God > Hobbies

Over the last three weeks, God has opened my eyes to many areas in my life that I needed to clean up. It’s a shame that it sometimes takes a traumatic event to open our eyes to our sin, but I heard so many similar stores through the years.


The other day, God convicted me of something that may seem quite minuscule to some. All of my life, I have been told to have a hobby to help get away from the “normal” life. It helps with stress, anxiety, etc. The problem is that many hobbies cost a lot of money, and inevitably cause stress. It sounds very similar to Newton's Third Law of Motion, often called the law of action and reaction, states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.


I am not here to tell you that hobbies are sinful. By no means. What I am saying is that if I am using the hobby to relieve my stress, then that is wrong. At this point, I have used hobbies in exchange of a closer walk with God. God tells us to cast our cares on him. 


I can’t breath without God (Job 12:10). What in the world makes me think that I can overcome my stress and anxiety by replacing Him with some hobby? The other problem with this situation that when I replace God with a hobby, no matter what intentions I may have, my relationship with God becomes unbalance. tIn fact, there are usually other areas that fall by the wayside. If we are depending on our hobbies to relieve our stress, then prayer is probably going to suffer.


Prayer is our lifeline in times of suffering, stress, and anxiety. So many people think that if we pray, then we are surrendering our man card. We are not masculine if we depend on anyone else. Complete and total surrender to God is the sign of a weak man. How can we value prayer if we don’t understand our relationship with God? When we fail to understand the ultimate sovereignty of the King of kings and Lord or lords, then we will always maintain a dysfunctional roller coaster type of relationship with God.


At some point in our life, we have all had that one friend that never calls, texts, etc. unless they need something. God is not a convenience store or a fast food drive through. God isn’t sitting there on the edge of His seat saying “Oh, I wonder if my children are going to need me today.”


Anything done outside of complete surrender to God will ultimately cause us to fail. Nothing replaced God. At some point, the hobby will not bring us peace and tranquility. Generally, at this point, we move to another hobby and another hobby until our stress and anxiety is relieved. 


1 Peter 5:7 “casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.”

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