Rebekah Lyons Invites You to Rhythms of Renewal

Rhythm is something intentional that we decide that we’re going to do every day. And, renewal is to repair something that has been broken down or worn out.

Rhythms of Renewal is God inviting us in to a cadence with Him. Where we rest with Him and He leads us. He wants to be our nourishment every single day, to offer us that daily portion. And, through that regular cadence we walk into healing.

Even in rhythm there’s patience and there’s waiting, there’s stillness and silence. And then new seasons will sweep in full of action and energy. There’s fruit on the other side of that journey.

So eventually, after fleshing this out, I pared it down to four concepts that we see modeled throughout Scripture, which are Rest, Restore, Connect, and Create. These would be rhythms that would help with sustained emotion, spiritual, relational, and vocational health.

• Rest is our spiritual life. It’s our inner life. We ask God what He wants to do in our hearts.
• Restore is our physical life, it’s our active life. How do we take care of our bodies?
• Connect is our relational life, our social life. Our friendships, our community.
• And, then finally Create is our vocational life. What gifts do we have to offer the world?

The reason we do these in that order is that the first two are input rhythms: Rest and Restore. It’s where we come to God and we say, “Please fill me. Show me the places where I have lack.”

We take inventory of our lives, we examine and confess. We get honest before God. We get raw. We say, “Please fill me. Show me what I need to know.”

And, then once we do that in our hearts, we go in our bodies and ask, “Where are we depleted? Where are we burnt out? Where are we lacking? Where are we just ready to quit whatever it is that we have in front of us? And yet, this is the very thing that God says, “Hey, I’ve given you something that needs to be strong… and that’s your body. I’ve given you a body that you need to steward.”

So you should care about what you put into your body, and how you move, and how you walk this out so that you live from a place of vitality. But, once you’ve received these two rhythms, and I give you a lot of examples for how to do this going forward, then, we’re going to have these output rhythms where we connect. What do we have to now offer someone else? How do we live with a spirit of generosity? How do we play? How do we seek adventure? How to we venture out? And so we’ll talk about that going forward.

Finally, Create. We recover our passion. We work with our hands. We take risks and we say yes.

And, finally, Jesus created just like the Father created something into existence. Jesus spoke. He was the Word, and He used words to speak of a Kingdom that would come. He paints pictures for us through this holy imagination, through parables. Sometimes people could understand and sometimes they couldn’t. And that’s why Jesus kept saying, “If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.”

He wanted to make sure that He was painting something, a visual understanding. Even though we couldn’t quite see it, He wanted us to grasp even then what the Kingdom of Heaven would be like. And so He gives us so many illustrations of this, right? Sometimes when we read those parables now, each time we read it we see new insights, new understanding of what those parables might be.

We also have the prodigal son which many of us are aware of. Sometimes this son goes and he wants his own way. Whether he’s covered in shame or he feels condemnation for himself, he lives a life that is out of the created order of his family, out of even what was imagined for him and he’s running.

And how many of us do that in our own lives? We just begin to run. We want to live our own way, live according to our own will, and Jesus is beckoning us through this parable, “Just so you know… There’s a Father in Heaven who calls you by name, who ordered you from the womb, who spoke destiny over your life. You can keep running, but the Father is not going to scorn or shake His head when you slowly come home with your tail between your legs. No, He’s going to be looking out and waiting in expectancy which celebration to come because He’s calling you back to Himself.”

See the work of Jesus even in all these rhythms is reconciliation. The point of these rhythms are to bring us back. There’s a cadence where we want to run sometimes. And, He says, “The rhythm is for you to come back to Me. I want to reconcile you back to the Father because I have mighty plans and purposes to accomplish through you that can be thwarted by the distraction of fear, and anxiety, and stress, and unhealthy. But, these rhythms are always intended to bring you back into reconciliation with God so that you can live out your Kingdom purpose each and every day.

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Your Turn

Won’t you join us for the Rhythms of Renewal Online Bible study? Register today! And grab a few friends to join us, too! We’ll start on January 20th! Sign up here!