P.O.W.E.R. Morning RoutinesSample

The Firstfruits of the Day

If you type in “morning routine” on YouTube, you’ll be treated with a generous assortment of cringe-inducing videos that promise to help you become a millionaire by copying what Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos supposedly do upon waking. It is true that if you study the life of nearly any successful person, you’ll usually find a rigorous morning routine. However, while temporal success is not necessarily a bad thing, both the content of and the reason for a Christian’s morning routine should come from his or her identity in Christ. As we saw in the previous chapter, a Christian’s desire to be productive originates in the acknowledgment that he or she belongs to God. As a blood-bought child of God, your life is a living sacrifice (Rom. 12:1).

And the first thing you do when you roll out of bed in the morning is your first act of worship for the day.

The Bible talks about this principle as “firstfruits.” The idea is that God expected His people to offer Him the first and best of their productivity. “The best of the firstfruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God” (Ex. 34:26). Whether you were growing grain (Lev. 2:14) or raising livestock (Deut. 12:6), whether you were rich or poor (Num. 12:20), God’s people were to give Him the firstfruits of their labor. “Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce” (Prov. 3:9).

By giving God the first and best of what you had produced, you were acknowledging that it all belongs to Him anyway. And while we no longer practice the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, the concept of firstfruits lives on in principle. We give the firstfruits of our paychecks to our churches as an acknowledgment that whatever money we receive for our work is a blessing from God. We give Him the first and best because, in truth, it all belongs to Him. In fact, the principle of firstfruits so permeated the thinking of early Christians that it may have been part of the reason they decided to meet on Sunday, the first day of the week. By giving God the first day of the week, early Christians were acknowledging that the whole week belongs to Him.

In the same way, when you spend the first moments of your day praying, reading Scripture, and doing other activities that prime you to be productive, you are offering God the firstfruits of your day. But what exactly should you do during this time?