Be Careful with Your Time
By Rick Warren
"Be careful how you live. Don't live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days." Ephesians 5:15-16 (NLT)
Time is your most precious commodity. You only have a limited amount of it!
It’s estimated that people will live an average of 72 years, or 26,000 days. You may think you’ve got plenty of days left, but, if you're over 27, you've already passed 10,000 days. You’re not getting any of those days back, and that’s what makes time your most precious resource.
You can always get more money. You can always get more energy. But you cannot create more time.
You have a certain number of days in your life, and that's it. When you spend them, they’re gone. So life management is really time management. If you learn to manage your time, then you learn to manage your life.
"Be careful how you live. Don't live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days" (Ephesians 5:15-16 NLT).
The opposite of careful is careless. The Bible tells you not to be careless with your life. Be careful. That means you should be intentional and deliberate with your time. I like to call it being purpose driven!
Do you know what it looks like to be careless with your time? On average, people spend three hours and 15 minutes on their phone a day. Americans spend more than five hours a day on their phones and check their phones an average of 58 times a day. That’s 35 hours a week that we’ve devoted to staring at a tiny screen—and that doesn’t include time spent on the computer or watching TV. Of course, not all of that time is fruitless. But being careful with your time means being aware of how you spend it and of whether you are spending it on things that really matter.
"Someone may say, 'I'm allowed to do anything,' but not everything is helpful. I’m allowed to do anything, but not everything encourages growth" (1 Corinthians 10:23 GW).
It's not a sin for you to spend five hours watching cute cate videos on YouTube. But it might not be the best use of your time. Some things aren’t necessarily wrong. They're just not necessary. It may not be wrong, but is it worth giving your life for?
Be careful with your days. You only have so many.
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This devotional © 2018 by Rick Warren. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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