Breathing keeps us alive. It functions in two different ways for us. It is voluntary and it is involuntary. On the one hand, it functions as the rest of our body does, across our bodily systems. Our body's systems simply function, involuntarily, outside our control, in the background (until they do not, when intervention is needed).
For people who believe in Jesus, the exercise of our faith can be like that, operating in the background. We go to church, we are generally nice to people, we participate in the things of faith, we give, we sing, we say 'hi' to one another. Our belief in Jesus extends a certain moral framework to our lives. Somebody insults us, we check the impulse to smack them upside the head (hopefully). We pay our taxes (forlornly perhaps). We obey the traffic laws (mostly...speed limits versus the speed of the traffic around us IS a thing).
We have Jesus, we know our Redeemer lives, sin is not really on our radar because we are forgiven. Things are, well, nice.
Returning to how our human bodies operate, our breathing is different from most (maybe all) of our other functions. Our heart beats automatically. Our brain synapses fire automatically. Our blood flows automatically. They can all be affected by outside stimuli, but they operate outside our control (until they don't when intervention is needed).
When it comes to breathing, we have voluntary control to some degree. We can, for a time, hold our breath, intentionally stop breathing, until the involuntary systems kick in, plunging us into unconsciousness if necessary to restart the process. We can control the pace and the depth of our breathing. This can provide us the capacity to calm down when our bodies are hyped up. It can provide us the capacity to oxygenate when we are preparing for exercise or sports.
A wise teacher once spoke of our breathing as a 'gear shifter' on our body's functions, allowing us to change how 'the engine' is running.
So, like breathing, our faith can simply operate. We know its there but we do not spend much time thinking about it or pushing on it. But what a waste. How much more could we be doing? Our faith could be horribly out of shape. Will it serve us when things get tough? Could we be doing more? More for God, more for Neighbor, more for Church, more for Ourselves?
The intentional 'breath' functions of our faith are living into our God. We 'breathe in' when we bring the Lord into our lives. We 'breathe out' when we reach out to our Lord. We are communicating with the Creator of Everything (so, no pressure...).
To breathe God into our lives, we use God's Word, the Instruction Manual God has issued, the Bible. We read it for ourselves and do NOT let other people (even me) read it for us. There are hard bits and easy bits, the easy ones there to provide guidance to the harder ones. We have cliches to guide us, like "Jesus is to be found on every page". We struggle with it, work it together, interpret it together, gathering God's Spirit into the group to hear what God has to say, including what WE are to say to God, how we are to breathe out in our faith.
To breathe out is to pray, to come to the Lord with the full spread of our hearts, from joy to regret to fear to need to intervention, whatever, as wide as the human experience can be, so great is the prayerful experience we can have in speaking to our God. How do we begin? Jesus' disciples asked Him the same thing. We named the prayer for Jesus, our Lord's Prayer.
So, to begin, or to begin anew, speak the Lord's Prayer, in mind and voice. We practice it every Sunday to lay the foundation of prayer on our hearts for any moment. If it isn't coming, Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:1-4 are the Gospel references. Breathe in the Word of God to breathe out our word, our prayer, to God. Make it voluntary, make it bold, make it deliberate, make it consistent. Do not simply live a faith that is 'nice', strive for the faith that is amazing.
Lets ride the fiery horse and chariot to the whirlwind of heaven,
Rev. Peter Hofstra
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