The Five Love Languages of God: Quality Time 🕜

Heey Sis,

We are continuing with love languages and today is all about quality time. I know I can do better with spending quality time with God. I hope this helps you know and love spending time with God.

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me - Revelation 3:20 

Isn’t it amazing that our Heavenly Father is calling out to us, in readiness and desire to spend time with us? We see from the beginning of time that God would take walks in the garden of Eden to spend time with man. We were formed from Him and in His very image and so, it only makes sense that He would desire that we spend quality time with Him. 

Quality time is showing love and affection by spending dedicated time together.  Nothing says “I love you” like full, undivided attention from those you love. It is a way to deepen connection with others through sharing time.  If then we indeed and genuinely love God, we would desire to set apart time to give Him our undivided attention. 

Quality time with God is more for us, more than it is for Him. He has commanded us to love Him with all our mind, body, and soul. And if we are to do this appropriately, we must spend time with Him to know that which He loves. Time spent with Him is a way to profess our love to Him. Time spent with Him is the gateway to our transformation - for as He is, so are we (1 John 4:17). A prime example is Moses, he spent so much time in the presence of God to the point where his face began to glow (Exodus 34:29-35). His time with God was rooted in wanting to know God, wanting to know about His person and character. Frankly as he drew nearer to desiring to know God, he began to glow and experience an inside out transformation. This is the result of spending quality time with God - quality time to know Him and not just to ask Him for tangible things. Our faith thrives and becomes unwavering, we glow and grow in confidence in our relationship with God. 

There are many ways by which we can spend quality time with God. To touch on a few; 

Listening to each other 

In a relationship, listening to each other is a sign of good communication. Feeling heard and understood further enhances the bond within a relationship. 

This same principle applies to our relationship with God. We often want to be the ones doing the talking and forget to listen to what God wants to say. God wants to speak to us. He tells us to call unto Him and He will answer us and will TELL us great and mighty things (Jeremiah 33:3). Isn’t this incredible?! That the God of the universe wants to speak to us and through us wonderful and glorious things that we do not yet know! But first, we must cultivate the habit of being still in His presence and waiting to hear Him speak. This could be through time spent listening to a sermon, worship songs, prayer or however it is you choose to spend time with Him. 

Limiting technology while with each other

Technology can be useful but also a killer for communication. Putting aside our mobile phones, computers, tablets etc can help us focus more on communicating with God. We might argue well I have my bible on my phone and perhaps notes. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that - but there is a slight chance that we might also get distracted with the many apps and other things on these devices.  For this reason, it could be worthwhile investing in a physical bible and notebook. Then your trigger for distraction is minimised and focus on God is maximised. 

Focus on quality and not quantity 

Sometimes, spending time with God is not always about how long, but the quality of interaction carried out in the meeting. Spending time with God has somehow become a competitive event - A measure of time and not quality. And so, we often find ourselves discouraged because we are unable to carve out hours in the day. For us to experience quality of interaction with God, we must humble ourselves before Him. After-all, so many individuals that had an encounter with Jesus did so in one single conversation which may have taken minutes and their lives changed drastically. This is because of the intentional and meaningful conversation they had with Jesus. For example, Jesus explaining to Nicodemus what he must do to be saved (John 3:1-21); Jesus telling Simon Peter to cast his net to catch some fish after they had worked hard the night before and caught nothing (Luke 5:4-11). The New Testament is filled with so many of these encounters - conversation encounters that happened in a moment. 

This is not to say that we shouldn’t aspire to be able to sit in His presence for hours. For in His presence there’s fullness of joy and divine peace. It is to encourage us to start with focus on quality of conversation and not quantity of time. Start small and as you build up in faith, so will the time spent in quality. 

Sis, if this or any of the previous posts has blessed or impacted you, please share on your social media and tell others about it. Here is the web version of the posts to repost.

🩷 +💡