Time and Priority
“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.” Romans 13:11-12
Since spring is just around the corner with the first signs being black cars turning yellow from pollen, tiny leaves sprouting from trees, and the biannual ritual of changing the time on our clocks, it is also time for some spring cleaning. I have been going through some of my old Bible notes from the 1980’s and have found some that I can use in my blogs. These were written over 30 years ago, but the content is just as relevant today and maybe more so.
Most of us never seem to have enough time. We worry because we don’t think we’re going to get this done or that done, or we never seem to have time to get sufficient rest for all the things that have to be done the next day. The health professionals tell us that sleep deprivation is one of the things that leads to all sorts of health problems. It makes sense. Our bodies can’t run on empty, and neither can we run on sheer exhaustion. We all have the same amount of time–24 hours a day–but somehow it just doesn’t seem to be enough. If we really consider the matter, we spend our time just about how we want to. Sure, there are things that we all have to do each day–work, chores, errands, eating, and sleeping, but somewhere amid all these time-consuming imperatives, surely, we can find time for prayer and Bible study.
Prayer and Bible study should be a priority in our lives. What constitutes our priorities? What’s important to us? The following was printed in the “Our Daily Bread” devotional many years ago concerning how a typical lifespan of 70 years is spent:
“Sleep-23 years; Work-16 years; Watching TV-8 years; Eating-6 years; Travel-6 years; Leisure-4 1/2 years; Illness-4 years; Dressing-2 years; and Religion (attending church, reading the Bible, praying, etc.)-6 months. Now if we knew for sure that our years on earth would be considerably less than the usual threescore and ten, what adjustments would we make in the expenditure of time? When our life comes to an end, it is like a tale that is told. What kind of story would our life tell? Would it reflect God-honoring priorities?” I think that if we were to do a new survey regarding how people spend their time, the years of sleep, work, and religion would decrease while the other six ways of spending time would increase.
Based on these original calculations, the average person spends four times as many hours putting on his or her clothes as he or she spends in prayer and Bible study and twelve times the amount for eating rather than serving the Lord. No wonder Jesus advised folks to fast so that they could have more time to pray! In Luke 12:22-31, Jesus said that God knows that we need time to take care of ourselves and our families, but if we make seeking the kingdom of God a priority, everything else would fall into place. Everything that was necessary would be accomplished. God’s timetable is much more efficient than ours.
Speaking of time, I also ran across an article that I saved several years ago, “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day”, written by Arnold Bennett. He wrote that “time is a miracle. You have never had it before; you will never have it again. You cannot bank, pickle, preserve, or embalm it; it will not keep. You cannot go in debt to time. You can waste the present moment, but you cannot mortgage one minute of the future. Time is democratic; you get just as much as anyone; just as much, but not one minute more. The millionaire and the pauper are treated just alike, as long as life lasts each has exactly 24 hours per day. We sometimes try to excuse ourselves; ‘When I get more time I am going to do so and so’. You will never get any more time; you have all the time there is, ever has been, ever will be. We can forget the past; look to the future, but any growth that we are going to experience has to come in the present. Time is far more valuable than money; if you have time, you can make money.”
These two articles are so timely for our day and age that I thought we all could benefit from the words of these wise folks. Considering that Jesus could come any minute for His church, it behooves us to use our time wisely in serving the Lord. I suppose a good practice would be, as we lay down at night to sleep, to go back over the day in our mind and see how we used the precious time that God has given us. Did He get any glory at all in the things we said and the things that we did? Are our priorities in order–God, family, others? May we all use the next 24 hours in ways that will glorify the Lord and encourage others.