Welcome to 15 Minutes in the Word with New York Times best-selling author Joyce Meyer.

On today's program, Joyce will be teaching from her series, Keeping God First.

There is much in life that competes for our attention, but there is one who wants to be first before anything else,

and when we make Jesus the center everything gets better be

encouraged today as joyce shares how we can pursue God first and grow a deep

satisfying relationship with him now here's Joyce with today's teaching I'm

doing a series called keeping God first last night we talked about the law

first things the law of first things not the law of first things the law of first things not the suggestion

of first things the law of first things it's just like the law of gravity it works whether you

like it to or not the law of first things means that the first portion of everything belongs to

god it's not yours it belongs to god and if you keep the first portion you're. It's not yours. It belongs to God. And if you keep the first portion, you're keeping what's not yours. You're actually stealing. You say, well, that's kind of a heavy statement. Well, that's what Malachi 3 says. Malachi 3 is talking about the tithe, and it starts out saying, you're robbing me. The whole nation is robbing me. And because you're robbing me, you're living under curse. They said, well, how have we robbed you? And he said,

you have withheld or you have kept your tithe. Isn't that interesting? The first portion doesn't

even belong to us. Well, let's take it over into the area of time. I don't believe the first

portion of our time really belongs to us either.

I believe that the two things that are the most important for us to give God the first portion of on a regular basis is our money and our time.

Our money and our time.

Well, to be honest with you, some Christians today, those especially who have been around the word for a long time, you've kind of died to that first 10% of your money. You've already figured out that's not going to be yours. You don't have much problem giving that to God. You might have a little problem once in a while when he asks you for something beyond that, but that first 10% you've already figured out belongs to God and you've seen him work in your life, and you know if you want

the rest of what you have to be blessed, and you need to give God that first 10%.

But I'll be honest with you, most of us, myself included, we can give our money away easier than we

can give our time.

So we need to talk about the importance of spending time with God.

We talked about that some last night.

...