Simplify Your Schedule: Week of September 12

What?
Reduce the number of meetings, activities, commitments, or outings that you participate in this week.

Why?
Busyness and clutter plague our culture, distracting our attention and confusing our desires. Pulled in a thousand directions and burdened by a million commitments, we have become a fragmented people with unclear purpose, shallow devotion, and countless anxieties. A practice of external simplicity resists this tendency in our culture and allows us, by the power of the Spirit, to train towards the kind of internal simplicity that characterized Jesus — that single-minded intention to glorify God with one’s whole life.

How?

Plenty of blogs can teach you how to declutter your life. For advice on acknowledging your priorities, distinguishing what is essential from what is extra, and making necessary cuts in your schedule, you should do a Google search and see what you find. But as believers in Jesus Christ, our purpose in practicing simplicity runs deeper: We want to utilize external disciplines to cultivate our spiritual life so that at our core we look more and more like Jesus. That means supplementing the blogs’ advice with spiritual insights. Prayer ought to accompany this practice in several important ways.

1. In prayer, we must acknowledge that we are finite creatures who cannot be at all places or do all things and that only the Lord is God. We must lay aside our culturally-imposed ideal of playing God. 

2. In prayer, we must ask for the discernment to identify the areas in our life in which we have busied ourselves, whether in productive ways (meetings, activities, house care, etc.) or in unproductive ways (“scrolling,” binge watching, shopping, etc.). 

3. In prayer, we must lay our anxieties about not doing and going at the Lord’s feet and ask that he build our trust in him. 
4. Finally, in prayer, we must ask for the focus to seek first the Kingdom of God. With fewer distractions, spend time away from the doing and going and simply be with God in silence and prayer and the Word. Ask him how you can glorify him more fully and make that the entire goal of your life.