The Bible gives us at least five tips for how we can manage our time in a God-honoring way. In this post we’ll at the second.
Tip#2: Determine your priorities.
Jesus commands his disciples in Matthew 6:33 to seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. So of all the categories we need to budget time for, Jesus makes it crystal clear which category we need to begin with – and that’s the faith category (time with God).
The truth is, God wants to be first in every area of our lives. The tithe is about putting God first in our finances and starting your day with Bible reading and prayer is a great way to put God first with your time.
We’re afraid that if we put God first we won’t have time for everything else we have to do, but nothing could be further from the truth. You see, everyone has 168 hours a week to work with. Assume you spend 56 hours a week sleeping (that’s 8 hours a day) and 50 hours a week working (that’s 10 hrs a day, five days a week). That leaves us with 62 hours to give to the five categories we talked about in our last post (faith, family & friends, finances, fitness and fun). If we divided the 62 hours evenly, that would give us about 12.5 hours of time for each category. Now I’m not saying you should give an equal amount of time to each category (for some are more important than others) but if you did, you would have about 12.5 hours a week to give to God. This means you could spend 1 hour a day reading your Bible and praying, 1 hour a week attending a service, 1 hour a week serving at a different service and 2 hours a week with your growth group…and you’d still have about an hour and a half left in your weekly budget of time for God. And you’d still have over 12 hours left in the week to give to each of the other four categories (family & friends, finances, fitness and fun). In other words, even if you spent all this time developing your faith, you’d still have about 2 hours a day to spend with family & friends, about 2 hours a day to manage your finances, about 2 hours a day to work out, and about 2 hours a day to just have fun.
What I’m trying to show you is that you can budget time for God first, and still have more than enough time to get everything else done. If it seems as though you can’t, you need to realize that that simply isn’t true. It’s not that you can’t, it’s that you’re currently mismanaging your time. Well, the good news is that the next two posts will help you begin creating some time margin, so be sure to check back in tomorrow (Wednesday) and Thursday.