Smart Phones and Smart Spirituality

Check out 7 Ways Smart Phones Can Enhance Your Spiritual Life by Joe Carter at TGC. Some of this material was adapted from Joe Carter’s latest work, the NIV Lifehacks Bible: Practical Tools for Successful Spiritual Habits (Zondervan, 2016).

“We're going to make some history together today.”

Those were the words the late Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, spoke 10 years ago this week when he introduced the first version of the iPhone. At the time, smartphones—cell phones that operate as mobile computing devices—had been around for nearly a decade. But Jobs’s boastful claim proved to be prescient, and the iPhone sparked a revolution in the use, innovation, and mainstream adoption of smartphone technology.

As with most every tool, ubiquitous use brings a plethora of problems. Technology has a way of shaping our values and our culture—often in ways in which we remain blissfully unaware. Christians must therefore think critically about how smartphones affect us, both on the individual level and also as a community of believers.

Yet in watching out for the pitfalls of technology we should not overlook the ways that smartphones can be useful for spiritual formation. Here, for instance, are seven ways you can use your smartphone to enhance your spiritual life:

1. Read God’s Word

Being able to conveniently carry around God’s Word wherever we go is one of the greatest benefits of having a smartphone. Most likely, though, you mainly use the app when you forgot your print Bible or when you need to look up a particular verse. But Bible apps can be used in a variety of useful ways, such as when your Bible reading plan includes chapter readings from multiple books (as with Prof. Horner's Reading System).

When I used that system with a printed version of the Bible I spent nearly as much time flipping through the text and keeping track of the 10 bookmarks as I did in reading the Scripture passages. The app makes the process much simpler and more convenient, thus helping me to stick with the multiple-chapter daily reading approach.

Recommended resources: YouVersion’s Bible App (which includes the Prof. Horner Reading Plan)

2. Listen to God’s Word

Listening to audio Bibles can increase your Scriptural intake and help you to catch nuances in the text that you might miss in your readings. A couple of decades ago you’d need to spend several hundred dollars for dozens of cassettes or CDs. Today, you can download free apps that have excellent recordings of God’s Word that you can listen to anytime on your smartphone.

Recommended resources: ESV Bible app, NIV The Listener's Bible

3. Memorize God’s Word

When it comes to memorizing Scripture, the key is repetition and recitation. Use your calendar app or an app that allows you to schedule texts to yourself to send the verse you want to memorize at a predetermined time during the day.

An alternate approach is to copy the verse or passage on your note app and set a (silent) alarm to send reminders throughout the day to stop and work on memorizing the passage.

There are also several apps, such as ScriptureTyper, that can help make the process of memorization easier.

Recommended resources: TextItLater, ScriptureTyper

22 Benefits of Meditating on Scripture

What do you get out of the practice of meditating on Scripture? Joel Beeke, in his essay on “The Puritan Practice of Meditation,” (quoted at the Gospel Coalition) lists some of the benefits as follows:

1. Meditation helps us focus on the Triune God, to love and to enjoy Him in all His persons (1 John 4:8)—intellectually, spiritually, aesthetically.
2. Meditation helps increase knowledge of sacred truth. It “takes the veil from the face of truth” (Prov. 4:2).
3. Meditation is the “nurse of wisdom,” for it promotes the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:8).
4. Meditation enlarges our faith by helping us to trust the God of promises in all our spiritual troubles and the God of providence in all our outward troubles.
5. Meditation augments one’s affections. Watson called meditation “the bellows of the affections.” He said, “Meditation hatcheth good affections, as the hen her young ones by sitting on them; we light affection at this fire of meditation” (Ps. 39:3).
6. Meditation fosters repentance and reformation of life (Ps. 119:59; Ez. 36:31).
7. Meditation is a great friend to memory.
8. Meditation helps us view worship as a discipline to be cultivated. It makes us prefer God’s house to our own.
9. Meditation transfuses Scripture through the texture of the soul.
10. Meditation is a great aid to prayer (Ps. 5:1). It tunes the instrument of prayer before prayer.
11. Meditation helps us to hear and read the Word with real benefit. It makes the Word “full of life and energy to our souls.” William Bates wrote, “Hearing the word is like ingestion, and when we meditate upon the word that is digestion; and this digestion of the word by meditation produceth warm affections, zealous resolutions, and holy actions.”
12. Meditation on the sacraments helps our “graces to be better and stronger.” It helps faith, hope, love, humility, and numerous spiritual comforts thrive in the soul.
13. Meditation stresses the heinousness of sin. It “musters up all weapons, and gathers all forces of arguments for to presse our sins, and lay them heavy upon the heart,” wrote Fenner. Thomas Hooker said, “Meditation sharpens the sting and strength of corruption, that it pierceth more prevailingly.” It is a “strong antidote against sin” and “a cure of covetousness.”
14. Meditation enables us to “discharge religious duties, because it conveys to the soul the lively sense and feeling of God’s goodness; so the soul is encouraged to duty.”
15. Meditation helps prevent vain and sinful thoughts (Jer. 4:14; Matt. 12:35). It helps wean us from this present evil age.
16. Meditation provides inner resources on which to draw (Ps. 77:10-12), including direction for daily life (Prov. 6:21-22).
17. Meditation helps us persevere in faith; it keeps our hearts “savoury and spiritual in the midst of all our outward and worldly employments,” wrote William Bridge.
18. Meditation is a mighty weapon to ward off Satan and temptation (Ps. 119:11,15; 1 John 2:14).
19. Meditation provides relief in afflictions (Is. 49:15-17; Heb. 12:5).
20. Meditation helps us benefit others with our spiritual fellowship and counsel (Ps. 66:16; 77:12;145:7).
21. Meditation promotes gratitude for all the blessings showered upon us by God through His Son.
22. Meditation glorifies God (Ps. 49:3).

Starving Ourselves to Death

From The Poached Egg

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One Thing To Do

If you could do one thing this year that is guaranteed to radically change your life for the better, would you do it? Check out The 1 Spiritual habit You could Begin Today that will Change Your Life Forever by Kyle Winkler::

Losing weight, getting more education, and managing debt and stress top the U.S. government's list of most popular resolutions for a new year. Certainly, self-betterment in things such as health or finances is a noble goal. But issues in these areas are often mere symptoms of an underlying spiritual condition relating to whom or what we each believe we are—our identities. Consequently we use money, education, work and so many other things as means to define ourselves and steer our own destinies.I'm convinced that Satan loves to trap us in an endless cycle of "strategies" for self-improvement. In doing so, he keeps us on a treadmill where we consistently exert much effort, but get virtually nowhere. At the end of the week, month or year, too often we're in the same condition in search of yet another regime in which we can find purpose and meaning.

Ultimately Satan's strategy is to fill our minds with other voices that detract from the voice of truth that identifies us with Christ: a new creature (2 Cor. 5:17), righteous (2 Cor. 5:21), chosen (Eph. 1:5) and accepted (Eph. 1:6). Satan knows that identity gives way to purpose and mission. That is, when you know who you are, you know what to do. So if he can confuse us about the former, then we'll be on a never-ending search for the latter.

There is, however, a single, simple spiritual method that Jesus used when faced with similar issues. And you too can apply its power in the same way to begin to silence the enemy, build confidence in your identity in Christ, and thus, change your life. Let's explore.

Jesus' Temptation Is Ours Too

At His baptism by John the Baptist, as Jesus arose from the water, the heavens were opened, the Spirit of God descended upon Him like a dove and the Lord spoke:"And a voice came from heaven, saying, 'This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'" (Matt. 3:17).

Jesus's baptism account marks the first time recorded in Scripture that God publicly spoke an identity upon Jesus. Freshly baptized, God declared Him to be His Son. And even further He assured His Son of just how pleased He was with Him.Immediately following, the Bible records that Jesus was sent out into the wilderness, where after 40 days of fasting, He was famished. Here, at His weakest moment, the devil came to tempt.

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From Radio Free Babylon

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