Declutter Your Life — Morning Devotions

By Chris WittsSunday 26 Dec 2021Morning Devotions with Chris WittsDevotionsReading Time: 2 minutes

When was the last time you paused just to meditate on God? Even in our ‘quiet times’ it’s easy for distraction to set in as we look ahead toward the events of the coming day.

“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth,” says Colossians 3:2 (NKJV).

Meditation helps us pull the plug on the mental whirlwind. It focuses our minds—and then our hearts in response—on God’s sovereignty, his purpose for our lives and our day, and his truth. Meditation brings a clarity and cleansing. It settles our minds.

Every so often, my computer begins running slow. It becomes overloaded with small bytes of information stored throughout its drives. To speed the computer’s processes, I have to take the time to work through it, purging old files and unused programs.

Sometimes we need to purge and clear through our minds as well. We set aside the details we don’t need and the demands that don’t fit into God’s plan for our lives. And then we narrow our focus:

• What does God want from me today?
• What does my family need today?
• What has my employer asked for today?

Maybe we need to reduce our obligations:

• Are you over-committed? Doing too much?
• Running here, there and everywhere, unnecessarily?
• Do you constantly find yourself running from task to task with little downtime in between?

Simplify your life

While some people do thrive on a very full schedule, for most of us, constant obligations are nothing but draining:

1. Make Necessary Cuts: If your schedule is so crowded that you have little time left over for family and fun, you need to let something go. Yes, making cuts is hard. But so, so worth it.
2. Get Rid of Toxic Friendships: Are there people in your life who do nothing but bring you down, people who bring out the worst in you, or people who are just plain miserable to be around? If so, it may be time to either limit contact with them or to dump them altogether. Again—hard, but so, so worth it.
3. Limit Time Wasters: If you were to keep a written record of how you spend every minute of your days, what would you find? Hours spent making memories with your children, or hours spent on your phone, texting or looking at Facebook? All too often we think we need more hours in the day, when, in reality, we simply need to use the ones we have more wisely.

Allow God through the Holy Spirit to fill your minds with good thoughts. Let him do his cleaning up, and the spring clean—you will never regret this.