The final installment of our steps to fulfilling New Year’s Resolutions/Daily Walk with God is accountability.

When it comes to working out and losing weight, my wife wants me to succeed more than anyone, so I tell her my intentions of working out 3 times a week. She’ll hold me accountable and keep me to it. Even when I rolled my ankle in basketball, which was barely a good of enough excuse for her to let up on me.

Find someone in your life that will hold you to spending time with God, almost to the point that it’s annoying. Make sure it’s someone that you can be honest with, even when you didn’t spend time with God; otherwise it’s kind of pointless. Find those people that you can be accountable to and at the same time you can hold accountable.

So there it is. Three helpful hints to spending time with God:
1. Make it Realistic and Measurable.
2. Put It In Your Schedule.
3. Be Accountable.

Hope this helps.

Continuing our conversation on fulfilling New Year’s Resolutions and to add on to the realistic and measurable step; the next step to fulfilling your New Year’s Resolutions is to put it in your schedule. My scheduled time to work out was basketball on Monday nights, Wii Fit Wednesdays and Thursdays after work.

When it comes to spending time with God, put it in your schedule. If you’re a morning person, spend time with God in the morning. If when you get to work, you can’t remember if you brushed your teeth before you left, you’re not a morning person and maybe you should spend time with God later in the day; like on your lunch break, or after work, or before or after dinner, or before you go to bed. I don’t care when it is, just put it in your schedule so you know when it is, and so you’ll know if you missed it or not.

A good friend and mentor of mine, Josh Clark, once said (or stole from someone), “You can’t MAKE time, you have to TAKE time.” The point being, we all have 24 hours in a day, we can’t create time, we can only take it from somewhere else. So if you want to get serious about spending time with God, you’re going to have to take it from somewhere/one/thing else.

I’ll also credit him for saying, “If you change the way you speak, you’ll change the way you think.” So, stop saying you’ll make time for God (as far as I know, science is not that advanced… yet) and start taking time.