Spending Time with God

Spending Time with God

Source: Joyce Meyer

How do you spend your daily allotment of time? Are you able to spend time on the important things or do those high priority items constantly keep getting moved to the back of your mind? It's tough, but it's very important to keep our priorities straight. God says that anything that takes His place in our life is an idol.

First John 5:21 says, Little children, keep yourselves from idols (false gods) - [from anything and everything that would occupy the place in your heart due to God, from any sort of substitute for Him that would take first place in your life]. Amen (so let it be) (The Amplified Bible). The interesting thing about that verse is that it says that we are to "keep ourselves" from false idols. In other words, this is not something that God will do for us. We are to take care of this on our own.

So how successful are you in scheduling your day so you can spend time with God? Are you able to give Him your best time or does He have to settle for what's left over in your day, never getting the time He really deserves?

To make sure you always have time for God, let me give you an illustration. Picture a jar, a big quart jar like you'd can tomatoes in. Now picture that jar full of small rocks. The jar is full…all the way to the brim. Now you have just one more rock to put in that jar and that one last rock is twice as big as the others. You look at that rock and see that there's just no way you're going to get it in that jar. You try putting the big rock on top of the others and pressing down, hoping to squeeze it in. But rocks are solid, and if you push too hard you might break the glass jar. You finally give up and say that there's no more room. You are going to have to leave the big rock out of the jar.

Now a friend walks up and says, "I'll show you how to get the rock in that jar! The thing to always remember is to put the big rock in first." And she dumps all the little rocks on the table, puts the big rock in first, then proceeds to put the smaller rocks in the jar one by one. All of the rocks go in the jar—with room to spare! She looks at you triumphantly and says, "Just remember, the big rock goes in first."

The jar is your day and the little rocks are all the little things you have to do in the course of that day. The biggest rock is the most important thing you have to do, which is spend time with God. If you wait to fit that in last, it will almost never work. But it's almost like magic—when you do that first, everything else seems to just fall into place; it all fits.

Putting God first in everything has become a very important part of my life. I give God the first minutes of the day by spending time in prayer and reading my Bible. I give God the first of my income each month. Before paying any bills, I make sure I'm giving money to my church and other ministries I believe in. In everything I do, I try to put God first because I know if I put Him first, everything else will fit.

What about you? Is God most important to you too? The best way I have found to determine if God is first in my life is to slow down and ask myself some simple questions: What do I think about most? What is the first thing on my mind in the morning and the last thing on my mind at night? What do I do with my time?

If we spend an hour a week praying and fifteen hours a week playing golf, then golf is obviously a higher priority than God. If we spend thirty minutes praying and thirty minutes reading the Bible every week but spend fifteen hours watching television, then television must be more important to us.

The truth is, we make time for what we really want to do. We all have the same amount of hours in a day, and for the most part, we each have the freedom to set our own schedule. If we want to spend time with God, then we are going to have to make the time we spend with Him a priority in our lives. We're going to have to put our big rock in the jar first!

For more on this topic, you may order Joyce's four-part series Keeping God First by visiting www.joycemeyer.org.


Author/teacher Joyce Meyer has been helping people overcome life's problems through biblical keys to practical Christian living since 1976. Her radio and television programs are broadcast throughout the United States and much of the world. For additional information, you may contact Joyce Meyer Ministries at P.O. Box 655, Fenton, Missouri 63026 or visit www.joycemeyer.org.

Useful link: www.joycemeyer.org

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