The Lord spoke to me last week when I was spending time with Him and I wanted to share it with you. Praying that just maybe it will speak to you and challenge you as much as it did me.
Most of my mornings, during this season of being home, are pretty slow and leave me with quite a bit of time on my hands. I have been spending an hour, sometimes a few hours, with Jesus. One morning last week, as I was spending time with Him doing my devotional, I felt this anxious/guilty feeling inside that I was spending “too much” time with Jesus.
Hold up. Like is that even a thing? Too much time with my Father?
I didn’t want to ignore it, so I sat with the Lord and began to ask Him why I was feeling guilt for spending “too much” time with Him, and He revealed something to me.
He revealed to me that I had kind of decided in my mind and allowed myself to believe the lie that I should only spend 30 minutes a day doing my Jesus time, because any longer than that was wasting time and that I have other things that I could/should be doing. Just to be really clear, THAT IS A LIE STRAIGHT FROM THE ENEMY. So once I identified that lie and silenced it, I continued doing my devotional and in it, I read, “You cannot overflow until you are filled.” Whoa.
Let me say that one more time for the people in the back.
You cannot overflow until you are filled.
One of the scriptures in my devotional this morning was John 7:37-38, “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”
I’ve read that scripture many times, but it spoke to me in a new way when I read it this time. A revelation occurred in my heart.
I cannot overflow rivers of living water if I am not being filled with rivers of living water.
So I asked myself, “how do I get filled?”
Scripture says that whenever we are thirsty, we need only come to Him and drink (John 7:37).
This is what I wrote in my journal after asking myself that question and allowing Jesus to speak to my heart:
Spend time in His presence. Spend time praying… talking to my Father. Spend time reading His Word. Spend time meditating on His Word… letting it change me, work in me, open my eyes, renew & transform my mind & thoughts, change my perspective. Spend time worshipping. Spend time listening to the voice of the Lord… allowing space & time for Him to speak, to move in & through me. Spend time asking Holy Spirit to fill me & to give me fresh & new revelations. This is how I am filled with rivers of living water, to then overflow rivers of living water to the lives of others.
Notice a theme in what I wrote?
It takes TIME. It takes spending a lot of time with someone in order to get to know that person. It’s the same in our relationship with Jesus. It takes spending time with Him, every single day, in order to get to know Him. To get to know His character. To see how He lived. To see how He loved. To see how He talked. To get to know the very person that I’m trying to look like. I can’t be like Jesus without first knowing who He is.
Jesus spoke to me again and reminded me of Ecc 3:1 that says, “to everything, there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.”
He reminded me that He has given me this season of rest. A time to truly find rest in Him. A time to learn what it means to find dependency in Him. There is purpose in this season. The time that I spend in prayer, meditation, seeking Him, reading and studying His Word, during this season, is going to be crucial for the next season that He’s leading me into (Squad Leading). My time that I spend with the Lord every day is EVERYTHING. There’s obviously some mornings where I do only have 30 minutes of Jesus time, and that’s ok. But I feel like Jesus is telling me to not take the slow, uninterrupted mornings, where I have a lot of time to spend with Him, lightly, or to waste it by spending time scrolling or watching Netflix (personal conviction), but to choose Him and to press in and lean in during this season of being home and able to spend this amount of time getting to know my Father more.
If there’s one thing that I’ve realized since being back in America, even more so now then before my Race, is that the enemy is using busyness and distractions to keep us from spending time with Jesus daily. The enemy is real people. The Word says in John 10:10, “The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.” Let’s stop allowing the enemy to convince us of the lie that “we don’t have time.” We do have time. We all have 24 hours. It’s a choice that each of us has to make. We have to be intentional when it comes to choosing how we’re going to spend the time that we have. Let’s choose to spend time with Jesus, whose purpose is to give us a rich and satisfying life.
My devotional this week asked some great questions that went along with what the Lord has been speaking and really confirmed everything He’s been saying to me, and I want to ask you the same questions:
Is it important to you to know the Scriptures well? Is it important enough to rearrange your own personal priorities in order to study the Scriptures?
And one last final question to ponder on that hit me so hard: Doesn’t it make sense to suggest that no part of our life as a Christian should be more important than our study of the Scriptures?
My prayer is that God would give each of us a greater desire to know Him more and to spend every possible moment that we have seeking the truth of His Word. I pray that God would continue to reveal Himself to us in new and creative ways that only He could do. I pray that He would give us fresh revelations of who He is. And I ask that as we choose Him first and seek Him consistently, that there would be an overflow of living waters from our hearts into every person we come in contact with. In Jesus Name. Amen.
With love and overflow,
Mads
