My recent article "God Comes First. College Comes Second.” got a lot of comments. I received good comments but also comments from people that completely misunderstood my article. By putting God first, I didn’t mean to forget about the deadlines, GPA, or homework. This is not what the Christian life is all about. God does not work this way.
As a Christian college student who is very competitive about grades, I tend to forget the source of my strength. It doesn’t take much to forget about God and to put Him aside. There are a lot of times where just thinking about my homework, I get all stressed out and the last thing that I think about is doing my devotions with God.
I wrote that article because I realized that though I had a lot of things to do and deadlines to meet, that was not an excuse to not have my time with God. I cannot leave Him aside and then expect Him to help me on my exams and final grades. To put God first does not mean that I am going to read the Bible the whole day and pray for hours, while my professors are frustrated with me because I am not meeting the deadlines. That is not honoring God either. God wants us to do well on school stuff, but understanding first that only He can do everything if we depend on Him everyday.
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might…”
Ecclesiastes 9:10
God clearly says in this verse that whatever we can do, we have to do it. And the things that are obviously impossible for us, He will make them possible. This means that spending the whole day reading the Bible and praying when you have an exam the next day, gives you no right to think that God will help you guess every question right and will help you score an A. God cannot help us if we didn’t do the part that was possible and easy to accomplish for us.
Putting God first simply means to always remember and be conscious of who is the source of our strength and recognize Him as such. Having the daily devotions, Bible reading, and prayer time will always help us to be very effective throughout the day, and with the rest of our responsibilities (this includes college stuff).
We put God first in our lives when we glorify Him in everything we do. It doesn’t matter if you are a pastor or someone who cleans tables at a restaurant - everything we do is a ministry, and if we do our things correctly, we are glorifying God as the first One in our lives. Therefore, those of us who are Christian college students, are meant to give our best in everything we do, without leaving God aside but trusting Him our everything instead. And this is what it really means to put God first in our lives.
