Have you tried binge television watching? With Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other services, you can watch an entire season of episodes (or multiple seasons) of a television series one after another. I’ve had friends do that with DVD sets in the past but now you can find most any popular series and immerse yourself in it for days, weeks or months at a time. Annie and I watched all eight years of OCD detective “Monk” over a year. I’ve watched an entire season of Game of Thrones flying from Orlando to Mumbai. We are currently making our way through ten years of “Heartland,” an uplifting Canadian family drama about a young horse whisperer and her extended family on the family farm. (Sound like anyone you know but with more sun and less snow?)
When we binge watch a series we catch an episode every night we can. Some nights we catch two. Sometimes we can’t stand the cliff hangers and find ourselves watching several in a row. I get so excited and immersed; I am tempted to change my phone ring tone to the series theme song. Annie and I talk about our favorite characters as if they were friends we see every day, which, I guess, we do. Even though the episode might have been filmed nine years ago, it was last evening to us. We discuss what might happen, laugh and cry with the ups and downs, hope for the best, think of the advice we’d give the characters and mine fantastic nuggets of insight about life, love, faith, hope and redemption in our own lives.
What if we “binge-watched” the Bible? What if we immersed ourselves in the Kingdom of Heaven this same way? What if we spent our days in hymns and Psalms? As I read about the early church in Acts, it sounds like that’s just what they were doing. When I read and think about Dallas Willard, (e.g. Divine Conspiracy; Hearing God; Renovation of the Heart), Richard Foster (e.g. Celebration of Discipline; Life with God), Martin Luther, Thomas Merton, John Wesley, Mary (Martha’s sister)- I am struck by how they fill their lives with God, the Father, with Jesus, and with the Holy Spirit – a binge of contemplation, worship, love, and service which brings them into the Kingdom of God, here and now. Jesus lived, died and rose again to make the Kingdom accessible (“at hand”) to us here and now if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear (and lives to live). What are you binge watching? What am I binge watching next?
Jesus assures us that life is not a cliff hanger. Many times sermons exhort us to live as if it were. But what if we just couldn’t get enough of life with God- not because we don’t know what will happen, but because we know what has happened and we want to live into the glory of God’s Kingdom here and now, thrilled to learn what God has in store for us in today’s episode of life with God?
Read Colossians 3: 12-17, and remember: God loves you UNCONDITIONALLY and has a special place for you in this great adventure! 
Mike
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+3%3A+12+-+17&version=NRSV