By sis Leong Mei Ji
How people spend their time
Someone has calculated how a typical lifespan of 70 years is spent. The estimates are: Sleep—23 years—32.9%; Work—16 years—22.8%; TV—8 years—11.4%; Eating—6 years—8.6%; Travel—6 years—8.6%; Leisure—4.5 years—6.5%; Illness—4 years—5.7%; Dressing—2 years—2.8%; Religion—0.5 years—0.7%, adding to a total of 70 years.
Set our priorities right with our time
Where and how we spend our time is foundational to where and how we centre our lives on Christ. Where and how we spend our time is where and how we place our values.
Our time is very important here on earth. We will never be able to retrieve the days we spend foolishly pursuing the things of the world. It’s for this reason James 4:13-15 says, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” We ought to order our priorities and do first things first (Matthew 6:33). We must wisely structure each day so that we get the most out of the time that we are allotted. We can do this by putting the best use of our time to the purposes of God in the lasting, eternal, and fruitful purposes of our heavenly Father, and cease wasting the precious and invaluable minutes on that which is fleeting and temporal. If we do not invest the time needed to achieve those goals, then all we have are empty ambitions.
How do we spend our time?
Time is completely ours to do what we will. We can choose to either use and invest time in eternal things or allow time to drift by without taking advantage of the gift we have been given. We can decide to make the best use of our time according to the purposes of God as revealed to us through the Scriptures. If we spend the majority of our time simply getting through our days trying to find happiness, rather than seeking what the Lord wants us to do, then we know that we have not yet come into a right understanding of God’s purposes for us and we also know that we have yet to surrender our lives fully to our Lord. Our time here is too limited and too important to spend on worldly pursuits. It is important how we live each moment because time is fleeting and our appointment with death and judgment is a certainty (Hebrews 9:27).
Comentários