Renewal School Pt 4; Holy Patterns

Daniel 1:3–9

Daniel 6:10–13, 16-23

How to Become a Person Defined By Holy Habits

1. Holy habits are God-focused patterns that sow seed in the soil of daily life that yield fruit of a relationship of intimacy and proximity in the life of tomorrow. Holy habits are not activities; they are disciplines that submit and surrender unholy appetites and unhealthy desires, that then allow God to resurrect you in spiritual health and wholeness. In the beginning it is more training your appetites to say no and drawing the lines of what you don’t do, before those appetites rewire you into living in a way you were never meant to live.
2. Have you come to be defined as one who constantly serves God? What got Daniel in trouble was that he constantly served God. But in even greater detail, the king over all the land doesn’t even know the God Daniel serves by name, only that his life is lived in such a way that he constantly serves Him. Renewing your life, focus, and functionality is what determines if the title rests on you of a constant servant of God. If you will take seriously the call of constant service, the blessing is discovering and sensing a God with you, around you, and inside of you, in every season and aspect of your life.
3. Even the smallest patterns of renewal in this day and age can be the very resistance needed for a shift in the climate of the world around you. Daniel started with prayer three times a day in quiet resistance to the modern order and by the end had a king passing a decree in which everyone was mandated to worship the God Daniel served. The king’s first decree went from worship me to worship Him. And this is the first step—turning the attention from worship of self, to worship of Him. His first decree missed the mark and the second decree corrected it. The king wanted to worship something; he just needed someone to show him, through how he lived, who was worthy to be worshiped.