Throughout the last year, I had a lot of emphasis on Spiritual Disciplines. I shared a lot about reading God's Word, different methods for doing so, tips and methods for a deeper prayer life and more. 
It was a fun year for me as I really explored what Scripture has to say on those subjects and wise advice from mature Christians in the areas of Spiritual Disciplines. And as it's the beginning of a fresh year, I think it's an excellent time to revisit this topic.
Listen to the Podcast:
I also recorded this blog post as an audio podcast. If you want to listen in instead of reading, click play below or do a combination of both
And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. 
Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.
It's good to come back and revisit this topic of Spiritual Disciplines - that is, those disciplines like Bible reading and prayer that help us to draw closer to the Lord - because it's so easy to get off track. We get lazy, we forget, we don't make it a priority and the busyness of life crams in and shoves out those priorities. 
Before we jump into more specifics next week of how we can jump start our Spiritual growth, I want to make sure we have a firm groundwork laid for spiritual growth...especially as busy homemakers!
How do we grow in the Lord? How do we come to more maturity in Christ? And in fact, what does that even look like? 
The Wrong Responses
I think most of us know that we should be reading God's Word. That we should make a consistent habit out of it. That we should be in prayer. But the ideas of doing so can easily get lost in the shuffle of our busy day. And 1 of 2 things can easily happen
We just never develop these into consistent habits. We may go 6 months or a year or more without every reading our Bible apart from Sunday morning.
We work on developing them into a habit, but mostly so that we can check them off our list and go about our merry way. We can easily equate the idea that we should be doing these things with the idea that we are somehow buying God's favor or his merit by practicing these spiritual disciplines.
It's so easy to either ignore our spiritual disciplines on the one hand with everything we else we have going on in life, or we can turn it into something legalistic, that we just want to mark off our list so that we can feel like we are doing the right thing.
Of course, neither of these responses is correct. And I've fallen into both camps at some points in my life or another.
"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age," - Titus 2:11-12
1) Salvation is of Grace
First and foremost, Salvation is of Grace. God's grace to an unmerited and undeserving people. Nothing we did or have ever done qualifies us for salvation. God freely bestows lavish love and grace on us because Christ died on the cross for our sins and made us righteous before a holy and just God.
When we accept that grace and salvation, and repent and turn away from our sins, then we are made right before God. God has placed Christ's righteousness on us at the moment of salvation, and thus we are saved. This is called justification. We are justified before God.
That's what we first have to understand when talking about growing and maturing in Christ. We already stand before God, forgiven and accepted. But as that passage in Titus demonstrated, we are still to train ourselves up in godly matters and to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions.
All of this takes discipline, effort, and work.
"Used in a spiritual sense, discipline includes all instruction, all reproof, and correction, and all providentially directed circumstances in our lives that are aimed at cultivating spiritual growt...