Have you ever gone through a season where you’ve felt spiritually disconnected and dry? I mean at one point in your life you can remember that you were “on fire” for God. You were active. You shared your faith. You invited people to church. You were excited. You felt the presence of God through worship. Your prayers were passionate, specific and you prayed believing God would actually answer you. You were convicted about the sin in your life. But somewhere along the line your fire went out. Worship seemed like a ritual. You began to feel like you were going through the motions. Your prayers got shorter and if you were honest, you secretly doubted God would even answer them because to you so many others have gone unanswered. And…it became easier to sin without conviction. It’s been said that drifting in the Christian life is more like a slow leak rather than a blowout. This doesn’t happen overnight, but rather, it happens over time. I want to suggest 5 things we can do to hopefully restore that passion for God back.

#1 – ADMIT WHERE YOU ARE

When King David found himself in these dry spiritual places he was very real with himself and with God with where he was.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. ~Ps. 63:1

Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God! I will praise him again—my Savior and my God! ~ Ps. 42:5

It’s important that you admit to yourself where you truly are. If you are in a dry season then acknowledge that before God and before others. The worst thing you can do is to deny the state that you’re in. If you do so, you’re bound to stay there because you aren’t willing to admit you have backslidden. Admit where you are so you can find your way back.

#2 – REPENT FROM SIN

In Ps. 32 David is recounting how his life was shortly after he committed adultery. He says,

“For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”

One of the quickest way to experience spiritual drought is to have sin you haven’t confessed and haven’t repented from lingering in your life. The reason is because God will let you sin but won’t let you enjoy it anymore. When we don’t confess regularly and repent this leads to us feeling disconnected from God because instead of experiencing peace and joy we are overcome with guilt and shame. The Holy Spirit, Who lives within you, has an assignment to convict us when we are disobedient. And so if we are living in sin how can we possibly expect to have an intimate relationship with God filled with joy, peace and contentment?

#3 – LIVE A LIFE OF PURPOSE

We were created to live our lives with purpose. When we feel we have very little to live for outside of our immediate family we begin to question whether our life is really counting for much. Are we making a difference? Am I living out exactly what God has called me to do? No matter how great our careers are, life will quickly become stale if we rely on that for our joy. Discovering your purpose is not easy for everyone but let me suggest a few questions to ask yourself.

• What burden has God placed inside of you that you cannot shake no matter how hard or how long you try to suppress it?
• What painful experiences have you endured in your life that you have a passion to help others avoid or help them walk through it? Often times God uses our pain to catapult us into our purpose.
• In what areas are you using your God-given gifts to either help people know God or help those that already to get closer to Him? When you are not using your gifts for a prolonged period of time you will begin to experience spiritual dryness.

#4 – SET YOUR PRIORITIES

One of the quickest ways to experience spiritual burnout is to be distracted with busyness. This is where the enemy gets most of us because we can be busy doing so many good things that we miss the God things (Lk. 10:38-42). It’s so subtle because everything we are doing is good and none of it is sin so we think we are okay. If your schedule is filled with activities from sun up to sun down you will eventually feel disconnected, spiritually dry and will experience burnout. People will fill up your schedule if you let them and so YOU must set your own priorities. If you don’t, someone else will and that can quickly lead to spiritual dryness.

#5 – PRACTICE SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES

Finally, when we don’t practice our spiritual disciplines of prayer, quiet time, worship and fasting we WILL feel disconnected. We will attempt to operate like a cell phone that hasn’t charged. Every time I ignore these I experience short and long seasons of feeling disconnected and dry.  Even Jesus, who is God, understood the importance of getting away by Himself to pray.

After sending them home, he went up into the hills by himself to pray. Night fell while he was there alone. ~ Matt. 14:23

But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer. ~Luke 5:16

If Jesus understood the importance of spending unhurried and uninterrupted time with the Father then how much more should we?

My prayer for you today is that you would apply these five principles to hopefully experience a spiritual renewal in your personal relationship with God.