By Dan Baldwin, 30 Minute Christian
It's easy to say, "I'm going to commit to studying my faith 30 minutes a day." It's quite hard though to pick one place to start. Before even starting, one has to consider all one could possibly study when it comes to Christianity.
Having been through Lutheran confirmation as a teenager I knew the basics of what I needed to do, read the Bible and join a church. The one thing that always stuck with me through my previous religious training is that God wants to talk to me but unless I spend time reading the Bible or affiliating with others in a church, I won't recognize God talking to me.
While thinking about how to get started on this I found myself in a discount bookstore looking for Christmas gifts and stumbled upon the book Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald Whitney. At just $4 the price was certainly right. I thumbed through the contents and it seemed well organized. It was written in 1991 but that didn't seem to make a difference. So I bought it and started reading.
Step one in the book was memorize Bible verses. This seemed a bit childish as the last time I did it I was in elementary school going to a Baptist vacation Bible school one summer. The book makes a pretty good case though for the value of memorizing Bible verses so I figured I'd give it a try.
After searching the Internet for "favorite Bible verses" I quickly found dozens that I either remember or that spoke to me so I got a small pocket notebook and started writing a few down so I could begin committing them to memory. Right after I decided it was OK to memorize Bible verses I saw that the 1/9/11 episode of Desperate Housewives had two of the characters quoting Bible verses to each other as they tried to make a point. Very interesting.
The Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life also quotes many Bible verses in making one point or another. When I read one that seems interesting I look it up in my own Bible and try to understand the larger context of the verse. If it seems like a verse I'd like to memorize one day I write it down in my small notebook.
So now I'm started. I'm memorizing favorite Bible verses and looking for a church to join.
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