COMPELLING REASONS TO START YOUR DAY EARLY WITH GOD.
Meet with God before you meet with men.
Geoffrey R. Kirkland
God’s Word provides a daily prayer for God’s people: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Psalm 90;14). Moses prayed those words that may provide a fitting early-morning prayer to God for all of us. George Mueller once said: “I want to encourage all Christians to get into the habit of rising early to meet with God.” The morning time, more than any other time, provides the best occasion to orient your heart and mind to God and His Word at the very outset of a new day. Abraham rose early to meet with God (Gen 19:27). Moses rose early and built an altar to Yahweh (Ex 24:4). Even the Servant-Song speaks of the Messiah as one who morning by morning is awakened and is taught (Isaiah 50:4).
In this brief write-up, I want to give a pastoral plea for you to start your day with God. I want to provide some practical and compelling reasons for you to begin your days early with God before you go to email, social media, and news. I will provide seven pastoral pleas and I will word them in the negative for greater impact.
If you don’t begin your day early and with God, then...
1. You fill your mind with the world before divine truth. — You do not want your mind to sit idle from the early morning waiting for the things of this world to fill it. If you do not proactively and diligently fill your heart with divine truth, the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eyes, and the pride of life will not wait long before they will occupy your thoughts. Strive to fill your mind with Truth before the word seeps in.
2. You give an easy opportunities for anxieties to birth, fester and grow. — If you do not start your day with God early and preeminently, then the cares of this world and the worries of your heart will quickly take root and occupy your thoughts. You don’t want the anxieties of this world to begin in seed form early in the morning, fester all day, and then grow into mind-consuming troubles. Rather, fill yourself full with the character & beauty of God.
3. You go against Psalm 119:147: seek the Lord early. — The psalmist made it his goal to rise early and cry for help. If you don’t come to God early, the world will come to you swiftly. If you don’t fill your heart with divine Truth then the world will fill you full with its lies, its temptations, its cravings, and its desires. Seek the Lord early and wait for His Words by eagerly, diligently, and passionately pursuing Him in His Word.
4. You contradict the example of Christ who woke early and went to seek God early. — Even your own Savior, the blessed God-Man, rose early in the morning while it was still dark to get away and be alone with God in prayer. Strive to emulate your Savior. If the perfect Son of God needed morning prayer and anchoring His heart with the Father, so must you and I also!
5. You miss the way to filter and discern what you see of the world thru the word (if you meet the world before meeting the Word). — It is the Word of God, which is the sword of the Spirit, which provides us an all-sufficient tool to wield off the temptations of the Evil one and His flaming arrows. If you don’t spend time in the Word first and in prayer, then you don’t have the proper filter in place by which you can sift through all the things that will bombard you in a given day. God’s Word gives you the lens through which you must test everything. Indeed, you are to abstain from every appearance of evil and hold fast to that which is good.
6. You will find it harder to focus and linger in heart and mind because of distractions. — If you try to put off having your time with God until later in the day, you will soon find it much more difficult to focus because of the many distractions that come from any number of instrumental means. Your phone may ding, the email may arrive, the calendar alert may sound, your thoughts may plague you, that meeting agenda will come to your mind that you have to prepare for. And on it goes. But if you start your day with God, you can take every thought captive later on throughout the day having rested your heart and soul on the steady Sovereignty of your heavenly Father.
7. You’ll be unfit to meet with men without having met with God first. — You will be much better suited and prepared to meet with men only after you have met with God. But until you have met with God, you are not be able nor equipped to meet with men. Commune with men less and more with God. Communing with Christ will guard your thoughts, your words, your reactions and responses, your actions and practices, and your daily conduct.
Seek to emulate the wise example of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. On February 23, 1834, the 20-year-old McCheyne wrote in his journal, “Rose early to seek God and found him whom my soul loveth. Who would not rise early to meet such company?”
To conclude, pastor Scott Hubbard provides a wise word:
"Nevertheless, the testimony of God’s people in Scripture and church history suggests that morning is, far and away, the best time for most of us to meet with God. Before the day’s tasks demand to be done, before the headlines bring the world into our living rooms, before our phones beg for our attention, and before the air around us starts humming with activity, we desperately need to hear from God. We need the first voice of the day to be his."
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