The morning hours are the most valuable of the day. Don’t waste them.
“Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the first-fruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”
Proverbs 3:9-10
“All the best of the oil and all the best of the wine and of the grain, the first-fruits of what they give to the Lord, I give to you”
Numbers 18:12
Every morning of a new day is the beginning of the time we will receive for the day. If we live through the day, we receive 24 hours to do everything we need to do. Whether or not we are good stewards of that time is up to us. Many people plop in front of the television first thing in the morning. They watch the news and fill their mind with garbage. The news is not even a proper reflection of reality, yet people watch it anyways.
You waste your morning self-medicating with mindless shows. You hate your job, hate most of your life, so you choose to distract yourself with television. How is this man better than a drug addict? Both waste time, money, health and life pursuing a moment of medication induced pleasure. Is your life so horrible that you must distract yourself from it constantly?
Or you can be among the 99th percentile of men who reject this waste of the prime morning hours.
You can be the man who uses the morning to get work done, to get ahead on disciplines, to become better. This can be done regardless of whether you are a “morning” or an “evening” person. Discipline supersedes personality. Use the morning to get ahead on reading your Bible, whatever your allotted reading length is. I always recommend starting with anywhere from 10 verses to one chapter. No, it is not a lot, but it beats everyone who is reading zero chapters or verses a day.
Stop wasting your morning. The morning hour is a chance to get ahead of the competition. While they are in their warm beds, all snuggled up, you are improving. You are working and focusing on the things that matter in life.
Spirit.
You start making every morning effective and you start winning.
Yes, the first mornings are difficult. It is hard to change from instant comfort and self-medication in the morning to discipline and work right out of the gate. However, the power you gain from the continued discipline, and the satisfaction you feel from taking action outweigh that difficulty ten to one.
After the first few days, it becomes easier to string days together, it becomes easier to get out of bed, the discipline takes over your mind. Eventually, you string together enough effective days to notice that you are changing in small ways.
Your general Bible knowledge is a tiny bit better.
Your attitude is a tiny bit better.
That cornerstone of success, your mental state is a tiny bit better.
Ignore every individual who reports massive change in life and attitude, that is hyperbole and emotionalism. Improvement always comes one infinitesimally small brick at a time. Add up enough of those bricks over a long enough time, and you have built a structure of character that is impressive to behold. Everyone will think it was “one moment” or that you were an “overnight success”, but you know the truth. You are the cumulative result of every action you have taken up to this point in your life.
As hertical as it is to say, just reading the Bible won’t “change your life”. This isn’t some mom-blog built on a foundation of emotionalism. God gave you all the tools to change your life in His word, but YOU still have to do the work. Nothing changes that. So make it happen first thing in the morning, every morning, and become better. Become a man.
Mantra
The first hour of the day does not belong to me.
Application
Give the morning to the Lord every day, this is simple. You don’t have to feel like doing it, you don’t have to want to do it, you just have to do it.
Read a chapter of the Old Testament, and Chapter of the new testament, and repeat a Verse ten times for memory. Do this every single day. Is it a ton of reading? No. Is it doable? Yes. And it is infinitely more than the “Christians” who are doing no reading, which turns out to be about 80% of them³. You must do this every day. No one is asking you to move a mountain. Wake up a little earlier and give those first fruits to God.
If you cannot manage that much reading, aim for 10 verses from each old and new testaments, and repeat a verse for 10 repetitions. Once you become comfortable with that habit, then add more reading. That is how you win.
Study The Aggressive Verses at spartanchristianity.com
Conduct Yourselves Like Men.