Why do we sometimes feel far apart from God?  Can failing to connect with God be a time management problem? The Bible is the word of God. What keeps you away from your Bible keeps you away from God.  I believe there are three basic reasons why we don’t read, study, and meditate on the Bible. All three of these reasons correspond with the main reason we all fail at time management. We don’t put the weight of importance on the right things.

If we are trying to be creative and put a little different spin on things, we can call our failure to connect with God the three deadly D’s. For those who love both alliterations and puns, we can call these the 3D’s.

We fail because we…

I

Don’t take the Bible seriously enough. We don’t understand the true nature of the Bible as the word of God and give it the great importance it deserves. We mix it up in a jumble of other books and teachings.  Even the most ardent disbeliever in the Bible’s inspired nature, would have to claim when looking at the facts, that in all of world history there is simply no other comparison of a book to it. There is no other ancient or modern book written by as many different authors, over such a long period of time, and is this well recorded and preserved. It is a miracle in itself. But the miracle of its existence is of small significance to the critical fact that it is God inspired. It is literally the word from God to man delivered through the reality of history, poem, and letter and deserves to be treated as such.

The Bible is not that difficult to read, but it isn’t necessarily easy. We can fall into the trap of ignoring it or thinking we already may know it all and gravitate our time to easier things. But nothing keeps us connected with God as much as God’s word itself. Nobody, and no other book, when honestly and intelligently examined does a better job, often in the oddest, unique, and original of ways of keeping on message the record of man’s fall and Jesus redemption better than the word of God itself. The Bible is a  book describing reality as it is though it is most often mistakenly passed off merely as a book of morality.

II

Don’t take Jesus Christ sacrifice on the cross seriously. We are self-diluted and believe in our actions that somehow there is life disassociated with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When we try to push death and sorrow aside and live with the goal of the eternal life of happy retirement as the end game, we are missing the point. Jesus willing death on the cross was and is still the only way of solving the problem of the pain and suffering of the world. Jesus is the only solution. When we put our weight and emphasis on anything else we are misusing time. Don’t worry that in following Jesus you will lose yourself. Yes, we will lose our limited and ultimately failed life, but we will gain the infinitely unique and varied life of Christ. If we have this attitude, we will not neglect reading the Bible.

III

Distractions bog us down. It seems that we are ever and always distracted with something! The busyness of the world really can separate us from our first love, but at the same time we are called to love our neighbor and serve in our families. We can’t simply just hide away from society. The great call of every Christian is to focus on the right things for the right reasons. But you won’t wake up in the morning and pick up the paper or look at the top stories on Facebook and jump right into reading the Bible. You will have to push through these distractions with the strength of gratitude.

I have seven children, live in a 100 plus year old house needing lots of upkeep, and have a job at the moment that covers one third of America. Plus I am trying to share how to navigate this and connect to God in a busy and distracted world with you too. I get how easy it is to be distracted and ignore the obvious and most important.  I know that there is not just one right answer but there is one right emphasis.

Join me in the next couple of weeks as we look at how to put life first and push busyness down the list and attack the many distractions we all face that are keeping us from the God we love.

We will look at why the Bible can be trusted, distractions of the mind, distractions of the environment, and why we don’t do what we want to do among others.

Doug

The words of British poet Robert Abrahams say it well, “For some men die by shrapnel, And some go down in flames, But most men perish inch by inch, In play at little games.”  Our goal is to identify the little games and put a stop to them and put the right weight on the right things.