A friend and I were talking the other day, and he said to me, “My doctor told me I need to take care of my health through diet and exercise, or he’s going to put me on medication.” I asked him what he was planning to do, and he said, “I want to get healthier, but I’m having a hard time motivating myself because improvement takes time and effort.”
Time + Effort = Improvement.
There’s no getting around it. Whether we’re talking about physical health, spiritual growth, or improving our marriage, we need to invest the time and put in the effort.
I’m amazed at how many of us say we want a deeper faith in Jesus, yet we fail to put in the time and effort needed to grow our spiritual muscles. This is not an accusation but an acknowledgment of something I struggle with as well. Our faith development competes with the demands of ordinary life.
Contemplating the secrets of the universe requires significantly more time and effort than watching a movie. Participating in weekly worship services requires a commitment of at least a couple of hours each week. If you devote yourself to reading, meditating on, and memorizing Scripture, you have to carve out an additional 15–30 minutes a day, which you could otherwise spend sleeping or watching the next episode of your current Netflix series.
I’ll be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in September 2027, and I just received an email with a training program to help me prepare. The program lays out weekly activities that increase from two days a week to five days a week over the course of several months. If I follow the plan, I’ll need to commit the time and effort necessary to improve. Finding the time and committing the effort are no easy tasks.
Improvement in any area of life can feel like a huge imposition, which is why so many of us fail to make progress, and that includes in our faith. We may crave a closer walk with Jesus, but we never seem to find the time or put in the effort to see it come to fruition. We just kick the can of faith down the road of life and wind up saying, like one elderly man who died a few years ago, “My one true regret is not having gotten around to my faith.”
The solution is to stop seeing our spiritual development as a side interest and put it front and center. Joshua said, “Choose this day whom you will serve.… But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15, ESV).
The choice is not theoretical but practical.
The choice requires follow-through.
The choice is a commitment of time and effort that leads to growth.
The choice is best made in community not in isolation.
The choice is empowered by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
The choice is … yours.
