Give Your Time to God: Part 3 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning.

At this time of morning every weekday we just stop for a minute and listen to God. That’s what it means to read God’s word, the Bible, with your heart and mind open to Him. It’s listening to God, and it’s an amazing thing, isn’t it, that God is paying attention to you personally.

You know, some people, if they hear something like that, it makes them a bit nervous. What? God is watching me. He notices what I’m doing? Yes, he does. But that’s not a thing to be afraid of. It’s a thing to embrace because the God who’s paying attention to you and your life is a God who loves you intensely, who wants the best for you, who understands your brokenness and the problems that brings in your life and the baggage you carry from hard experiences in your life, he knows and understands all of that, and he’s reaching out to you saying, let me be involved in your life because I am the one who created humanity, and I am the one who can bring healing and wholeness into your life as you give your life to me and invite me to chart the course of your life. You will find me at work. Making your life all that I intended it to be.

Well, this week we’re talking about giving God our time.

And we’re working from a passage in James chapter 4, starting in verse 13. Let me just read you 4 verses out of James.

God says, come now, you who say today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit, yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life, for you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that as it is. You boast in your arrogance, and all such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

Sin means you’re not doing what God wants you to do in life, and you need to correct that.

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Well, the challenge of this passage, isn’t it, is to use your time for the things that matter to God.

To him who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, to him that is sin, God says, pay attention to what you’re doing with the time you have in your life. Do what’s right. Do what’s right because what you do with the time that is so temporary, fleeting, and brief, the time you have in this world, what you do with the things that you do in this time has an impact on eternity.

Right, the things of God are the things that have to do with eternity. What do you do with your time in this life that is for God? That has an impact on eternity. What is your relationship with the people in your life? God wants to work through that.

How can you spend time with them in a way that encourages them to focus on spiritual things and their relationship with God? How can you help people set the priorities in their lives, whether it’s your children or friends that you have?

To help them focus their lives on the things that matter to God. After all, if we’re here for just a little while like a mist. And then we finish our time in this world and in these bodies and we go to be with the Lord.

Isn’t the thing that will matter to us for all eternity so much more important than the brief things of this world? So let’s focus our lives on those things, and this is what God is encouraging you to do as you go into today, right? This is not just abstract about your whole life. It’s about today.

What in your life today do you know that God wants you to do? Then do it.

You’ll never be sorry.

I’m John North.

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