Start Your Day with God

Leslie Basham: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Tuesday, June 8. How do you spend the first part of your day?

(Alarm ringing) 'Aahhh...just five more minutes?'

Nancy's Dad taught her something really important about the first moments of the day. We'll hear about it as she continues in a series called, "Instruction of a Father."

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: 

Now my Dad was, Take God seriously, that Christ is our life. He is not a part of our life. He is life itself.

Ecclesiastes 8:12b says, "It will be well with those who fear God." Fear God--that's the bottom line. He is the one who spoke the universe into being with the power of His word and who holds this universe together with the word of His power. So, how foolish of us to keep God at the fringe of our lives rather than where He rightly belongs, that is at the core.

Now, let me add a second one here and if you've listened to Revive Our Hearts for any length of time, you've heard me say this multiple times before and you will hear me say it multiple times again.

And that is Start your day with God. Start your day with God. It's no secret that the place I learned that was, as a little girl growing up in the DeMoss home, where that was the way of life--where my Dad emphasized, mostly by his example, the importance, the necessity of a daily quiet time.

Now this isn't the substitute for the fact that we walk with God throughout the day, but we need time each day set apart to be in the Word, listening to God, and then responding to Him in prayer and praise.

This is what gives wisdom, perspective, direction for all the rest of life. I watch so many women today, women my age, older, and younger, who are living these frustrated, frazzled, frenzied lives which I fall into myself all too often and I believe more often than not a core reason is because we haven't stopped to center our lives on Christ.

So people say, "I don't have time to read my Bible. I don't have time to have a quiet hour or a holy hour with the Lord." Listen, choose your priorities for your life and then build your life around those priorities.

I would say this especially to you younger women, I'm talking to all of us, but especially you women who are developing habits now early in your life, start those habits now. I'll tell you this, "It will never be easier than it is now."

You may be a student thinking, I've got 8:00 o'clock classes every morning; there's no way I can start my day with the Lord! When I get through these exams, when I get through this degree...

Listen, when you get through that degree, you're going to have a j-o-b, hopefully or you're going to be married, you're going to have a husband and then you're going to have children and you'll never have an uninterrupted five minutes for the next ten or more years of your life.

You'll say, "Boy, life was so simple when I was a student, if I could just go back I could order my days around biblical and godly priorities."

I want to tell you, every season of life, no matter how old or young you are, there will be something that will conspire to keep you from having a daily devotional life.

I wrestle with this almost every day of my life. Now, that may surprise you and some of you may think, She teaches the Bible every day, this is easy for her! I'm telling you, I get in my quiet time chair and all of a sudden I'm thinking of fifty-seven things I have to do. I get a new burden for housecleaning. I mean, it's incredible what things come to my mind when I set apart that time to meet with the Lord. It's hard because Satan knows that if he can get me distracted and derailed there, he's going to throw my day and my life off kilter.

There are so many passages in the scripture that talk about the importance of seeking God early. 

• "My voice you shall hear in the morning, O Lord, in the morning I will direct it to you." (Psalm 5:3).
• Psalm 143:8a, "Cause me to hear your lovingkindness in the morning."
• Isaiah 50:4b, "The sovereign Lord wakens Me morning by morning, He wakens my ear to listen like one being taught."
• Then Proverbs 8 talks about it and wisdom is actually speaking and she says, "Now listen to me. Blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise and do not neglect it."
• Then wisdom says, "Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates." (Prov. 8:32-34a) How often? "Every day, waiting beside my doors."
• Joshua 1, Psalm 1--verses that tell us that if we meditate on the law of the Lord day and night that we will be successful in everything that we do.
• Then James tells us that we need to receive with meekness the implanted Word, not just reading the Word, but having a humble heart as we read it, receiving it because it's able to save our souls, it's able to sanctify us. James goes on to say, "So don't just be hearers of the Word, don't just listen, do what it says" [James 1:2 paraphrased]. Receive with meekness, submit yourself to the authority of the Word of God.

My Dad had a high view of Scripture and it was symbolized by the fact that he would never put anything on top of his Bible. Now, it wasn't that he worshiped the piece of leather here and the paper and ink, but he reverenced the Word of God.

I've made this a habit in my own life just symbolically because I want to demonstrate to myself and to others that the Word of God is supreme. I don't put other books on top of the Bible. I try not to put papers and things on top of the Bible; I want the Bible on top of everything else in my life but not only physically.

I want to listen to it and I want to challenge you to listen to the Word. When you do, whether it's in public reading of the Scripture from the pulpit or you're reading it privately, listen carefully.

I love the fact that in the church I attend we stand for the reading of the Word of God. Reverence the Word of God. Submit to it in your heart. Don't sit in judgment of the Word. Let it sit in judgment of you.

And let it be the authority in your life, in every area of your life whether it's your work habits, your sleep habits, your eating habits, your marriage, your parenting, your dealing with struggles and issues in your life, sinful bondages, how you deal with people, how you deal with money, how you deal with time.

Let the Word of God be that which gives you direction and wisdom and then take the direction and wisdom that it gives. Let the Word of God mold you and shape you and convict you and change you. We are sanctified by the truth. Jesus said in John 17:17b, "Your word is truth."

As you start your day with God and then continue your day, meditating on the Word of God, making it a part of the warp and woof of your life, you will have blessing, you will have success, you will find wisdom, you will gain intimacy with God.

And you will discover and experience through all of your life, the purpose for which God created you. And you'll be able to fulfill that purpose because you've been filled with the Word of God.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Let me encourage you even in this moment not to just be a hearer of the Word but to be a doer. I wonder how many of you would say honestly, "The Word isn't a central habit in my life. I don't have a consistent time of being in the Word, reading, studying, meditating."

Can I say, "It's not too late to start? Start today. Start tomorrow morning. But make a determination in your heart that you will order your life around the priority of God's Word; the number one thing in your life will be getting to know God."

We can't do that without steady, consistent, faithful, regular intake of God's Word into your mind and your heart and your life.

Father, I pray that there would be many, many women listening today who would make that commitment and would say, "Starting today, starting tomorrow, I want to start my day with God. I'll reorder other things in my life. I'll make them fit around my relationship with God rather than trying to squeeze my relationship with God into an already overcrowded schedule." So Lord, make it so, may it be so I pray in Jesus' name, Amen.