A Valuable Resource
Imagine a scenario where you find out that you’ve received an inheritance from a rich relative you didn’t know you had. This relative was unbelievably wealthy and has left everything to you in cash. However, there are some unique requirements placed on how you can receive this money. You will receive $86,400 each day for the rest of your life, but you have to spend it by the end of the day or you lose it. Whatever you don’t spend is gone and you can’t get it back. Additionally, this money can only go to you—it can’t be passed on to your family. When you die, the funds stop coming through. I would venture to guess that you would be very intentional in trying to make the most of that resource for the benefit of you and your family.
It’s easy for us to think of money as a resource that we need to be intentional with, but, in reality, time is an even more valuable resource. Every day, you get 86,400 seconds, 1,440 minutes, or 24 hours to use that you will never get back and can’t pass on to someone else. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Lost time is never found again.”
From a worldly perspective, even unbelievers understand the concept of maximizing the limited time you have on earth. Have you heard the acronym YOLO before? It stands for: You Only Live Once. It’s the mentality of: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” It’s used to justify things like: “Take that vacation; go skydiving; spend an exorbitant amount of money on something you want—YOLO!”
Rather than advocating for a mentality of living life to the extreme to maximize pleasure, I want to look at the concept of making the most of our time from a biblical perspective. As believers, our goal should be to honor God and bless our families with how we spend our time.
In his infinite wisdom, God hasn’t told us in Scripture precisely how he wants us to spend our time. We’re not given a divinely mandated schedule that we’re expected to follow. “Here’s how much time to devote to work, family, praying, eating, sleeping, leisure, etc.” Since this is a scriptural gray area, we need to use wisdom to navigate how our families spend their time.
The first step to pursuing wisdom is fearing God and knowing him.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
Prov 9:10
In light of that, we’re going to look to God’s Word to help guide us in our goal of honoring him with our time.
A Unique Challenge for Families
For parents of young children, this topic is particularly pertinent to us. As your family responsibilities grow, your free time gets more constrained.
I remember when I got married, I was like, “We’re so busy. What did I do with all that free time I had when I was single?” When we had our first baby a few years later, I was like, “Man—we had so much free time before we had a baby. We don’t have any free time now.” Then we had two more kids and I felt the same way looking back to when we only had one kid. Now that my kids are teens and tweens and have school, homework, sports, youth group, etc., I’m hard-pressed to remember what I did with the free time I had when they were younger.
At each stage of family life, you may often feel like you have more to do and less time to do it. Managing your time gets trickier. It can be easy to not even evaluate how you’re spending your time when you’re just trying to keep your head above water. In the midst of this time crunch, if we just coast into autopilot, we may unintentionally end up stewarding our time poorly. Seeking to honor God with the gift of time that he’s given us takes intentionality.
In this series of articles, we’ll see that wisely stewarding our time honors God, blesses our families, and benefits our own health.
Time Stewardship Diagnostic
At the start of this series, please take a moment to review a quick diagnostic test regarding time management to get a baseline for how you feel like you’re managing your time.
How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent) in regard to managing your time in the following areas?
- Working (at a vocational job or in the home)
- Spiritual Disciplines (e.g. reading the Bible and praying)
- Worship/Church
- Serving
- Quality Family Time
- Fellowship/Building Relationships
- Getting Enough Sleep
- Non-Sleep Rest (e.g. enjoying a hobby, wholesome entertainment, playing a sport, reading, etc.)
- Exercise
How would you rate your time management overall? What is the biggest challenge for you in managing your time wisely? What is an area of your life you would like to prioritize more time towards?
With our personal baselines set, we’ll explore how wisely stewarding our time honors God in our next article.
