What work is really being done?

While reading the Bible this morning, I came across Ephesians 2:10: "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

In the margin, I had a quote from Pastor Tim regarding this verse: "God's work in me should occupy more than 50% of my life."

In other words, in order to truly be God's workmanship, we need to allow Him to work within us. We need to spend the time processing our thoughts, our deeds, and our lives to see just how far along He's brought us on our journey home - essentially, to dig deeply within in order to go beyond supeficiality.

I think this verse, and the associated lesson, gave me pause because thus far this year, I haven't been creating very much room for the work that God wants to do in me. As I alluded to at the bottom of this post, there are particular spiritual lessons and issues that He is bringing to my attention, but I've had to put them on the back burner for a while because there's a certain amount of ministry work that I've been working on that other people are waiting on me for (namely, curricula for training new worship leaders and community group leaders). I suppose I've rationalized it to be a necessary, temporary sacrifice of my own spiritual development, but I'm hoping to get my priorities more in line sooner rather than later.

On another note, it seems that for many of my Christian friends, there's been a mass movement towards a greater emphasis on prayer - personally, corporately, for the church, for the world, for our friends and family, for ourselves. To that end, I realized that since I take the train around three times a week anyway, there's a built-in 50 minutes during my commute that I can spend praying. So, I spent some time today re-organizing prayer items on my PDA so that I can more easily track them with regard to the above-mentioned areas, and spent most of the train ride to and from the office praying. I'm excited to see how I can grow in the area of prayer this year.