When You Can't Find The Time Series

INTRO: Living the Simple Life… ? What IS the simple life? The simple life doesn’t mean living simple minded, it just means being able to enjoy life and appreciate simple things in life.

You know, sometimes we surround ourselves with so much stuff that demands our attention on a regular basis, that life just becomes complicated and we find it difficult to have peaceful moments where we can appreciate God and His creation and our family and the things that we should be living our lives for?

How do we get our priorities so mixed up? How did life get so complicated? Those are a few of the questions that this series hopes to answer, and I hope it will bring us a little more encouragement and a little more insight as to how we can slow down and get back to living the simple life…

Roll video, “The Paradox of Your Time” 2:22 …(FAITH HIGHWAY)

It seems like the more stuff we have. The more we fill our hearts and homes with the things of the world, the less room we have for the things of God. The more stuff we bring into our lives, the less room there is for God in our lives, because stuff: things consume time, and time is a valuable commodity because we have so little of it in our lives.

The Bible says, James 4:13-14, “Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money."

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”

Our life is like a mist that comes and goes so quickly. Now, realizing how short life is, we should be people who are busy investing in lasting things: things that will still matter a million years from now.

? WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE / PRECIOUS TIME?

Most of us are wasting at least four hours every day on things that have no lasting significance whatsoever. Did you know that according to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day? In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the television tube.” And average of four hours of every day is blown on TV: stuff that won’t matter a million years from now. ((Now, it’s important to keep up on the news and things like that, but we could stand to turn off Fear Factor or Friends: who cares what happens to Joey! We could decide to turn off the stupid shows that are out there and decide to take control of our own lives.))

A lot of us are spending precious time on worthless things. That’s the paradox of our time.

? What’s a paradox? A paradox is a contradictory statement. It’s like saying, “You know, it seems like the less time I have the more I get done.” It sounds contradictory… Why would someone say they get more done when they have less time?

A paradox seems contradictory, but nonetheless, it can still be very true…

? For instance, (JOHN) if God were to shorten every day of your life from 24 hours down to 20 hours a day, what would you do with your time? You would have to reprioritize…

I’ll bet you’d be forced to make adjustments to your lifestyle. I’ll bet you’d do a better job of prioritizing and balancing your needs with your wants, and the result of that organization would be greater efficiency and more purposeful use of your time.

? What would be the first thing to go if you had 4 hours less in every day?

When people know their time is short, the smart ones start to cut out the unnecessary clutter…

Take for instance, someone who has terminal cancer. The doctor tells them they have 6 months to live… What do they start to do?

They start spending time with their family, they start donating time and resources to the church and to ministries that make a real difference in people’s lives, they start to do things they always felt like they should do.

Illust: My dad, when he was dying from esophageal cancer, spend that last months and weeks of his life developing a closer relationship with the Lord than he had ever known before because he knew it was time to start investing in something that would last beyond the grave: something that would do him some good a million years down the road.

You see, we have eternal souls. Not eternal bodies, but eternal souls and we need to be diligently investing in God’s Kingdom, where we want to spend out eternity.