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.
But we have to watch out because we can invest our time for wise things, unwise things, or even for evil things.
This is why in order to invest our time wisely, we must invest in people and use our time to tell others about God who loves us so much.
Whenever we get a chance, we must make the most of every opportunity to build relationships and tell others about Jesus Christ.
There are 168 hours in each week.
In average, we spend about 56 of those hours sleeping.
We spend about 24 of those hours in eating and personal hygiene.
We spend about 50 of those hours working or traveling to work.
That means… there are only 35 hours a week of “discretionary” time left over.
That is about 5 hours per day.
Therefore, we must ask, “Where are we investing those hours?”
Many people organize their lives around activities.
Most people tend to be activity-driven rather than people-driven.
However, the Bible makes it very clear.
What is important is people and relationships because they are the only things that will last forever.
The Bible teaches that the best way to invest our time is to invest it in relationships.
Therefore, we must invest our time in these 5 relationships.
First, our relationship to ourselves.
This is our personal lives.
This is our personal development as children of God.
We must grow physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
We need to invest our time for personal development.
Second, our relationship to our family.
Our family is an area that we need to schedule into our lives.
If we are married, if we have children, we must schedule time for them.
We need to invest our time for our family, so that we can make spiritual impact on our families.
Third, our relationship to our church family.
God designed us to live in a church family.
This is why we need a small group of people, who know us and encourage us when we go through tough times of our lives.
That needs to be in our schedule.
Fourth, our relationship with our co-workers.
God sent us to our workplaces, so that we can build relationships with them to influence them.
If any of them do not know who Jesus is, then we must tell them about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ through our words and actions.
That needs to be in our schedule.
Fifth, our relationship with our friends and neighbors.
We are a part of a larger community.
We must be the salt and the light to our friends and neighbors.
If they already know Jesus, we must encourage them to follow Jesus faithfully.
If they do not know Jesus yet, we must help them to know Jesus through our actions and words.
We must invest our time for them.
Therefore, how can we handle all these relationships?
The key is balance.
We must invest the right amount of our time to each one of these relationships.
When the lunch bell rings at Boca Raton Community High School in Boca Raton, Florida, 3,400 kids spill into the courtyard and split into their social groups.
But not everyone gets included.
Someone always sits alone.
Denis Estimon came here in first grade as a Haitian immigrant.
He felt isolated, especially at lunch.
Now he is a senior and popular.
But he has not forgotten that first grade feeling.
Therefore, he started a club called We Dine Together.
Their mission is to go into the courtyard at lunchtime to make sure no one is starving for company.
For new kids especially, the club is a godsend.
Since it started last fall, hundreds of friendships have formed, some very unlikely.
The members of We Dine Together use their lunch time to invest in relationships.
What they do can teach us adults, too.
We must invest our time in relationships.
We must invest our time to tell others about Jesus.
III. We must spend our time according to God’s will (v. 17).
Verse 17 says this.
Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.
We must use our time wisely and not foolishly.
In order to do that we must understand what the Lord’s will is for our lives, and spend our one and only life to do His will.
In some sense, time management is a misleading concept.
We cannot really manage time.
We cannot delay it, speed it up, save it, or lose it.
No matter what we do, time keeps moving forward at the same rate.
The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.
We must manage ourselves to drop some unimportant things in our lives and do the things that God has called us to do.
This is why we must understand what our God-given mission in life is and invest our time to fulfill it.
There are at least four specific wills that God has for every single person in this world.
First, God wants us to get to know Him and love Him.
We were made to put Him at the center of our lives.
Therefore, we must set some specific goals about getting to know God and learning to trust God.
Second, God made us to become like Jesus.
We need to set some specific goals regarding what kind of character we need to work on.
How do I want to be different a year from now than I am today?
What character qualities, specifically, do I need to work on?
We need to schedule our time for this.
Third, God made us to make a contribution to the world.
He has given us certain gifts and talents.
Therefore, we must set our time to make best possible contribution with our gifts and talents.
We must set some specific goals and time to make the world a better place.
Fourth, God made us to deliver His message to the world.
We are here to deliver the message of the good news of Jesus Christ to people who do not know Him yet.
We must set a goal to share and communicate the message of love.
Once we have set some goals based on our missions, then we can schedule our activities around those goals.
That is how we ought to manage our time.
We have so many things to do every day.
And we do not have time to do everything.
This is why selection is the name of the game.
The good news is that God does not expect us to do everything.
But He expects us to do what He has called us to do.
This is why we must focus on our God-given mission.
We must spend our time according to God’s will.
Conclusion
A time management expert was teaching a seminar for executives.
He placed a large, clear open-mouthed jar in front of the group.
Next, he put few softballs into the jar until it was full.
“Is the jar full?” He asked.
Everyone nodded.
Then he took few golf balls and filled up the jar.
“Is the jar full?”
By now, they did not answer.
Therefore, he poured small beads in.
He asked, “What is the lesson about time management?”
Hands shot up, and someone said this: “No matter how busy you are, you can always fit more things into your schedule.”
But the speaker said, “Wrong!”
“The lesson is this: Unless you put the big things in first, you cannot fit in the others. You must figure out what your big things are.”
You must find what your big things are and put them in first.
If you do not put those big things in first, something else will fill up our jars.
In order to live our one and only life wisely, we must use our time wisely.
We must treasure our time.
We must invest our time in relationships.
We must spend our time according to God’s will.
