“Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’[d]38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’[e]40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” “ Mt. 22:37-40
“I’m too busy for my own good,” someone told me one day.
We chatted a bit. I shared how that very morning the Lord had warned me to slow down. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. Someone needing to slow down. Being warned by the Lord. Me. And others.
I walked off, and within minutes the Spirit of God pointed something out to me. My friend had talked about being too busy for her own good. That’s how we sometimes see it, isn’t it? Like being too busy hurts us, and perhaps we’re even willing to concede our busy-ness hurts others. But what about the Lord?
How can we be of use to Him when we are too busy? His greatest command, and desire, is for us to love Him with all our hearts. He desires us to worship Him, to spend time with Him, to learn of Him, to grow in His image, to seek Him and pray to Him and hear Him, to study His Word, to praise Him, to commune with Him, to be in His fellowship. Are we too busy for God’s good? Too busy for intimacy with God?
The Lord also desires, and commands us, to serve Him. Are we too busy to serve Him? Or, are we too busy serving Him to simply love and worship Him and spend time in His presence? Are we justifying our busy-ness by saying we’re busy serving Him all the while we’ve made serving a higher priority than loving Him?
The Lord also commands us, and desires, that we love others and serve them and help bring them to Him and help them to follow Him. Is our busy-ness keeping us from this?
We may be too busy for our own good in that we are depriving ourselves of a stronger and intimate relationship with the Lord, and missing out on the joy of serving Him, and missing the blessedness of loving and serving others, or some combination of any of these, but when we think of it as merely being too busy for our own good, we are focused on self. Following Christ isn’t about self; it’s about the Lord.
And when we make Him and His will our greatest priority, when our relationship with Him is more important than anything else in our lives, when loving and obeying Him are number one in our hearts and actions, when our focus is on Him and not us, rest assured we will be mightily blessed in the process. But may the motive in our hearts NOT be self for repenting of our busy-ness and learning to be led by God’s Spirit and to go at the pace He desires, remembering that Jesus never struggled with busy-ness, but simply spent time with His Father and was led by His Spirit as the perfect model for how we are to live. May our motive be love for the Lord and choosing in our love for Him to humble ourselves before Him and to yield to His Spirit leading us forth!