Manage Your Time Wisely Series

Manage Your Time Wisely

YOLO Part 2

Ephesians 5:15-17

We are currently going through a new message series: YOLO.

“You only live once.”

It is true that we only live once.

However, what does this imply?

The Bible is very clear on this.

Because we only live once, we must invest our one and only life meaningfully.

Last week we thought about having a clear mission in life.

Today we will think about using our time wisely.

Time is our most precious commodity.

It is more important than money.

We can always make more money, but we only have a certain amount of time allotted in our lives.

Once it runs out, we cannot get it back.

Therefore, how do we use our time wisely?

How do we make the best use of our time?

There are a lot of good time management books and CDs and seminars out there about saving our time.

However, today we will not talk about how to get more done.

Rather I will talk about how to do less not more.

Most of us are already doing too much.

Our lives are filled with activities.

And we are so stressed out that the last thing we need to do is learn how to add more activities in our day.

We add and add without ever stopping to ask, “Is this really necessary? Should I do this in the first place?”

So how should we use our time?

In the passage that we read today, the Apostle Paul taught us these three things regarding using our time wisely.

I. We must treasure our time (v. 15)

Verse 15 says this.

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise,

The Apostle Paul told us to be very careful when it comes to using our time because our time is our life.

When we waste our time, we are wasting our life.

Therefore, we must be very wise about how we use our time.

We must treasure our time as a valuable commodity.

Every day is so precious, we must be very careful how we use it.

If we want to understand how important one year is, we can ask a student who failed a class.

If we want to understand how important one month is, we can ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.

If we want to understand how important one hour is, we can ask a businessman whose flight was delayed an hour.

If we want to understand how important one minute is, we can ask a man who had a heart attack in a restaurant and a doctor happened to be sitting at the next table and his CPR saved his life.

If we want to understand how important one second is, we can ask a person who barely missed a head-on collision with an oncoming car.

If we want to understand how important one millisecond is, we can ask an Olympian runner who missed a medal buy one-tenth of a second.

Time is so valuable.

Imagine there is a bank that credits our account each morning with $86,400.

It carries over no balance from day to day.

Every night it deletes whatever part of the balance we failed to use during the day.

What would we do?

We would draw out every cent.

Each of us has such a bank.

Its name is time.

Every morning, it credits us with 86,400 seconds.

Every night, it writes off as lost whatever of this we have failed to use for good purpose.

It carries over no balance.

It allows no overdraft.

Each day it opens a new account for us.

Each night it deletes the remains of the day.

If we fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is ours.

There no going back.

There is no drawing against “tomorrow.”

This is why we must make the most of today.

We cannot waste our time.

Once it is gone we can never get it back.

We must treasure our time.

II. We must invest our time in relationships (v. 16).

Verse 16 says this.

making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.

The Apostle Paul told us to make the most of every opportunity of our time.

But what opportunity was he talking about here?

Was he talking about an opportunity to make money or an opportunity to become famous?

Here he is talking about an opportunity to make eternal differences.

Why?

It is because the days are evil.

Many people in this world do not know Jesus, and they live in sin.

This is why we must invest our time to build relationships with others and make eternal differences in their lives.

In some sense, our time is like money.

We can invest our time for different things.