How to Get Spiritually Motivated

I get bored with most spiritual stuff REALLY easily. I’m probably am not supposed to say that as a pastor but it’s true. I can watch ten hours of Tiger King without flinching, but if you want me to read some devotional book for ten hours it’s not happening.

Over the summer I had an intelligent teenager ask me in a seminar I was leading “What is a good way to get motivated to go to God?” I didn’t have time to answer it at the time, but this feels like just the right moment. It took me a long time to figure this one out myself.

The people who talked to me about spending time with God when I was growing up all said some version of the same thing. They shared about waking up early in the morning and spending an hour reading the Bible and then thirty minutes praying in quiet. I tried and tried and tried but it just didn’t happen. I dreaded the time I spent doing that and ultimately just stopped. I felt guilty about stopping, but the guilt wasn’t enough to make me want to sit quietly for an hour and a half early in the morning.

Then I discovered something awesome… I have ADD! And that can be a superpower. I am great at coming up with ideas. I love variety, and when I really like something I can use the hidden superpower of ADDers hyper focus.

My problem with the spiritual stuff wasn’t that I was somehow bad at spiritual things, but that I wasn’t engaging with God in my own way. I was trying to spend time with God like someone else, and THAT doesn’t work.

The key to spiritual motivation is finding how you connect best with God and taking time to do it.

That sentence has two key parts: FINDING and TAKING. We’ll start with the finding. Most people don’t really know how they connect best with God because they haven’t tried many things. Step one of for most people is spiritual experimentation. You probably already know about reading the Bible and praying, but let me give you a list of things other people have told me were some of their favorite spiritual practices:

• Writing music

• Sitting in nature

• Walking in nature

• Writing poetry

• Painting

• Singing

• Dancing

• Meditating

• Running

• Hiking

• Lifting weights

• Rephrasing Psalms in their own words

• Reading a prayer book

• Watching youtube videos of worship bands

• Researching first century culture

OK, the second one and the last one are mine but the rest really are other people’s. I know what you might be thinking. Some of those don’t sound particularly spiritual. And you’re right because the spiritual side comes from you and God. If you sit down at a piano to write a song, that can be a spiritual moment. When you go to the piano with the intention of meeting God there, you are going with an openness to experience God and you find that God is there to meet you. The same for writing or reading or walking in nature.

God is everywhere and created all of us to enjoy different things. That means that whatever it is that we love and wherever we love to do it, God can meet us there and speak to us!

Once you FIND what you enjoy doing with God, the second step is taking time to do it. I remember a pastor telling me that you can’t make time to do things, you have to take time. No one can create more hours in a day and most people’s days are full of something already. That means that in order to spend time with God, you have to take time from something else and repurpose it for your soul.

That is the key to motivation: finding what you love and taking time to do it.