Cultivators Week 5: Action Steps and a Prayer to help cultivate gratitude:

1.)  Cultivate gratitude by logging it: Write a couple of things down that you are grateful for each day.  Make a journal, use your phone, write it on a sticky note and put it on the bathroom mirror as a daily reminder.

• Try it for 7 days and then evaluate how it’s impacted your thought life, your relationships, and your walk with Jesus.

2.)  Cultivate gratitude by expressing it. Tell someone thank you this week.

• Start with your loved ones and thank them for something they do or for just being a blessing in your life.

• Then expand the gratitude circle out and tell someone you interact with regularly thank you: someone at church, at work, a neighbor, etc.

• Then think about the folks who might rarely hear the words thank you: a boss/supervisor, mail carrier, garbage collector, customer service rep, someone at the doctors office, a cashier, etc…

A prayer you can use on this Thanksgiving week:

            “Lord, help me to be grateful for what I have, to remember that I don’t need most of what I want, and that joy is found in simplicity and generosity.” Rev. Adam Hamilton, Church of the Resurrection, Leawood KS

Cultivators Week 4: Questions for Reflection and Prayer

1.)   Do I just give or am I also generous?  In other words, does your giving come from a place of well cultivated generosity or does it come only from obligation?

a.  Joy is a good gauge for generosity.  When you give does it bring joy or pain?  Does it bless you or bother you?  Is giving an inconvenience or an opportunity?

2.)   What holds me back from being generous…or when am I resistant to being generous?  Fear, selfishness, a lack of trust that “God will supply all my needs according to the riches of His glory in Christ Jesus?”

3.)   Ask God for opportunities to be generous this week with your time, energy, resources and finances, and ask Him to make you aware of those.  We cultivate generosity by being generous. 

A prayer you can use as you go through the week:

            God, thank you for being so kind, understanding, and generous to me.  Thank you for being generous in-spite of me.  And thank for all the blessings you have provided, namely your Son Jesus, who is the ultimate picture and example of generosity.  You gave your only Son so that we find life everlasting.  Help me to be more generous so I can experience you more and be a blessing to others.  Help my life be fruitful by following your example to be generous. In Jesus name I pray, amen.

Cultivators Week 3: A Servant’s Heart

• Make a list of all the ways that Jesus serves you. Everything he’s done, count your blessings, think about what He’s done, etc…

• Think about what keeps you from serving and make a list of those reasons: busy, don’t know what to do or where to begin, maybe if we’re being honest…sometimes we don’t serve because we’re overly focused on ourselves.  

  A prayer to pray as you go through the week:

            Thank you for all the ways you’ve served me from the daily blessings give to your great sacrifice on the cross.  Help me to develop an even greater servant’s heart.  Mold me into the kind of person who lives with a “How Can I Help” mindset. Help me sees others as you do.  And help me follow you faithfully Jesus, so on that day that I finally stand before you…I hear those precious words, “Well done good and faithful servant.

Cultivators Week 2 Action Steps and Prayer

• Feed your mind: this week, take one Bible verse, two or three at most, and read it right before you go to bed. Then read it again when you first wake up and think about it as you go throughout your day.  Ask questions, jot down some notes, ask God to speak to you through those words of scripture.

• Ask Good Questions: write down at least one question you have about God, faith, a Bible verse, something you’ve always wondered or struggled with.  Then spend time thinking about it.  Study it in the Bible, share your question with someone else and discuss it with them.  Don’t dismiss your questions, wrestle through them.

The more we feed our minds and think about our faith the more we will be transformed into the image and likeness of Christ.

A prayer to pray as you go through the week:

          God, help me to renew my mind.  Help me to feed my thoughts, and to develop a thinking faith with a desire to learn, grow, and be molded into the image of our great Savior, Jesus who is the way the truth and the life.

Cultivators Week 1 questions for reflection and prayer.

• Am I making others around me better?

• What is the condition of my relationship with Jesus?

  Prayer: God, reveal to me the kinds of things that I have been cultivating in my life. Show me the hard places in my life. Show me the rocks in my heart that keep the roots of faith in Christ from growing down deep. Remove them and help me to listen to your Word, retain it, and apply it to my life so I can become good soil that produces the kind of crop that blesses you God and others.