Aug 29, 2016
By Katrina Goodrich
www.sdbwomen.org
As I grow older it seems as though a lot of my “Christian” conversations revolve around how to keep moving forward in your relationship with God. Even though I’m not involved in as many different activities as I was when I was younger, it seems as though life is moving more rapidly and I don’t have time to do things as I once did then. I get so rushed and hurried that I’m constantly attempting to fit God in my life in between times — which admittedly come fewer and further between as the years continue.
I realized I’m trying to fit God into my life when I really need to fit my life into what He has planned for me. I think this shouldn’t seem as revolutionary to me as it does. I neglect that because I consistently get so caught up in “doing.” This realization completely changes my outlook and attitude about things and even affects my energy levels when I act on this truth.
Acting on information you have garnered can be the most difficult step you take in your life. Part of our calling as Christians is to act. It is not a dead faith that we have, but an active and living one. We are excellent at seeing things that need to be done or generating ideas for the future — but until you act upon it, this information is meaningless. This is where I’ve been. I came to this realization that the world doesn’t revolve around me. Until I do something about it, I continue to do and feel the same things which I did before.
The question then is, how do I begin to do this? In what practical ways do I begin to act on this knowledge I now have? I do not want to stay where I have been. Once I identified this problem, I was blessed to attend a conference where John Chandler, of the Spence Network, was giving a seminar. He spoke about his network and their goals — which are about developing young leaders in the church. I took away a lot of practical lessons from that time. One in particular struck me: He asked if we were “winning the battle.”
In this age, it is so easy to become distracted the very moment your day begins. Many times you wake up with a list of things you need to work on during the day, or awake to fires that need to be put out at work, school, with your children, spouse, etc. It is exhausting to wake up to this and you can’t possibly start your day on a godly course.
This is one reason why John encouraged us to do morning devotions. For the first time in my life, the reason people do morning devotions makes sense — because they want to start their day off on course and then whatever they’ve gone over that morning they can put into practice. But just doing morning devotions isn’t winning the battle. Many people today use their cell phone as an alarm clock. The problem with this is that, if you’re like me, you get notifications of everything that occurred over the evening. Distractions! Even if you do devotions after this, you still have something going in the back of your mind. Then, if you have your Bible on an electronic device, you get distracted by all subsequent notifications. I now use a regular old alarm clock and a printed Bible for my morning devotions. I’ve found that this is what I needed to keep growing.
Winning the battle constitutes reading your Bible and spending time with God the very first thing you do in your day. I don’t win the battle every day. I will continue to lose occasionally in the future. But it is amazing to see the
direct results of beginning to fight this battle.