Do you feel too busy? Like you can’t get it all in?
Is the first thing you drop often a spiritual task, like reading your Bible or talking about God with your kids?
If you’ve been there before, welcome! This post is written with you in mind.
This post is all about how to grow spiritually even when you are busier than ever.
Do you need a resource to use to teach your kids the Bible? Download the NEW Attributes of God 30-Day Family Devotional!
How to Make Time for Spiritual Growth: 2 Strategies to Try
If you’ve been in church any length of time, you have probably heard it said more than once that you need to be reading your Bible every day.
I wrote an entire post on how you can make regular Bible reading and study a part of your routine, so if you’re struggling there I would encourage you to go back to this post and take a listen.
You’ve probably also heard that it’s your job to teach your kids the Bible. After all, you have more hours with your kids over the course of their childhood than their church leaders ever will.
I talked in this post about how to get started with teaching your kids the Bible, so hopefully you’ve already been thinking about and maybe implementing some steps to making that happen.
It’s true that prioritizing your own study of Scripture is really important to your faith, and it’s also true that teaching your kids the Bible is really important to for their faith.
But it’s also true that we are busier than ever before.
So then the question we all have to answer is this:
How on earth are we going to make time for our own personal study of the Bible AND teaching our kids the Bible when we already have a lot going on?
There’s only so many hours in a day, and we’ve got stuff to do.
We have meals to prepare, practices to get our kids to, schoolwork to complete, reading to get done, chores to do … the list goes on and on.
Your list is unique to your family, and so is mine. But we all have a list that never seems to end of things we have to do and places we have to be.
And most of the things on our lists are important.
But if we are Christians, then growing in our faith and helping our kids grow in their faith is also important.
There’s got to be a way to make those things priorities as well.
There’s got to be a way to make sure that we give time in our days to the important work of learning about God – who He is and what He wants us to do – and to give our kids plenty of opportunities to learn about God from us as well.
And it doesn’t have to be “all or nothing.”
We can let go of whatever someone else told us was the ideal way to do things, because that way isn’t getting done.
Instead, we can choose to start by making small changes and adjustments in order to bring us closer to where we want to be.
In order for us to increase spiritual growth in our homes without it feeling like we’re just adding another thing to an already long list of things, we’ve got a couple options.
First, we can cut things out in order to make time for us to read our Bibles, pray, and do whatever else we need to do to grow our faith. We can cut things out in order to make talking to our kids about the Bible a priority.
And that might be where you’re at – this is something that only you can discern, and I would really encourage you to think about it and spend some time praying about whether there are things on your list and in your family’s schedule that just need to go.
But if you aren’t in the spot where you feel like you need to cut things out of the schedule or that you can cut anything from the list, then it’s time to get creative and resourceful about how you spend your time.
You don’t have to quit every extracurricular activity you have going on. You don’t have to cut people out of your life or never leave your house to socialize. You don’t have to stop doing things that are important and worthy of your time and energy.
But what you might need to consider is whether you are being creative and resourceful when it comes to prioritizing spiritual things the way you are creative and resourceful about other aspects of your life.
Here’s what I mean by that:
- When you want to have multiple kids in sports but the schedules aren’t aligning … do you just give up right away and say “maybe next season, kids”? No. If your kids being in sports is important to you, you figure it out. You divide and conquer with your spouse. You ask for help from other team moms. You become creative and resourceful.
- When you need to go shopping for pants for your ever-growing children, but the week is already packed, you figure it out. Even if that means you order several sizes of pants online, try them on, and return the extra next week, you become creative and resourceful because it needed to get done.
There are so many different examples of how creativity and resourcefulness come into play when you’re making time for your priorities, but hopefully those two examples can give you enough to go on to think about how you’ve personally applied creative thinking and resourcefulness to problem solving in your parenting and scheduling.
Ask yourself whether you ask for help or approach your days with flexibility when it comes to Bible study, prayer, and having spiritual conversations with your kids.
Do you ask for help from your spouse in making it happen? Do you reach out to friends to help? Or do you say “maybe next season, self”? Do you say, “There’s no time for it this week, this will have to wait”?
I suspect many of you have been there. I know I have.
So, back to our original question: How on earth are we going to make time for our own personal study of the Bible AND teaching our kids the Bible when we already have a lot going on?
I can think of two strategies you can use this week to make an immediate impact on your ability to focus on and prioritize your own spiritual growth as well as teaching your kids how to follow Jesus for themselves.
The first strategy is to utilize church programming, and the second strategy is to utilize pockets of time.
Let’s talk about utilizing church programming first.
This is going to be the easiest strategy to implement for your own spiritual growth if you already have a church you attend.
Most churches have programming going on that you aren’t taking full advantage of. If you know you need to be making more time for your own spiritual growth, now is the time to find one way to take advantage of what’s going on at church that you aren’t right now.
This doesn’t mean you have to be there every time the church doors are open. It just means you need to take a look at the calendar and see where you could prioritize your spiritual growth at a time that the church can help you do so.
Are you already there Sunday morning, but you only go to one service time? Try going to both so that you can attend a Bible study and the sermon. Or serve one hour and go to the sermon the other. Both attending a Bible study class and serving are great ways to prioritize your spiritual growth.
Does your church have some sort of midweek worship time? Go ahead and see if you can add that to your weekly routine. Even if there aren’t classes for adults, if you can drop your kids off and head off into another space in the building and study your Bible and pray for a solid hour, that’s better than not doing anything during the week to connect with the Lord.
This strategy isn’t just going to help you with your spiritual growth – it’s going to help your kids grow spiritually too!
Being involved at church means your kids will have more exposure to the Bible, they will interact with other adults who love Jesus too, and they will view regular church attendance and spiritual conversations as just part of their routine.
The second strategy you can use is to utilize pockets of time.
This podcast is all about how we feel too busy to fit in personal Bible study and spiritual disciplines, much less doing that AND discipling our kids, so I’m going to just put it out there that probably none of us are saying, “Oh, silly me, I actually DO have hours and hours of time to grow spiritually and also disciple my kids.”
If we had those hours and hours of time to allocate to this, we would be doing it already.
What we have instead is pockets of time that we aren’t currently utilizing for these really important tasks.
So let’s talk about how to utilize pockets of time.
For your own Bible study and your own spiritual growth, maybe the ideal is waking up early, getting in an hour of Bible study, and that being the daily rhythm.
But ideal is only good if it’s getting done.
So maybe what’s better than not studying the Bible at all is to listen to a chapter of the Bible through the Bible app in the morning, reading it from your Bible at the beginning of lunch, and praying before bed.
Think about the tiny pockets of your day that you currently fill with something small and easy to let go, and ask yourself how you could fit in some time to focus on the Lord instead.
For teaching your kids the Bible, you can do the same thing. Again, maybe the ideal to you is having a full on Bible study session with your kids every day.
But ideal is only good if it’s getting done.
So maybe what’s better is reading a verse with your kids over breakfast and asking them what they think God is teaching through it. Maybe better is praying specifically for your kids while you doing the after-school snack dishes, and being intentional about steering conversations at dinner to God and what the Bible teaches.
You can do those things in small pockets of time.
All you really need is the willingness to be creative and resourceful when you’re figuring out how to grow your faith and help your kids grow theirs.
Again, you might need to cut some things out of your schedule. That’s something that only you know and can discern.
But it might be that you are approaching spiritual growth and discipleship with too much of an “all or nothing” attitude rather than applying creativity and resourcefulness to your approach.
To recap those strategies that you can use right away, here they are:
The first strategy you can use this week to make an immediate impact on your ability to focus on and prioritize your own spiritual growth as well as teaching your kids how to follow Jesus for themselves is to utilize church programming, and the second strategy is to utilize pockets of time.
Take Action to Make Time for Spiritual Growth
We’re going to end with an action step you can take today.
Today’s action step is to bring others in on the conversation.
- If you’ve got a spouse, ask them how they think you both can prioritize spiritual growth for all members of the family. Make a plan together!
- If you’ve got a strong Christian friend or a small group or some sort of accountability, reach out to those people and let them know what you’re thinking of doing to help yourself grow closer to God and how you plan to help your kids do the same.
Leave a comment on this post to let me know how it goes!
Quick Links
Connect with Faith Talks Daily
- NEW RELEASE: Attributes of God 30-Day Family Devotional: https://faithtalksdaily.com/attributes-of-god/
- For the free Quick Start Guide to Family Bible Time: www.faithtalksdaily.com
- www.instagram.com/faithtalksdaily
- www.facebook.com/faithtalksdaily
Do you need a resource to use to teach your kids the Bible? Download the NEW Attributes of God 30-Day Family Devotional!