Ending Your Day with God

January 10, 2023 | Andrew Zakhari

At some point your work day comes to an end. You are home from the office or you’ve put down the laptop screen. Let’s also suppose that you have reached the point in the evening where the children are put to bed and whatever remaining tasks around the house are completed for the night.

This is a wonderful opportunity to put a spiritual frame around your day. Having started the morning with God, at various points throughout the day were made aware of his presence, you now decide you want to end the day with God.

Ending the day with God ensures that whatever happened during the course of the day – good, bad or meh – you are bringing it to a perfect end. By perfect, we mean something like a ship out at sea now returning to harbor. It may have been lost or caught up in a storm, but if it returns to the harbor it has found its perfect end. The same applies to ending our day with God.

Here is what Baxter counsels:

“Before returning to sleep, it is wise and necessary to review the actions and mercies of the day past, so that you may be thankful for all the special mercies and humbled for all your sins.”

Whether you were aware of it at the time or not, each day God uniquely provides mercies and blessings. It is easy to settle for the obvious and material blessings (food on the table, a job, a loving family, etc.), but we should endeavor to go deeper here.

In reviewing your day, do you see God’s gracious mercy in your life? When you talked with your boss, did you sense God supporting you? When you spoke to the children around the dinner table, were you more aware of how God created them each with a unique personality and set of gifts? When you were discouraged about something, did a particular scripture come to mind? These are deeper awareness of God’s working in your life and they are worth recounting.

But we also must look at the other side. Were there sins committed that should have been avoided? Were there opportunities to do good and yet there was a failure to do it? These also are worth bringing to God, asking for forgiveness and strength to do better the next day.

It is also good to end the day with a Psalm or a few verses of comfort from Scripture. This reminds you at the end of the day about the most important things that our life should be about as followers of Jesus.

My prayer is that over time you would enjoy the blessing of learning how to spend each day of God as you seek to follow the Lord Jesus.