We live in a western culture in which hustle is holy and progress is prized. But if we have determined that spiritual investment matters to us, then we are challenged in these verses to re-claim our time for good use according to God’s standards of good.
We will explore how our obligations affect the time we are able to give to spiritual investment. If you feel like your time isn’t your own, there’s not enough time to do all the things you need to do, or that the idea of adding one more thing to your to-do list might just break you, this post is for you.
Regarding time and spiritual investment, let’s begin with expectations. We can have a lot of assumptions about what time spent in spiritual investment can look like. If you’ve grown up in a religious setting, you may have been taught that a proper period of time spent in spiritual investment consists of at least an hour devoutly sitting in a quiet corner, reading your Bible, and praying off of note cards for all the illnesses and traveling mercies of the ladies in your women’s bible study group. That is certainly one way to invest spiritually. But it is not the only way. And it may not even be the best way for you.
Restore our fortunes, Lord , like watercourses in the Negev. Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy. Though one goes along…
Rather than going to the Supplier of the seed, I have attempted to sow my own dead seed. Rather than letting God cause the growth, I have been seeking multiplied fruit from my own efforts, trying to be a branch detached from the Vine. No fruit comes from that.
Because when we love Jesus, when we believe he came from God, his sacrifice covers our sins, and we gain direct access to ask the Father in Jesus’s name. Then when we are truly asking as Jesus’s representatives, with his motives and ways of loving rather than our own, the Father gives what we ask.
