A Time for Everything

Time is one of the most valuable gifts we have, yet we often feel like there’s never enough of it. In this episode, Pastor Chris explores Ecclesiastes 3 and the wisdom of Solomon regarding the seasons of life. He challenges us to reflect on how we spend our time and whether we are investing it wisely in our relationship with God and others. Learn practical ways to steward your time well, maximize the moments God has given you, and live with an eternal perspective.

Key Points:

1. Watch Where Your Time Goes – Time is a limited resource. Psalm 90:12 urges us to "number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom." How we spend our time reflects what we value most.
2. Use Your Time Wisely – Ephesians 5:15-17 calls us to "make the most of every opportunity because the days are evil." Pastor Chris shares insights on balancing work, relationships, and faith.
3. Maximize Your Precious Time – Prioritize the things that matter most. John Maxwell says, "Priority management is the key to maximizing the time we have." What does that look like practically for believers?
4. Trust God in Every Season – Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us that there is a time for everything. Whether in seasons of joy or hardship, we must trust God’s plan and seek His will in all things.

Personal Stories from Pastor Chris:

• The Reality of Time Investment – A story about Josh McDowell’s insight that children spell love as "T-I-M-E," emphasizing the importance of spending quality time with loved ones.

Notable Quotes:

• "Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once lost, you can never get it back."
• "A wasted life is nothing more than a collection of wasted days."
• "Our lives are short, like a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes (James 4:14). How are you using your time?"

Actionable Takeaways:

1. Audit your time – Take a week to track where your time goes and make adjustments to align it with God’s priorities.
2. Make time for Jesus daily – Spend intentional moments in prayer, scripture, and worship.
3. Invest in relationships – Show love by prioritizing time with family, friends, and church community.
4. Live with an eternal mindset – Store up treasures in heaven rather than only focusing on temporary pursuits (Matthew 6:19-21).

Scripture References:

• Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 – "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens."
• Psalm 90:12 – "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."
• Ephesians 5:15-17 – "Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity."
• James 4:14 – "You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."
• Proverbs 3:5-6 – "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."

Keywords:

Christian time management, Ecclesiastes 3, biblical wisdom, trusting God’s timing, spiritual growth, prioritizing faith, stewardship of time, making the most of life, living with purpose.

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The WELL Faith Podcast offers encouraging, Bible-based messages from Pastor Chris Teien and guests. New sermons are released every Sunday. Replay episodes are marked with an asterisk. Find us online at ChrisTeien.com and Rockwell.Church in Virginia, MN. Email comments to wellfaith24@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Today let's all just give a little time.

Chris T 1:42

Hi, this is Pastor Chris. And today I want to talk to you about how there's a time for everything. A time for everything. You just watched a video on love well spent. And when time is well spent, that shows love. A matter of fact, I remember one time Josh McDowell was teaching that kids spell love, T-I-M-E. And a lot of times what you spend the most time with is an indication of what you love the most. Do you spend a lot of time with Jesus? Then maybe you truly love Jesus. If you're not spending any time with Jesus, how could you love him? Anyway, it's time for everything, and it's Mother's Day, and this is not a Mother's Day message, but if you are a mother, thank you. Thank you, moms. Thank you, biological mothers, that at least brought the children into the world. Even if you weren't able to stick around and do the rest of the motherly duty, rest of the mothering, nurturing, rest of the mothering, and someone else had to step in. Thank you, stepmothers. If you had to step in, the step-in mothers that help. Sometimes it's biological mothers and stepmothers and even other people filling roles as mothers helping to raise children. Thank you to all of you. Grandmothers, sometimes grandmothers need to step in and help with the children, sometimes just to babysit, sometimes permanent permanently as they raise their grandchildren. Thank you, grandmothers. Thank you for all of those mothers that are watching. We appreciate you. Mother's Day is hard for a lot of people, though. It's hard for mothers or mothers who've lost a child. It's hard for women who never have had an opportunity to have a child. It's hard for moms that don't think they did good enough or their children have abandoned them. It is hard for people who have lost their mothers. Their mothers aren't here anymore. But anyway, let's talk about time. We have a little bit of time to talk about time. All right, point number one: watch where your time goes. Watch where your time goes. You're not getting it back. It can slip through your fingers so quickly. Time can go by so quickly. Give me some minutes here. Give me some of your time, and maybe I'll help you to learn how to get more time, how to use your time more wisely. Anyway, number one, watch where your time goes. Very important to watch where your time goes. Ecclesiastes 8.6 says there is a time and a way for everything, even when a person is in trouble. In each day, there are 24 hours, 1440 minutes and 86,400 seconds. And every one of them is a precious gift from God. Time is something we feel we never have enough of, yet we give it away so easily. Someone once said, time is free, but it's priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. And once you've lost it, you can never get it back. Maybe you've seen this before, but this is how some people spend their lives. Maybe this is how you spend your 70 years of life. You spend 23 years sleeping, 16 years working, eight years watching TV. There's not anything on TV worth watching eight years of. You spend six years eating, some more than others. You spend six years traveling, four and a half years with leisure, four years illness being sick, two years getting dressed. And it says one half year with religion. That can't be. I spend way more than one half year of my life pursuing Jesus. Anyway, that came from in our daily bread from some years back. But anyway, it's a good way to slice up the time pie and see where it goes. We all spend our time and we often uh waste our time. But we need to number our days. Psalm 90, verse 12 teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Someone once observed that a wasted life is really nothing more than a collection of wasted days. And as God gives us life, each one of us starts the new year with the same number of opportunities, 365, that we can choose to either use and invest in eternal things or allow to drift by without taking advantage of the gift we have been given. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail is not found primarily in talent, but in diligence and effort. So, how have you done so far? It's almost the halfway point of the year. So we're almost coming five months down. How have you done from your new year's resolutions? Have you kept them? Are you doing as good as you had hoped? Maybe it's time to re-resolve to change those things that you want to change. As soon as you realize that you're not working on it anymore, then make a new plan and get back to work in using your days wisely. Psalm 39, verse 4. Show me, Lord, my life's end and the number of my days, and let me know how fleeting my life is. You have to realize that your life is short. You have to realize that your life is not as long as you think. You have to realize that the opportunities that we have today may not always be here. You need to enjoy certain things as they come along because you may not ever get those opportunities again. If you knew the number of your days, you would know exactly how to plan. I don't know what you would do to plan, but if you knew that you had two years and 10 days left, then that would make a total difference in what you are doing, in the way that you're spending your life. Right now you might think you have more time than you know what to do with, but you don't know how much time you have. So if I knew that I had two years and 11 days or something of my life left, then I wouldn't need to save for retirement because hey, I'm not gonna need it. I could lease a car for three years because I'd be done with it in less than three years. We just don't know. Somebody that had finally purchased his dream home and got in the gotten the car of his dreams, waited basically all of his life to get all this stuff, and then once he finally acquired it all, within a few weeks he suddenly died. And so sad. And there's a few apps, I've mentioned this before, but on the on our phones uh and on the computer, there's a few apps that try to calculate when you're gonna die. Not life insurance apps, just apps on your phone, like uh personal death clock. And uh one app I filled in my information and it said, You're gonna live to be 70 something. It's yeah, that's the average. You're not really, you know, showing me anything I didn't know already. And the average man, the American man, lives to be like 70 some years old. I filled out another one, said, Do you smoke, do you drink, do you exercise, do you have these health issues, how much sleep do you get? What where do you live? What's your work environment? And then it calculated everything and came back and said I was gonna live to be over a hundred. If I'm gonna live to be over a hundred, I'm going to need to save more for retirement. Anyway, let's look at Ecclesiastes chapter three, where presumably Solomon lays out some of his great wisdom uh when it comes to the way life is spent. So basically in Ecclesiastes chapter three, in the beginning of the chapter, he lays out the spectrum of time. From one end of the spectrum to the other, these are some ways that we spend our time, and it's really good to think about. Ecclesiastes 3 1, out of the New International Version, says there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens. There's all sorts of different times in our life, and we're just going to read about this in a minute here, but different seasons. We are young, it's like the spring season of our life. And as we grow old, it's the fall season or the winter season of our life. We need to enjoy each season, we need to prepare for each season, we need to trust God in each season, and we need to live for Jesus no matter what the season is. Ecclesiastes 3:2 says there's a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to be born. My friend Pastor Greg's daughter is about to deliver another grandchild. And so he's really excited about that. Could happen at any time. Pretty exciting. I remember when my daughter Jessica was about to be born or on the way to be born, that my wife was on bed rest for a long time. And so we waited and we prayed. We prayed that the baby, that this little baby wouldn't come out until it was ready. So whenever it was ready, we were ready for it to come out. But we prayed that God would not allow this child out of the womb until it was healthy. So sure enough, our daughter Jessica was born three weeks early, three weeks early. And I remember looking at her in the hospital nursery and standing next to another dad looking at his baby. And he said that his baby, I think it was a boy, was three weeks early and was having some issues with breathing with his lungs. And my little daughter, who was in there too, was three weeks early and she was just fine. And we praise God for that. But there's a time to be born, and God knew exactly when you would be born. And that's perfect timing for my daughter to be born when she was. And we praise God for that. It is a great thing when God answers our prayers like that. Sometimes we go through difficulties and we wait for God to heal our child, and we wait, those premature babies, for them to get strong enough to come home. Anyway, babies being born. Interesting that some of us were purposefully conceived by our parents. Our parents had a plan. Our parents got married. Our parents got together and said, you know what? We are financially stable, we've got everything together. This would be a great time to have a child, and then they had a child. And so that was great. Some of our parents were told that they should wait to be intimate until they get married, and then there was a pregnancy. We were the mistakes that came, and as a result of that, we punished our parents for years after that. So maybe not punished, I don't know. I'm pretty sure that if you were a surprise child, that your parents are delighted that they got the opportunity to be your parents, and that you were a surprise, you showed up unexpectedly, but God helped them get it through, get through it. So anyway, time to die. Death is difficult. Death is difficult. Death is difficult when it's unexpected. When someone dies suddenly and you didn't they didn't have a chance to get their life in order, uh their affairs in order, and you didn't have a chance to say goodbye. They were here one minute and unexpectedly, then they died. Maybe it was a car accident, maybe it was a sickness, but they just died suddenly. And that is so sad and so difficult. But it's also difficult when somebody dies slowly, they're diagnosed with a terminal illness and they know they're gonna die. They know there's a period of time until they die, and you watch them suffer and you pray for their healing and you try to give them help and encouragement. And it is so difficult to watch someone die slowly. But it is uh good when you know that they are secure in Jesus, that they're going to heaven, that yes, they left us in this life, but we're going to see them again in heaven. That is an awesome thing. And sometimes when we grow old, we get tired of living this life and we long to go be with Jesus. Our soul gets weary and tired, and heaven sounds pretty awesome. And that is a great time to celebrate that someone has gone with Jesus. But death is tough, and that's part of the deal. There's a time to be born, there's a time to die. There's a time to plant and a time to uproot. Have you ever had opportunities to plant things? So, about 20 years ago, when I moved to Bell Plain and all the houses were being taken, the only house we could find that really worked for us was a new house. It was brand new, but it was half built, so the basement wasn't finished. I had to finish that myself. God provided a little help, so that was good, but had to do the landscaping. So I looked at some trees. I went to Home Depot and I'm like, oh, okay, there's some trees. I'll buy some of these trees. I'll plant these trees. Didn't really look at the label, didn't really think about what I was planting. I'm just like, okay, we need to plant trees, and these look okay. I think they'll do. So I planted three pine trees, uh, Dakota spruces. They do real nice in our sandy soil. Don't regret that at all. And then I bought a red maple and a silver maple. Dog chewed apart the red maple. That one died, got rid of that. Dog tried to chew apart the silver maple, and but that one continued to live. She was a pretty smart dog, actually, because she realized, even when I didn't, that there was no, I had no business planting a silver maple in the back of the yard like that. I guess it's fine now that it keeps growing and the roots are popping out of the ground like the incredible hulk. I looked into it and see now that it's going to grow to be like 80 some feet high and or more. And that's probably not the best tree to put in the corner of my backyard back there. But anyway, I planted it and I should have paid more attention to what I was planting. And I want to encourage you that if you are going to plant something, if you're going to invest in something, do a little research and try to figure out what you're planting and what you can expect from it and how it's going to work out and the whole time frame. So just don't go out randomly planting things. So be careful. And then time to uproot. So with this new house, the builder had an obligation, a responsibility to put in a tree in the front yard. So he did. He put in an ash tree, and the ash emerald boar is coming into our county, and I guess they're taking down a bunch of ash trees anyway. But our tree got ripped apart in the wind. So the trunk started to get ripped in half. So I had to take it down. And I was excited to put a new tree there. I was excited to uproot that tree and put a new tree in that spot and cut it down. And I was gonna grind, get the roots, get the trunk ground out, and put a new tree there. But it turns out that the roots had wrapped itself around the gas line. And so I don't know why the builder put it there, but you can, as I was digging around trying to get the stump out, I saw the tag and the gas line. And so it is entangled. It is entangled. And if I had not called before digging, I might not have known that, and that could have been bad. And the guy that came along that said, Oh, drill some holes in it and burn it out, did you not hear that the roots are entangled in the natural gas line as an L-O-Kaboom? So, anyway, every now and then I take the axe and I go out there and I try to chop a little more of that trunk away. But when I think about this though, I think that sometimes our roots are embedded, our roots are entangled, our roots are deep, and sometimes we uproot our family. When we change jobs, we move away, we live in one community and we're rooted, we're planted, we're established, and then we uproot our family and we move somewhere else. And we need to make sure that we pay careful attention to how our family is doing in the midst of the move. You want to be careful when you need to uproot your family. And if you move somewhere else, you want to do all you can to plant roots and make a difference so you can grow strong. In friendships or business, be careful when you are uprooting. Another verse that comes to mind when it comes to roots is Hebrews 12:1. And it says, Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, so that was in Hebrews chapter 11, all those heroes of the faith. Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. So we need to be careful to when we pull out things that are well rooted, that we don't want to cause any trouble, any damage, we don't want to ruin anything. Matter of fact, I found some I had some bushes that I wanted to pull out, and I had read those roots could get into the concrete block of the house. And if you ripped out the bushes, you could roots, you could rip out part of the foundation too, which is crazy. But we need to help some people to just like I struggled to get those roots untangled from the gas line. Someone may need help getting untangled from the sin that holds them captive. Ecclesiastes 3:3. A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to kill, capital punishment for murderers, a war, enemies that are trying to kill us. Um bugs and rodents. When we bought the new house, the whoever did the leveling of the dirt around the house and foundation must have hit the concrete block with their bobcat or whatever they are using because there was a hole in the concrete block, and the new house was full of mice. Prayed and then killed over a dozen mice one night. Time to kill mice. From weeping to laughing. It says, From mourning to dancing. Sounds like what happens at a wedding. So it's oh, you're getting married, you're gonna leave us. Oh wait, ha ha ha. We wanted you to get married, didn't we? Oh, we're so excited you're getting married. Oh, wedding dance. Anyway, life has a full range of emotions and we should enjoy laughter. We should enjoy those happy times. And as I'm getting older, I'm pausing more often to just take in and try to record in my mind the happy moments that I don't know if I'll get again. So I don't know if I'll have more opportunities to enjoy some of the things that I've gotten to enjoy. And I encourage you to do that too. To enjoy laughter, to enjoy the happy moments and to find a balance in life, but pursue that, be a happy person. Remember to enjoy the good times when they come around. Scatter or gather stones that could be for warfare or self-defense, could be for landscaping or wall building or home building. One commentary said that they would often scatter stones when their enemies were coming to try to slow them down and make it harder for them to reach them. All these different types of emotions, all of these different things are part of the sphere, part of the timeline of things that happen in our lives. The timeline. Ecclesiastes 3, 6 through 8. A time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. Searching and giving up. What are you searching for? And why do you think you need it? Do you really need it? Do you really need to find it? When my wife and I first got married, I think it might have been a wedding present, but we got one of those knife sets with the block where you put the knife in. So you had all the different knives and they're supposed to go in the block, and somehow we lost the biggest knife. It's like all of a sudden there's a disappearing monstrous knife in our house. It's like, is it in the couch? Where did the knife go? How does the knife disappear? We searched for it for a long time and never found it. Uh Stefan Thomas in San Francisco has been searching for his password to access his $220 million in Bitcoin fortune. Can you imagine him praying every day? Lord, please help me remember my password. Writing down every possible password he could think of and then trying it as many times as possible until the thing locks up. I don't know, I'm not even sure that how it works, but that's what I would be doing. Are you searching for a spouse or a job? Pray and ask God to help you. Keep and throw away. You know, sometimes we keep way too much. We're hoarders. We need to downsize and simplify. Maybe we need to throw it out or donate it to the Salvation Army or something. Many things are worth keeping, but if it's material possessions, you can't take it with you. So you need to find a balance there. But some things that we want to acquire are things that we feel we really need, like uh high-quality tools often are worth keeping. I've actually become, I'm a grandpa, I've got four grandkids. I've actually become that old guy that saves things and gets to use them again. It's like I was working on a car and had some extra brake pads. I'm like, I didn't even have this car. It was for someone else's car, but I'm just gonna put it on the shelf and see maybe I'll need it someday. And sure enough, I did need it someday. Someone else came along and had that vehicle that needed those brake pads. And I'm like, yeah, see, there's some sense in keeping some of these things. Anyway, keep and throw away. Sometimes we need to just let it go. I tear and mend. Sometimes it's worth fixing. And mending, and then later it might be best to tear it into rags. So sometimes it's worth repairing, sometimes it's worth fixing, and sometimes it's worth just tearing apart. The price of lumber is really high right now, as far as home building goes. The price of houses is really high right now. I saw somebody say that they were thinking about selling their house, but instead they might part it out because they'll might get more money for the lumber. So I thought that was really funny. So I've heard of parting out cars before, but parting out houses because you think you're going to get more money. I guess I just read the price of copper is record high too. Anyway, be silent and speak. Be silent and listen. We should probably be silent more often than we speak. We sometimes are too silent and we need to speak up. Sometimes there's things that we need to speak up. We need to tell people about Jesus, not be silent, not be undercover Christians. We need to proclaim our faith and share his promises and make a difference. Don't want to be silent about that. Sometimes certain things bother us, and it's more of a preference than anything, and probably just want to be silent about that. But anyway, if you choose your words wisely and don't say too much, people will even think you're wise. So love and hate. Love God and what he values: hate sin and evil. Time for war and a time for peace. Sometimes there has to be war to protect peace. And when people get selfish and when freedom is threatened, it often leads to war. Unfortunately, war has always been a part of life. Seek peace. Sometimes we need to go to war in a spiritual battlefield. That is all right. But it's great when we don't have to go to war against people who live on our borders or other countries or send our young people to war. Anyway. Ecclesiastes 3 9 says, What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. So God gave us work. Adam and Eve sinned, and God cursed the ground. And then it said Adam would work by the sweat of his brow, and uh bearing children would be harder for Eve and for women, but um God has given us work, and God even enjoys, allows us to enjoy that work. I might be getting ahead of myself here, but God has made things beautiful in its time, and he has set eternity in our hearts. And so we don't know everything is everything God has done in the past or everything he's gonna do in the future. All we know is what he has revealed to us through the Bible, what he has revealed to us, chosen to reveal to us through scripture. And we can't even comprehend what he does or why he does it. Isaiah 55, 8. God says, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. Then it says, His ways are higher than our ways, his ways, his thoughts are higher than our thoughts. We don't fully understand God, but we know what he reveals. We know what he's told us, and he's told us that it is the sin in our lives that separate us from a relationship with him. It is the sin that he rejects, and we need forgiveness from our sins. Revealed in the Holy Word of God through the Holy Spirit, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. In John 3.36, it says, Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on them. Have you received Jesus as your Lord and Savior? Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ came into this world and lived among us? That he died on the cross and then rose again, uh, that he ascended into heaven and he hears our prayers and he offers salvation to those who place their faith in him. Repenting is realizing you're heading in the wrong direction and going the other direction. We need to do all that we can to follow after Jesus, and the Holy Spirit helps us in that. But first we need to commit. First, we need to acknowledge, first we need to accept Jesus. Romans 10, 9 says, if you declare with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. Would you pray with me now if you'd like to receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior? Lord Jesus, I acknowledge that you came and lived among us, that you lived a perfect life, and that you died on the cross, and that you rose again. That you died for my sin so that I could be saved. So please forgive me of my sin and come into my life and save me and make me the person you created me to be. I want to follow you and learn your ways in Jesus' name. Amen. Or pray something similar to that and let us know so we can help you grow spiritually. Let us know because we want to help you to grow in your faith. Ecclesiastes 3 12. I know there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live, that each of them may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all their toil. This is the gift of God. So enjoy your work, enjoy the fruit of your labor, do good and be a good worker. Excel in all you do. Ecclesiastes 3 14. The New Living Translation says it this way. And I know that whatever God does is final. Nothing can be added to it or taken from it. God's purpose is that people should fear him. What is happening now has happened before, and what will happen in the future has happened before, because God makes the same things happen over and over again. History does repeat itself. So if that's truly what's happening, if that's truly what's happening, then we need to follow the Lord's plan because he's the only one that knows what's going on. Proverbs 3 5, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. Number two, use your time wisely. Use your time wisely. We don't know how we should live, we don't know what we should do without God's help. So James 4.14 says, Why you don't even know what will happen tomorrow? What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Our lives are short. Our lives are short. And what do we value? A.W. Tozer wrote in What Christians Want to Know that there are seven rules for self-discovery, seven questions to help you discover the things you value most. Number one, what we want most. Two, what we think about most. Three, how we use our money. Four, what we do with our leisure time. Five, the company we enjoy. Six, who and what we admire, and seven, what we laugh at. Ephesians 5:15. Be very careful then how you live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is. In the Biblical Counselor's Manual, June Hunt and the people who write that manual wrote about the wise stewardship, the wise steward of time. So the wise steward is aware of the importance of time, is watchful, vigilant, and on guard to protect their time, and is conscious of accountability. They are not as unwise, but as wise. The wise steward relies on God for wisdom, discerns God's will, is sensible and balanced. The wise steward commits each day to the Lord, is open to God's turning of events, and looks for opportunities to be used by God. Because the days are evil, the wise steward knows there will be temptation to waste time from the outside world, from inner cravings, and from Satan, the adversary. Therefore, do not be foolish. The wise steward learns from past mistakes with the use of time, relies on inner strength from the Lord to overcome temptation, knows how to discern between the good and the best, but understands what the Lord's will is. The wise steward spends time in intuitive communication with the Lord, listens to the Holy Spirit for direction, knows his gifts and abilities, and uses them for the Lord's work. And number three, learn to maximize your precious time. Learn to maximize your precious time. So I like to stack things. So I like to exercise while listening to an audiobook or the Bible. I like to uh do some work tasks, ones that don't require a lot of thought while uh listening to something that helps me to grow spiritually. I read a lot of books about faith and uh how to do things. I don't ever seem to read any fiction books, but John Maxwell had a great audiobook. I listen, it's only three hours long. I usually listen to it at 1.5 to two speed. So I double it up. So if it's a three-hour, it takes me an hour and a half usually. But nonetheless, I was listening to Success is a Choice by John Maxwell. Highly recommend it. If you spend a lot of time commuting, you should get those audiobooks going through your car stereo system so that you can learn as you drive. But anyway, John Maxwell says success is a choice and about maximizing our time and the importance of uh time. He says, ask the coach whose team is behind in the final seconds of a game. Ask the air traffic controller in charge of scheduling takeoffs and landing at major airports. Ask the news reporter who has just received a breaking story from the AP wire, and ask the cancer patient who just learned he has only two months left to live. There's no such thing as time management. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have. Our days are identical suitcases, all the same size, but some can pack more in them than others. No one has a magical ability to make time, but if our lives have direction, we can make the most of the moments that we have been given. He's got a lot of resources on time management. I've encouraged you to check them out to find them. And what I just read came from a blog that maybe I could share with you if you send me an email or send me a message asking me for it. And you can do the same thing. You can be, you first ask God for help and then to be really disciplined, to budget your time like some of you budget your money. That would be a really wise thing to do, and then to pray. One of the most important things that you can do is to commit these things to the Lord. Romans 12.12. I'm almost done, I promise. Romans 12.12, be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, and faithful in prayer. Faithful in prayer. I like this poem, too busy to pray. I got up early one morning and rushed right into the day. I had so much to accomplish that I didn't take time to pray. Problems just tumbled about me, and heavier came each task. Why doesn't God help me? I wondered, and he answered, You didn't ask. I tried to come into God's presence. I used all my keys at the lock. God gently and lovingly chided, Why, child, you didn't knock. I wanted to see joy and beauty, but the day toiled on gray and bleak. I wondered why God didn't show me, He answered me, but you didn't seek. I woke up early this morning and paused before entering the day. I had so much to accomplish that I had to take time to pray. And we need to take time. I'm going to show you in a video a video on how you will use your time.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

How will you use your time? Our days on earth are numbered. Our time is short, like a vapor or a fleeting shadow. Will you use this time to serve yourself? Or will you use this time to serve God and others? Will you spend your days storing up earthly riches? Or will you store up treasure in heaven where it is eternal? Will you trust in the Lord every day in order that he may make your path straight? Will you seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? How will you use your time?