Discover how to create a God-centred morning routine that transforms your day and strengthens your faith, even in the busiest seasons of life.

You wake up to the sound of the kids running around downstairs. You hope they’re playing nicely, but it sounds a bit like World War III.

As soon as you get out of bed, someone complains that they’re starving, another one has their head stuck in a jumper and all you really want is a quiet coffee with Jesus, because you could really use his patience right about now!

This scene might be fictional, but it’s not outlandish.

Maybe you don’t have kids, but you can still relate to that feeling of waking up, only to have the day smack you in the face and the mere idea of being able to sit with your bible vanishes like the morning mist.

That’s what having a world-centred morning feels like.

Life is busy. With or without kids. With or without a full time job. With or without (name your personal situation here)….

There’s never enough time in the day. Which is why it’s even more important to make the time to be with God when the day starts.

We’ve got to approach the day like Mary, rather than her sister Martha.

A soldier wouldn’t go into battle without his armour - and likewise, we should prepare ourselves for the day ahead by arming ourselves with scripture and clothing ourselves with prayer.

When you step into the day after placing your concerns at God’s feet and drinking in His wisdom, you approach the day with more peace, positivity, and productivity.

The cares of this world have been given to God and this frees you to show up and shine.

So if you’re tired of waking up to chaos, worrisome tasks and the noise of the world, let’s look at what makes a God-centred morning routine.

A God-centred Morning Routine

When your morning routine is centred around God, it makes Him the priority and places time with Him as the most important thing.

There are several ways you can spend time with God; by reading the bible, in prayer, singing songs of praise, reflecting or meditating on and memorising scripture, or even listening to a sermon being preached.

A God-centred morning makes fellowship with God the goal. As Jesus said “few things are needed—or indeed only one.” (Luke 10:42).

The only thing that is really needed in any of our lives in spending time with God. We need to spend time with God more than we need to eat!

It’s funny when you think of it that way, isn’t it? Or at least it is for me because I really love food! But Jesus views our time with God and our work with God as more crucial and more sustaining than physical food.

Jesus’ disciples went to get some food for Jesus because he was tired. When they came back, Jesus was talking with a Samaritan woman and the bible says;

Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

John 4:31-34 (emphasis mine)

So, I want you to see how crucial starting your day with God is. I want you to see it as more important than food because food provides temporary life but being with God will sustain us for an eternal life.

In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice;
in the morning I lay my requests before you
and wait expectantly.

Psalm 5:3

So if you’re ready, let’s create your God-centred morning routine!

Building Your Routine

Step 1 - Write down your goal for your God-centred morning

What are you hoping to achieve? Building your closeness with God, growing in your knowledge of the bible, or developing your prayer life for example?

Having a goal for your morning with God will determine how you structure your morning. Your goal will look different from mine, and it can even change as your spiritual life progresses. What you need as a new Christian will look very different from someone who’s thirty years in the faith.

Step 2 - based on your goal, write down the things that will help you with that goal, and make them non-negotiable.

So if your goal is developing your prayer life, then prayer would be a non-negotiable element to your morning routine.

Or if your goal was growing in your bible knowledge, perhaps memorising scripture would be your non-negotiable element.

Why am I saying these should be non-negotiable? Shouldn’t the whole morning routine be non-negotiable?

In an ideal world, we would all have as much time as we wanted to spend in our morning routines. But I’ve been around the block a few times, and life happens!

Maybe you’ve got a plane to catch. Maybe you have to leave really early for an event across town. Maybe your kid has the finale of their show today and you still haven’t finished their costume.

Life doesn’t run smoothly and there will always be things trying to pull our attention.

What I don’t want is for you to throw your morning routine out the window because you don’t feel like you can fit the whole thing in.

Whereas, even on your busiest days, if you do your non-negotiable activity, then you’ll know that you’re still growing in your time with God each day.

Step 3 - Outline a rhythm for your morning routine, highlighting your non-negotiable activity

Here’s the fun part! The part where we get to design a morning routine that will feed our souls and help us grow in our faith.

And if you're thinking, 'but I don't have time for a morning routine!' I want you to ask yourself if you are able to find time to eat in the day.

I'm guessing the answer to that is 'yes'. And if that's the case, then you can 100% find time to spend with God during the day.

Time with God doesn't have to be spent reading your bible for an hour. It can be as simple as spending a moment in prayer.

Yes. Just prayer!

And prayer is something you can do anywhere, anytime, and for however long you have or want. So it doesn't have to be complicated, drawn out, and full of bells and whistles. This routine has to fit your season of life right now. So work with what you've got.

If you wanted to create a routine with more than one activity in it, the order in which you put things is up to you. You can start with prayer and gratitude, or with a bible verse that you’re memorising.

Bible verse cards inside our monthly stationery club.

You can go straight into a bible study and then wrap everything up with a prayer.

Bible study page and Bible verse cards inside our monthly stationery club.

The choice is yours!

Here are some ideas of things you many want to include in your God-centred morning. Just remember to highlight anything that’s a non-negotiable for you so that you’ll know, when you have less time, that you’re still starting your day with God in the most impactful way for your season of life.

• prayer

  

  Prayer and Praise pages inside our monthly stationery club.

• bible reading

• bible memorisation

  

Bible verse cards inside our monthly stationery club.

• gratitude and thanksgiving

• audio or video sermon

• bible study

  

  Bible study page inside our monthly stationery club.

• songs of praise

• Youversion daily refresh video

• Psalm reading

  

  Bible verse cards inside our monthly stationery club.

• work through a devotional book

• work through a bible commentary

• journaling

  

Monthly journal prompts inside our monthly stationery club.

• Hebrew word study (this is where you look at a word in the Hebrew and dive into it’s meaning)

• Biblical Greek word study (the same as above but for the Greek New Testament)

• spending a few minutes planning out your day ahead

  

  A Daily Planner page inside our monthly stationery club.

• identifying your most important tasks for the remainder of the day

• making a note of someone to encourage or connect with that day

  

  Note cards and matching envelopes inside our monthly stationery club.

• preparing items for the day’s meals

  

  Menu planning pages inside our monthly stationery club.

• doing a few minutes of exercise

• taking a minute to track your habits

  

  A Monthly Tracker page inside our monthly stationery club.

Please note that your morning routine should not include all of these things! This list is just to inspire you or nudge you with ideas of what to include in your own morning routine.

Step 4 - Building in routine resistance

What do I mean by that? A resistant routine is one that can withstand even the most hectic lifestyle.

How?

Because it has dealt with or prepared itself for common challenges.

Remember when we talked about highlighting your non-negotiables?

I was helping you make your routine more resistant to “life”.

Lack of time, distractions, and inconsistency are morning routine killers so we need to ensure that your morning routine can resist or bounce back from these as much as possible.

Your non-negotiable elements will help you when you’re struggling for time and have a lot of things competing for your attention.

Dealing with inconsistency can be a bit trickier - especially for the perfectionists of us out there! 🙋‍♀️

Something that helps me have grace with myself is this verse:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

Lamentations 3:22-23

Every day is a new start. Even if, despite your best efforts, you miss a day or more, you can ALWAYS jump right back in the next day.

God isn’t going to shut you out. He wants you to spend time with Him.

And the sooner you jump back in after missing a day, the easier and easier it becomes to create those longer habit streaks.

As soon as I stopped beating myself up about continually missing my quiet times (that’s what I call my time with God), I found it a lot easier to open the bible every day!

I freed myself from the guilt of perfection - and just came to God the next day.

And the more I did that, the less I began to skip my quiet times. It became easier to spend time in the bible because I wasn’t doing it with a guilty conscience or a feeling of unworthiness.

I began to eagerly soak up the scriptures in the morning and cherish my time with Jesus and my coconut milk latte!

So I encourage you to keep going, even if you miss a day or two. Don’t give up meeting God, first thing. It’s more important than food!

Help For the Journey

So now you know what you need to do to build a God-centred morning routine. But where do you start?

If you’d like some ready made, and utterly gorgeous printables to use, plan with and encourage others with, then you’ll definitely want to join our stationery club!

The Paper Me Pretty club is the only place in the world where you’ll find the prettiest paper to help nourish your faith and improve your productivity.

Our beautiful monthly collections come with over 27 stunning items all designed to help you become more organised and nurture your soul.

Each month includes calendars, planner pages, bible verse cards, pages for bible study, prayer and praise, goal setting, journaling, meal planning and more!

Plus, each month I host a monthly goal setting call where I walk you through setting your goals for the month and breaking them down into achievable action steps!

This is the growth you’ve been looking for!

Invest in your time with God and invest in yourself by giving yourself the cutest stationery to grow, plan and journal with!

Click here to join today!

I can’t wait to welcome you inside the club!

He Who Began a Good Work Will Carry It On

I know that if you’re reading this, you’re not here by accident. You were meant to read this. And that means that I was meant to extend an invitation to you to join our club, because I know how much our club can encourage you in your faith, help you in your productivity and inspire you to be an encouragement to others.

How? Through our bible verse cards, faith-based stationery items, note cards and envelopes, and planning pages.

These might seem like little things, but they’ll have a big impact on you and ultimately on those you interact with. Because as your faith and organisation grows, so does your ability to encourage others - which is exactly what our note cards, envelopes and bible verse cards can do - they’re perfect for encouraging others with!

And by doing so, you’re ‘carrying on’ or ‘passing forward’ good things.

I hope that you’ll join me and our community inside the Paper Me Pretty stationery club. We can’t wait to welcome you!

Until then, I’ll leave you with this prayer:

I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

Philippians 1:3-6

Other posts you may like:

• 10 Practical Ways to Grow Your Faith

• How to Create a Morning Routine

• The Busy Mum’s Masterplan: 10 Strategies to Maximise Your Day