Honesty check. Wonderful people who have no use for idols and have made God, the Father of Jesus, our one God above all gods, how do we realistically live godly, Christian lives? There will always be hours to fill which provide a vacuum which can be a struggle to keep free of vice, even if we do as much evangelism, building up of each other and encouraging as our spare time, opportunity and energy allows, with God’s help. We may read some scriptures, as much as we can take in, perhaps doing so in a shared community context to aid understanding of what we read and provide for spiritual help. All that might fill an hour of spare time. We pray a short prayer (God is in heaven so we keep our prayer short), similar to the Lord’s Prayer, along those lines or maybe using those words, which might take minutes, given time to focus and prepare or a lot less, maybe a couple of times a day. We spend a bit of time kindly reaching out to the poor who ask for our help. We try to get some Christian meeting attendance into our day, perhaps a couple of times a week for a few hours a week. We keep such time free of dishonesty and keep only truth on our lips and in our minds, That is all well and good. We do not want to get ritualistic or to unrealistically overdo it. This is perhaps in addition to caring, spending family time, working full time or part time to provide for needs, keeping our environment civilised, getting sensible hours of sleep, eating, all leaving hours to try to relax. We might be working seven to ten hours a day to have something to give. In the restorative relaxation hours what do we do? It makes sense we still look at maybe some fashion magazines or celebrity gossip TV (if we are female, especially), watch some movies, maybe try to get informed together with being entertained by watching documentaries or reading factual books or browsing interesting subjects online. It might seem worldly, but we do need ways to both relax and gen-up on knowledge with a broad range of interests, perhaps with some hobbies in mind such as gardening or home improvement. We are humans and there are only so many ways we can learn and socialise even if we seek to remain as godly as we can be. What if we were stuck in prison or hospital or on an oil rig or remote lighthouse, with nothing but a TV or computer and only worldly people as colleagues and company. We need to try to avoid extremes of worldliness such as violence, porn, promiscuity, drugs, darker scientific interests, self-harm, alcoholism, hating, trolling, fraud, dishonesty, stealing, idolatry and the many vices thrown towards us by darker sides of society, but it is a battle, depending on circumstances, needing God’s constant help through Jesus Christ, and mutual help of believers by prayer and encouragement. We have not too much control over what we can do in our days, especially if income is low and we are poor. Mainly we keep struggling to eliminate vice from our day and try to include the positive, beneficial things as much as we can. We need to include self-development so we can stay productive and work profitably as we know and obey our Lord, who is Jesus. This might require that we learn from both worldly and godly sources, if we are realistic and honest about it. It depends on circumstances often outside of our control. So it is an ongoing need for wisdom and grace from God, who gives from above only good and perfect things, and we have to trust what God actually gives, not just what we think God might give. Reality is the thing. We should filter out the excessively ungodly, worldly, harmful vice, but we need to accept what is put into our lives from above and accept that God is real and knows what is good for us and that might involve things we do not relish such as hardship, boredom, difficulty and sadness. In all our struggling we can remember that Christ provided for us the crucified sacrifice which affects our behaviour and God raised Jesus Christ from the dead so that we have help at hand forever. God made with us a covenant by that cross. He is in the struggle with us.
