Give God Your Best Time

“O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.”

Psalm 63:1 (NKJV)

We say, “I do not have enough time.” What we usually mean is, “This is not currently a priority.”

That sounds harsh, so let me soften it slightly and then sharpen it again. Some seasons genuinely are brutal: a new baby, a sick parent, two jobs, a crisis. Those are real, and God is not standing over you with a stopwatch. But across a normal year, time is not mainly a supply problem. It is a priority problem. We find time for what we treasure, and we find explanations for what we do not.

David writes, “O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.”

The heading of this psalm places David in the wilderness of Judah. He is not writing this in a comfortable prayer room with a scented candle. He is in a desert, most likely fleeing for his life, and the imagery is drawn directly from where he is: thirst, dryness, no water. He looks at the landscape and says, that is what my soul is like for God.

Notice, this is not duty language. It is desire language. He is not saying, “I ought to seek You.” He is saying, “I am thirsty for You.”

And notice the possessive: “O God, You are my God.” Before any request, there is relationship. That is where devotional life begins, and it is why devotional life cannot be reduced to a discipline.

Now, let me guard something before we go further, because this subject produces more false guilt in Christians than almost any other.

The point is not legalism. Nowhere does Scripture command a particular hour of the morning, a particular length of time, or a particular method. David says “early,” and that was his practice; it is not a commandment binding your conscience. Some people are genuinely more alert at night. Some people have shift work. Some people have small children and there is no such thing as an undisturbed hour in their house for the next three years. If you have been carrying guilt because your devotional life does not look like someone else’s, put that down. It is not from God.

The point is intention. Relationships grow where time is given, and there is no way around that. You cannot maintain a close friendship on the leftovers of your attention, and you cannot maintain closeness with God that way either.

So here is the honest observation. If God consistently receives only what is left over, after everything and everyone else has taken their share, we should not be surprised when our spiritual life feels thin. That is not God withholding. That is the natural result of how relationships work.

Scripture, prayer and quiet before God are not boxes to tick. They are how we make space to know Him. The activity is not the point; the Person is.

And let me name the real difficulty, because it is usually not the diary.

Often the problem is not that we have no time. It is that the moment we become still, everything else starts shouting. The phone. The task list. The conversation that did not go well yesterday. The thing we have been avoiding thinking about. Silence has a way of surfacing what noise was suppressing, and that is uncomfortable enough that we reach for the phone almost involuntarily.

Which means the discipline is not mainly about finding minutes. It is about tolerating the first few minutes of stillness long enough to get past the noise.

So protect some space, and make it genuinely undistracted. Better ten minutes with the phone in another room than forty with it face-up beside you. Even Jesus, with a world to save and three years to do it in, “went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed” (Mark 1:35). If the Son of God built that in, our refusal is not devotion; it is presumption.

Practically: decide when, decide where, remove the obvious interruption, and start smaller than you think you should. A consistent ten minutes will do more for you over a year than a heroic hour you abandon by the fourteenth.

And come thirsty rather than dutiful. If the thirst is not there, tell Him that honestly and ask for it. “My soul thirsts for You” is itself a prayer you can pray on a dry morning.

Let me add one honest observation about seasons, because this needs saying.

There are periods of life when protecting an unbroken hour is genuinely impossible. Newborn babies. Caring for a parent with dementia. Two jobs and a commute. In those seasons, do not measure yourself against a standard designed for a different stage of life.

What you can do is change the quality of the moments you already have. Pray while feeding the baby. Listen to Scripture while driving. Keep a verse on the kitchen wall. Susanna Wesley, with a house full of children, reportedly pulled her apron over her head to pray, and the family knew to leave her alone.

God meets people in the season they are actually in, not the one they wish they had.

Do not give God only what is left of you. Give Him real attention, because intimacy grows where time is willingly given.

Prayer

Father, You are my God, and I want to seek You genuinely rather than dutifully. Forgive me for offering You the leftovers of my attention and then wondering why my soul feels thin. Where I have carried false guilt about how my devotional life looks compared with someone else’s, set me free from it. Where I have simply not prioritised You, convict me plainly. Help me to protect real, undistracted space, however short. And where the thirst has faded, give me thirst again. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Declaration

Time reveals priority. I will give God real attention, not leftovers, because intimacy grows where time is willingly given.

Pastor Ras

All Nations Community Church

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