Imagine a situation where you were annually given half a million dollars. You were told to invest it wisely, and the profit from how you invested it each year would all be yours. How much time would you devote, knowing that in the next decade you would be investing over $52,000,000?
This would never happen—right? Well, there is a parallel that happens every year. We know there are twenty-four hours in a day (with each of them having sixty minutes in it) and 365 days in a year. Every year we make a conscious decision about how we will invest the 525,600 minutes given to us. How are you using these precious minutes? What investment are you making?
Should there be any surprise that God speaks about using our time wisely? Perhaps the clearest statement of this truth is found twice in the Bible. Paul specifically told two churches, “Redeeming the time” (Eph. 5:16; Col. 4:5). As we think about how this applies to our lives, we should soberly look at the minutes/hours we give to God.
Think about how little time we spend in worship and adoration of God. If the only time we do this is that hour between 10:00 a.m. and 11:19 a.m. each Sunday morning, add it all together and the total time invested in praising God each year would be 4,108 minutes. Each of us has been give 525,600 minutes each week, but we foolishly invest about 4,000 of them in His presence and devote over 520,000 on ourselves. If you change these numbers to dollars instead of minutes, you would readily see that you are not making wise investments. He said, “Redeem the time.”
Now I recognize that many of those other minutes are committed to work, rest and nutrition, but still the numbers are staggering. I also know that you could add to the smaller number those minutes spent in private devotions, reading and meditating on His word, but for far too many Christians, this never happens. Remember that God told us, “Redeeming the time.”
How do we do this more effectively? First, recognize that we have wasted hundreds of thousands of minutes in the past. Those minutes are history. We are writing the future as we think about how wisely we use the fifty million minutes we can receive the next decade. I know we are far too busy. However, we might consider that when we say, “I did not have the time to do this,” we are giving an excuse and not a reason.
Having recognized our misuse of time, we then must make specific changes in our lifestyles. It may be we are overlooking opportunities around us to use our time more wisely. Let’s think about this together in next week’s bulletin.