The time lapse
between my last post and this one obviously shows that I am yet to become a time
management guru but I will like to share a few tips that have helped me maintain consistent times of fellowship with
God. But first, I’d like to establish just how important our personal devotions
are.
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| An hour spent with God is worth a lifetime with man |
Thank God for
tweet-like prayers and shower time worship but there is more to our relationship
with God than those. If you spend with your spouse the same quantity and
quality of time that you spend with your doorman (except your husband is the
doorman), you know that trouble looms ahead for both of you. So is our
relationship with God. Our personal devotion is similar to ‘keeping in touch’
with a loved one. How much time you spend together is not only a reflection of
your relationship but also its determinant. So you both can start out as BFFs
but end up as strangers- it is only a matter of not spending enough quality
time together.
1. Apart
from just keeping in touch with God, fellowship with Him offers lots of
benefits to us. First, the essence of our Christian faith is to know God
(Philippians 3:10). Jesus Himself said, “This is eternal life, to
know God”. Now, how do you really
know someone except by spending time with them, reading stuff about them or
listening to them? How are we going to really know God if we don’t spend time
with Him? How are we going to spend time with Him if we mismanage our 24hours
such that we can only cover the basic demands of life-Not that
personal fellowship is not basic, it is just that unlike your job, nobody
really holds you to ransom for not showing up.)
2. In
addition to knowing God intimately, consistent fellowship helps us to build the
power to resist temptations. A very wise guy said somewhere in the book of
Proverbs that “if you fall in the day of adversity, your strength is small”. It
is easier to overcome
temptations when we keep in touch with God. In fact, one of the
devil’s tricks is to gradually lower the depth of our fellowship when
a major trial looms. The idea is to get us weak enough to fall headlong
into his ditch when the temptation finally shows up. Spending sufficient time
with Him is the only way we are ever going to be able to walk in the Spirit
that we may not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.
3. Also,
It is in the place of daily fellowship that we can exchange thoughts with God
and thereby grow in grace and become more like Him even here on earth (Romans
12:2). A very dear friend, who I consider as my own Barnabas
once told me that “I would rather teach people how to fellowship with God than
teach them how to get healing or prosperity or any other thing because I know
that in the place of fellowship, anything can happen including healing and
prosperity.”
We
want God to use us to conquer territories and establish His will here
on earth but we have to know what the said will is. God used David, Daniel, Moses,
Gideon, Paul and even people we would consider losers in today’s world but many
of them spent time with Him, praying, studying and listening to Him
The Bible
consistently revealed that even Jesus made maximum use of His time. He would get up
to pray at dawn, work hard during the day (John 4:34), retreat from the crowd
when necessary (Mark 6:31), and multi-task by napping during commute time (He
wasn’t driving of course J)
(Matthew 8:24). He even wept over a city that did not know her time of visitation (Luke 19:44). He was that
conscious about managing time.
Now, if Jesus our
Lord managed his day so that he set apart time for fellowshipping with God, how
are we going to walk worthy without
having a similar practise? Let us take a step beyond wishing and desiring
intimacy with God to acting on those desires.
How about you? In what
ways have your personal devotions helped your faith and life generally? Please
share with us in the comments section.
Cheers,
Miss August.
Pic from: http://www.championcenterlv.com/danielfast/day-1-daniel-fast/
