Topic: Be Careful with Your Time [RICK WARREN Devotional 6 OCTOBER 2020]
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Be Careful with Your Time
“Be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days.”
Ephesians 5:15-16 (NLT)Time is your most precious commodity. You only have a limited amount of it!
It’s estimated that people will live an average of 72 years, or 26,000 days. You may think you’ve got plenty of days left, but, if you’re over 27, you’ve already passed 10,000 days. You’re not getting any of those days back, and that’s what makes time your most precious resource.
You can always get more money. You can always get more energy. But you cannot create more time.
You have a certain number of days in your life, and that’s it. When you spend them, they’re gone. So life management is really time management. If you learn to manage your time, then you learn to manage your life.
“Be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days” (Ephesians 5:15-16 NLT).
The opposite of careful is careless. The Bible tells you not to be careless with your life. Be careful. That means you should be intentional and deliberate with your time. I like to call it being purpose driven!
Do you know what it looks like to be careless with your time? On average, people spend three hours and 15 minutes on their phone a day. And Americans spend more than five hours a day on their phones and check them an average of 58 times a day! That’s 35 hours a week that we’ve devoted to staring at a tiny screen—and that doesn’t include time spent on the computer or watching TV. Of course, not all of that time is fruitless. But being careful with your time means being aware of how you spend it and of whether you are spending it on things that really matter.
“Someone may say, ‘I’m allowed to do anything,’ but not everything is helpful. I’m allowed to do anything, but not everything encourages growth” (1 Corinthians 10:23 GW).
It’s not a sin for you to spend five hours watching cute cat videos on YouTube. But it might not be the best use of your time. Some things aren’t necessarily wrong. They’re just not necessary. It may not be wrong, but is it worth giving your life for?
Be careful with your days. You only have so many.
- What goal could you pursue and accomplish if you reapplied some of those 35 hours a week you may spend on your phone?
- Do you want your children to remember you more for reading your Bible or looking at your phone? How are you working toward that end?
- What are some other examples of things you do that are not bad but are also not necessarily helpful?