There’s a video on YouTube of a dog walking on a treadmill who doesn’t understand that he has to keep moving in order to keep from falling off. He keeps trying to sit down and his owner tells him repeatedly to “walk!”, but again and again he nearly falls off because he wants to enjoy the experience while sitting down. When I watched that video it reminded me of us as believers and the effort it takes to continue in our walk with the Lord. We can’t sit down and just take a break for a bit, we must keep pushing on.
More and more recently it has been emphasized to Dan and I that living for Jesus requires a significant amount of effort in our everyday lives. Learning to walk with the Lord in every step of every day is not something that we can ever take lightly. Just like that dog we have to constantly push and pray and work in order to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”. (2 Cor 10:5)
Making the effort to set our minds on Christ can’t just mean something like having Christian music on in the background all the time. While having worship music on your mind is helpful, it’s much more beyond that. It’s the effort that it takes to go to church on Sunday when it’s likely you still don’t know anyone there yet. It’s taking part of a prayer group that’s not in your generation. It’s choosing to fast in prayer in obedience. It’s being intentional about the movies and TV shows you watch so that you don’t invite temptation. It’s taking the time to stop and listen to someone who you would prefer to ignore. It’s more than just journaling every day; most often the things that we need to do are uncomfortable and extremely inconvenient.
What if we tithed our time the way we tithe our money? We give 10% of our money back to God and after all, “time is money”, right? So, let’s figure this out, if there are 24 hours in the day - let’s say 16 if we’re sleeping for 8 of those hours, and we’ll subtract another 8 for the average hours spent working - so that leaves us with 8 hours. 10% of 8 hours, or 480 minutes, is 48 minutes. Could we give back 48 minutes of our time to God each day? That’s really not that long. It’s less than most TV shows. What’s harder? 10% of our money? or 10% of our time?
We want to be continuously growing in Christ and in unity with the Holy Spirit. When we draw away from that relationship, or try to “sit down”, we fall into temptation and cannot discern truth from lies. We become more focused on ourselves than on those that the Lord wants to point out to us. It’s most certainly worth our effort to spend time each day receiving our spiritual daily bread. In all honesty, I think I can “afford” to tithe 10% of my day, or perhaps I should be asking, can I could afford not to? I’m going to make the effort to begin focusing at least 10% of my “extra” time on being with Him.
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