Are you obedient with your time?

Time is our most valuable resource. It is limited and passes quickly.

Our time is not our own. We must steward our time in the same way we steward our money to glorify God. Stewardship is taking care of something another person has entrusted to you. Managing your time well is stewarding the time God has given to you. And stewarding what God has given you is worship.

Diligence vs. Laziness

The Bible is not silent on the importance of stewarding our time. Proverbs, especially, is full of truth regarding how to spend this resource:

• "A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich" (Proverbs 10:4, ESV). 
• "The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied" (Proverbs 13:4, ESV).
• "In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty" (Proverbs 14:23, ESV).

These verses don’t just speak directly about work, but they address anything we spend time on. If you are slack in tending a garden, your garden will bear no fruit. But if you diligently plant, water, and cultivate at the right times, you’ll have a big harvest.

Time management is more about obedience than anything else. What is the Holy Spirit telling me to do?

If you are sluggish in pursuing relationships, you’ll have no friends. Time yields intimacy, so not spending time with others means you’ll lack deep friendships. But if you faithfully invite people out, attend classes, or volunteer, friendships will be richly supplied.

If you work hard at managing your money, you’ll profit literally. But if you just talk about being financially wise and spend no time following through to budget and save, you’ll always be paycheck to paycheck.

What Motivates the Way You Spend Your Time 

Managing our time is key to having a fruitful life. But not everyone will manage it the same way. There’s no one-size-fits-all model to doing this right. So think, what motivates you? Is it the joy of doing? The importance of a task? The ease of doing something? Or is it actually fear? Worrying about what people will think? Pray and seek the Lord to find out if what motivates you is good or sinful.

If my motivation is actually sinful, like fear or worry, I need to repent and change what motivates me with God’s help. Sometimes the thing I need to do is actually the thing I want to do, but I am afraid I can't or I am not allowed to do it. Satan can lie to us and make us think that because something is difficult means it’s the right thing to do. But that’s not true. Ease or difficulty of a task has no moral implication. Don’t psyche yourself out of obedience because you assume something making you happy means it must be wrong.

Other times what the Lord is telling me to do is the hard thing. But I ignore it because it's no fun. This is blatant disobedience and needs to be repented of just like fear.

Time management is more about obedience than anything else. What is the Holy Spirit telling me to do? There is grace to obey. There is grace to repent of disobedience. Stewarding your time may seem small or unimportant, but it's not. Stewardship is worship, and time is our most valuable resource. What we spend time on and who we spend it with shows what we value.