Here’s a vital topic for us to grapple with if our lives are to be fruitful!
God has put enormous potential into every one of us. But what we achieve for His glory and kingdom is genuinely affected, very practically, by whether we learn some mastery of the skills of stewardship of time. If I want to love the Lord with all my soul, it has implications for making him Lord over my time!
This isn’t an easy issue to think about biblically. It didn’t arise in the first century because that simply wasn’t as pressured a society. But there are principles we can apply from what the Bible says about how we handle money. There’s a very challenging story in Mark 12: `Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few pence. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on”’ (NIV).
Jesus’ calling to us here is total discipleship, total dedication: a life where worship is my whole life-attitude, where I’m saying, Everything I have is a gift from God and belongs to him, & I want to live that way. Which is why, when we think about our money for instance, `How much shall I give away to God` is the wrong question. All we have is God’s! So the question is not, `How much shall I give away to God and others – 5%? 10%?` – but rather, `Lord, how do you want me to use your money you’ve put in my hands? How much should I keep for my personal needs, and what should I do with the rest? What have you entrusted this to me for?`
So we can apply the same principle with our time. God gives us a gift each week, seven days of 24 hours each. And it’s not a question of, I’ll give 10% to God for helping a youth group or homegroup leading and then the rest is mine. It’s all God’s time: in work, for our family, for leisure, for sleep, for watching football; it’s all from him and belongs to him.
This takes us right back to how we first became a Christian (and this happens over and over again, doesn’t it: any important issue will take us back to the Gospel in one way or another). We repented; that means we said we were sorry for sin and especially for our independence, and so we said, Lord, I give myself 100% to you, I am yours, you are my Lord, all I have is yours. So we’re applying that here: Lord Jesus, my time is all yours; how do you want me to use the time you’ve entrusted to me? How can I love you with all my soul in this? How do you want me to use the 168 hours you’ve given me this week? Where and how shall I invest it? And if we can grasp this it will change our lives; it will give us joy, it will mean we get the things done God made us for and that we long to do; it will mean fruitfulness.
So how do we, as the Bible says, `redeem the time`? How do we `buy it back` among all the pressures of a fallen world that give us such a sense of our time being wasted?
First of all we need to see where we really are: so try keeping a chart of how you use your time over two weeks. You may well be surprised at what you find. One of my Canadian colleagues said that when she did this and realized she was spending 18 hours on TV each week, it really motivated her to get a grip on things.
Then: Whether or not we do an actual chart, we’ll be aware that there are certain main blocks of time that are fixed – work, family, rest. Hopefully we’ve grasped the prime importance of learning to see them all under God’s lordship, see them as acts of worship. They are God’s purpose for us; and if they are God’s purpose, they’re not pointless, we can see them as acts of obedience and worship.
Our work, for example: work isn’t just something we get out of the way so that we can do the genuinely worthwhile things. It’s what God himself has given us to do and created us for, for the majority of our time (see Genesis 2). So it can’t be just a `waste of time`. We need to learn to see God with us there. Sometimes our profession may be called a `vocation`, which comes from a Latin phrase meaning calling; and that’s what our job is, a calling from God. `Whatever you do`, says Paul in Colossians 3:23-24, `work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.` Work is not wasted time; it’s growth time, it’s worship time, and it will be redeemed as we sense: This is a place God has called me into to grow, at least for now, and to build.
Now there can be a problem that leadership-type people tend to want to be able to do everything. And we can’t. I used to think how blessed Margaret Thatcher was that she apparently only needed five hours sleep a night, and how much more I could achieve if I were like that! But we must pray: Lord help me be practical and recognize, with your help, the limits to how much I, personally, can do. There are deliberate decisions we must make here. I remember my old colleague Graeme Fairbairn saying how the time he invested in God’s service in church inevitably cut into the time he had for the reading and networking that would have advanced his career. We have to make these choices with God, and trust him for the consequences. Others of us may be so led by God to take steps in using more time in the “secular” work he has called us to that we will actually have less time for church ministry. And there’s no reason to feel guilty about that, provided we’ve genuinely made the choice with God. But we will not be able to do everything; there are choices we have to make.
Another block of fixed time that should feature significantly on our chart is our family time. Again, this is not something to get out of the way so that we can do `Christian things`! Again in Genesis we find that family life is a central part of our life-calling from God. One aspect of that may be our time with our kids; and that’s enormously important, because now’s the time to invest so that they become healthy followers of Jesus in the lives of his kingdom. But as Graeme also said to me: we want our kids to learn that there’s a real spiritual war on, and to show them how we live in the light of that. We need to ask the Lord to help us see how to balance these things.
A third, essential fixed block is our sleep and `recovery` time. Does that happen simply because we are forced to take a break from what is truly worthwhile? No: it’s a purpose from God: `He gives his beloved sleep!` (Psalm 127). Our sleep and recovery time has a place in the rhythms of the purposes of God. Receive it with worship as a gift from God!
These three are, we may say, non-negotiable, `fixed` blocks of time. But the main issue for us is what we learn to do with our `discretionary` time, the time we have control over to use in different ways. And the key lesson I myself have learnt from all the sessions I’ve been to on time management is this: in your discretionary time, identify the key thing you want to accomplish, and do that first. If small things get left and they actually matter, you’ll almost certainly fit them in somewhere. If the big ones get left, you won’t have space to.
It’s a really important mental discipline to learn to do the key job first. It’s hard! Some days we come in to work and we feel woozy, and we change a printer cartridge and fiddle with some computer settings, then we read something, and then it’s coffee time, and then oops… most of the morning’s gone. On another day we exercise the mental discipline to do the big project first, and we usually manage to change the printer cartridge too! But on the days when we put the small things first, we often end up with a sense of futility and frustration at the end of the day. The same applies longterm to our lives; if we don’t learn to put the key things first, we’ll find we’ve spent our lives doing neither what God wanted nor the things we really wanted to do.
Let’s apply this now to redeeming spiritually our discretionary time. We need to learn the habit of planning in the key things first. Which are what? First, time with God. Why first? Because we’re called first to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. But that means, each day, planning in time for Bible reading and prayer and worship, and then protecting that time. We will not thrive as a believer, and will fall far short of our potential, unless we do!
Secondly, our key relationships. We’ve talked already about seeing the value in God’s eyes of the `fixed` time that we automatically give to these, but here we’re making a different point: God calls us to make sure we deliberately invest discretionary time in them! That’s our key friendships, particularly if we’re single, and our marriage if we have one. If we want our marriage to last, it’s essential we spend quality time together at least once a week. It amazes me when people tell me their marriages are a bit stressed and they don’t see the link to the fact that they haven’t been making those choices to spend good time together! Likewise, most of us will need to deliberately plan in and ensure time with our kids; I very much wish I had been taught that earlier in my own ministry. We need to plan these things in because we are wanting God to use us!
And then thirdly, plan in the time for your key area(s) of ministry. And fourthly, time for witness, for sharing our faith with people who are not yet followers of Jesus. Some of us are in spiritual leadership roles where the sheer volume of work can squeeze witness out of our lives. But our priorities and our leadership will warp unless in some way we are actively involved in fulfilling the Great Commission. We need to pray, `Lord, let me never forget that this is a war zone, not a holiday camp; that people all around me are living futilely, and dying tragically, because they’re without Jesus. Help me remember that, whatever else you’ve given me to do, you’ve given me a part of the frontier of your kingdom, a place to share your love and truth, that is mine and mine only. And Lord, help me think and pray hard and realistically how to free up time to take your love and truth to the people across that part of the frontier you’ve given me.` Let’s dream big dreams of how God can use us in witness; and make sure we create space, or just permit space, to `walk across the room` and share our faith.
And fifthly, our sabbath and leisure. These are a command from God! But my impression is that, for many of us, our day off a week is something we need to carefully protect – to protect ourselves from ourselves. Jesus’ teaching, and the ten commandments, make clear that joyful sabbath is made for man, not man for the sabbath, it is made by God for man, and we disregard what God has ordained here at our considerable peril. Also I’ve never forgotten the answer another colleague, ex-missionary Patrick McElligott, gave once to the question `What do you want to become better at in this coming year?` My golf swing, he said! How unspiritual? No; God calls us to sabbath and leisure (whatever that may be for you: anyway, time that leaves you refreshed and renewed). If we ignore these things we simply won’t last, and the burnout of longterm exhaustion can leave us damaged and less fruitful for a very considerable time. Again, there may be very deliberate self-assessments and decisions, even refusals, that we need to make here. I remember Jonathan Lamb from IFES saying that his experience of looking after Christian workers was he usually needed to urge them to do less, not more. And Lindsay Brown, also from IFES, said something along the lines of: If you can carefully safeguard your daily time with God; your food; your sleep; and your day off each week, you’ll go far.
Let’s plan our discretionary time deliberately so that these key things happen. In a way this is the biblical principle of firstfruits: set aside time first to make sure the main things happen.
Then there are various more `technical ` things that may help us. One is knowing the part of the day when you personally are at your best, and scheduling the most important things for then. Another is limiting certain types of tasks (answering emails, or phone or social media messages. for example) to one period of the day, so that they don’t keep on taking over what you’re doing. A third might be to set a phone alarm, for every 20-30 minutes perhaps, so that you sense how time is passing; this can limit the danger of allowing a task to extend beyond the necessary time (eg continually perfecting or rephrasing an email) – or allowing our web-surfing or social media to last far beyond what we would have wanted. This `segmenting` of our time can also have significant health benefits, providing a break when we can rest our eyes by looking out of the window at something distant, or when we can get some exercise (and experts say this is surprisingly valuable) by walking up and down the nearest stairs.
Two final comments however: Having said all this about planning, let’s make it a goal to learn also to be open to God and not frustrated when He – but HE! – overrules our plans. This means: don’t plan too tightly. My wife says I never leave enough space in my plans, and it’s true; I don’t allow sufficiently for the cussedness of life! (But that’s exactly why we need to ensure first that the key things happen.) And secondly another comment from Graeme Fairbairn: We can’t do it all; we’ve inevitably got to cut (and this also means, even while we should seek to be generous with our time, we do need to know our limits, and learn how to say, gently, “No” when something can’t or shouldn’t be added in); but whatever you cut, don’t cut your time with God. UCCF general secretary Oliver Barclay likewise said he wished he had time for learning more languages, or real modern fiction, or scientific research; but, he said, we are limited people; and we have to recognise this to really live out the purposes God made us for. And therefore, plan: plan your disposable time so that you do get the key things done. What would your family write on your tombstone after the words `(S)he always made sure (s)he had time for… `: some television series? Facebook? Us the family? God?
`A poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few pence. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on.”’ So what then is our calling as we manage our time? Does this mean we never watch a football international, or never watch a movie? No! But we do want to say, Lord, may your kingdom come over the hours you have given me; help me seek first your kingdom over how I use my time. We simply won’t fulfil our potential unless we learn to shape our time under his lordship. It’s an indispensable art to learn. We don’t want to reach old age and think, `I could have done so much more for the Lord if only I had learnt to manage my time!` Like all disciplines, it’s a longterm lesson; but if we want to grow in stewarding God’s gifts of time by the power of his Spirit, he will help us, step by step; and we shall fulfil the potential he’s made us for.
So let’s chart how we’re actually using our time. Are the main areas in place in the ways we feel God desires? What do you want to change?
Lord, please help me learn the way you look at my time, and your priorities for my time. Help me determine to put them first, and may your Spirit fill and guide me as I grow in this!
