyes

Lunch break may be all the time you have for devotion at the noontide. But it is well spent if you make time for prayer and review of what passage(s) you are memorizing from your morning devotion.

Pray for guidance to those Bible stories that closely resemble your experience to this point in time. God will bring them to mind, especially if you have been reading the stories on a regular basis. They have been given as examples to us to help us learn from others’ mistakes, or others’ victories, in likeness to our experience. We can glean from these stories an understanding of how different an outcome if only right choices had been made. Exercise faith in the principles revealed and apply them to your own life choices.

Remember, all this is rehearsal for the public worship hour on Sabbath, as well as for the benefit of all those we come into contact throughout the day.

“Here is a work for families to engage in before coming up to our holy convocations. Let the preparation for eating and dressing be a secondary matter, but let deep heart-searching commence at home. Pray three times a day, and like Jacob be importunate. At home is the place to find Jesus; then take him with you to the meeting, and how precious will be the hours you spend there. But how can you expect to feel the presence of the Lord and see his power displayed, when the individual work of preparation for that time is neglected.” (Ellen White, Review and Herald, August 15, 1882.)