Glorifying God with our time looks similar to glorifying Him with our money.
Like many younger adults, I lived most of my adult life without worrying about a budget. Money always seemed like a guaranteed resource that would always be around, I just had to avoid spending the ambiguous amount of “too much.” So when my family finally got on a budget, I realized just how finite money really is.
We began using a digital version of the envelope system, which is the idea that you take any income you receive and piece it out between different envelopes that need to have money in them (groceries, gas, insurance, etc). When you buy groceries, you use money from the grocery envelope to pay for them, and if there isn’t enough in it then you either buy less food or take money from another envelope. Some envelopes, like rent and utilities, demand that we have a certain amount in it by the end of the month… or else. Others, like money for eating out and buying clothes, aren’t as demanding and may even have to give up a few of their dollars for more important expenses.
If an unexpected expense comes up, the envelopes with some “wiggle room” are the ones we can safely dip in to. A co-pay at the doctor’s office may mean we don’t buy Kraft-brand string cheese. Coffee from the gas station means I won’t be buying a song on iTunes. Every dollar spent is a dollar I can’t spend elsewhere, and it has taught me the value of the limited resources that God gives us.
But this isn’t a commentary on how to manage our money. This actually has to do with a conversation I once had with my sister.
I shared with her that my free time used to be an idol that I coveted to the extreme. As we talked, we discussed the time that we waste pursuing a thousand small things and giving God whatever time is leftover (if we give Him any at all). She then shared something one of her college friends had written, which could be summed up as “time is the only thing we can give God.” I appreciated the idea but somewhat scoffed at how much emphasis he’d placed on time.
As I shared the idea with my wife and really started thinking about it throughout the day, the Holy Spirit kept unwrapping more and more of that truth to me. Like money, our time is finite. We don’t know how much we have, but history has proven that no human being has an infinite amount of time. While we often throw out phrases like “I’ve got plenty of time to _______,” or “I’ll get around to it one of these days,” James reminds us otherwise:
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. (James 4:13-14)
70 or 80 years seems to afford us plenty of time to accomplish everything we want. In reality, our “many years” on Earth are just an exhaled breath on a cold winter morning – it appears for a time until it vanishes and is forgotten. That’s certainly not news to most people, and many will live their lives understanding that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.
To the world, that means we ought to live life in excess. We should enjoy all the activities we can, relax whenever we’re able, and surround ourselves with pleasure because there is no hope outside of today. But as believers, does it glorify God to mirror ourselves, especially how we use our time, after the world?
Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. (Ephesians 5:15-16)
Time is a precious resource. Everything is governed by time, and every activity demands it as payment. Watching TV costs time, checking Facebook costs time, and even spending money costs the time spent earning it. A minute used on one activity is a minute that can’t be spent elsewhere; it is gone as soon as it’s spent.
Like any blessing, God expects us to be good stewards of this resource. We are expected to not only use it well… but use it well to His glory. But if we have a hard time making the best use of something as straightforward as money, how can we possibly be expected to wisely use something as abstract as time?
In short, I think God wants us to stick time in a few envelopes.
So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)
Our time can be counted, and it can either be budgeted or wasted. Like money in a checking account, we need to understand how much we have, make sure we aren’t overspending, and must always keep things balanced. So what does it look like to put our time in an envelope?
Imagine that daily life is a series of envelopes that we must fill with our time. Every day, we are given exactly 1,440 minutes to invest in life’s activities and requirements. Every single one of those minutes will be dedicated to something, and where we choose to spend each minute means that there are hundreds of other things that don’t receive that minute.
I said there are a few things in my budget with no wiggle room. Rent and insurance are set in stone, so I have no choice but to put money in those envelopes. Likewise, things like sleep and work must have time given to them, usually leaving somewhere around 5-7 hours for us to fill the more flexible envelopes like family, TV, cleaning, and God (amongst hundreds of other potential envelopes).
Along with work and sleep, we know God and family are envelopes that should never be empty. If we are only focusing on 4 envelopes, our ideal time budget might look something like this:
- Sleep: 8 hours
- Work and commute time: 9 hours
- Family: 4 hours
- God: 3 hours
In a 5 day work week, that means we would ideally sleep for 40 hours, spend 45 hours dealing with work stuff, enjoy 20 hours with our family, and devote 15 hours to growing closer to our God.
Of course, there are other envelopes we need to budget for as well, but to fill those we are forced to take time from our big four: God, family, work, and sleep. Who will we take time from when we want to watch a show on Netflix? Which envelope will get reduced when we want to get together with some friends or spend 20 minutes playing a game on our phones? What envelope do we pull from when we spend 5 minutes scrolling through social media or reading the news?
These things aren’t wrong, of course. Lives are complex, and we could spend 60 minutes doing 10 different things, jumping from one to the next and back again. However, looking at our days like this helps us realize that we are, quite literally, “spending time” on everything we do.
It’s easy for us to spend that time unwisely, wasting it on things that seem flashy now, only to realize that an envelope has been drained when bedtime comes around. But unlike money, we can’t just borrow time from someone else to cover our poor spending habits. Time we take from sleep in order to mindlessly scroll through Instagram or watch YouTube videos is time that is forever lost. Time we spend lying in bed and checking email before starting the day is time we may have to take from our Bible reading.
Without thinking, we often sacrifice time from an important envelope for something that seems worthwhile at the time, but in the end gains us very little. And over time we get tired, grow distant from God, become less productive at work, and feel less invested with our family. We often ask “where did the time go?” but if we’re honest, we can look back at our bank statement and see all the different ways we’ve bled these envelopes dry day after day, sacrificing important things for something lesser.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)
Time is just as much of a treasure as our money. Both are gifts from God, both can only be spent on one thing at a time, and where we spend them shows us what’s important to us. The very heart of stewardship is to manage the property of another, and to do it well. Everything in this world, including time itself, is Christ’s. He’s given us our days on earth to glorify Him, and it’s up to us to serve our master well.
That’s the reality of the brief amount of time God gives us to use wisely. Once we literally “number our days” as we read in Psalm 90:12 we realize that our funds are limited. When we stand in front of Christ and open up our ledger, will He be proud of our accounting, or will we look on with horror as He studies our transactions and asks why His envelope was always filled with remains?
I have no doubt that is a difficult reality to face. It honestly convicts me just to write it. But we don’t serve a God who wants us to live in guilt, constantly kicking ourselves in shame as we keep making the same mistakes over and over. Instead, He offers us the joy of repentance, forgiveness, and glorifying Him more tomorrow than we did today.
Just because we’ve used time poorly in the past doesn’t mean we must continue to do so. Christ allows us to prayerfully look at what we treasure with our time, honestly turn to the Father in repentance, and ask the Holy Spirit to give us a growing desire to use our time wisely. God gives us 1,440 minutes in a day, and we glorify Him by spending that precious treasure on things that matter most.
