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Success isn’t our primary aim—service is, and more specifically service to our Lord and his agenda.
The Hebrew word for “work” here is avodah, which is also translated to mean “worship” in our Bibles.
Our to-do lists will never be completed. There will always be a gap between what we can imagine accomplishing in this life and what we actually get done.
So, if we long to accomplish more than what sin will allow us to in one lifetime, it’s logical to assume that we were made for a different, timeless story.
God is directing a master narrative for the world, and I am just one of billions of actors in that story. In his great grace and wisdom, he has given me exactly as much time as I need to participate in that grand drama and work toward his kingdom. Not a moment more. Not a moment less.
Pastor John Piper went as far as saying that “aimless, unproductive Christians contradict the creative, purposeful, powerful, merciful God we love.”
The busier we get (and let’s face it: we’re all busy), the more we need the wisdom of God to redeem our time for his purposes.
pasting a block of text. And an open loop is nothing short of that: a commitment you have made to yourself or others.
Ultimately, every act of faithfulness toward others is an act of faithfulness toward God himself.
Noise limits our opportunities to be bored and thus creative. And if we don’t have the space to work out our God-given gift of creativity, it will be far more difficult to be productive.
God didn’t design our minds to merely receive information. He created us to think about and make creative connections between various inputs.
I think Paul is telling us that part of the solution to our anxiety is found in what we’re choosing to think about—the noise and information we are inviting into our minds.
When we read and study God’s Word, we hear his voice, but it takes silence and reflection to listen to his voice and connect his Word to our lives.
But as I hope you’re beginning to see, lonely places aren’t places of weakness. They are places of great strength.
“Acedia is evenings without number obliterated by television, evenings neither of entertainment nor of education but of narcoticized defense against time and duty. Above all, acedia is apathy, the refusal to engage the pathos of other lives and of God’s life with them.”32
Jesus has filled our hearts so that we would “fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28) with his glory by doing good works for others.
“Our insatiable desire for information is a clear sign that we covet the divine omniscience….We must observe God’s good boundaries for how much information we can process.”36
“Is this thing valuable?” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is “How much value does this thing offer me and at what cost?”
Our lives are too noisy, and if we want to discern and do our most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others, we need space to reflect and think.
“Under all his gentleness there is a purpose harder than steel.”
Jesus knew the difference between urgent and important. He understood that all the good things he could do were not necessarily the things he ought to do….If
But spending all your time in reactionary mode is not the way of Jesus. To redeem your time in the model of your Redeemer, you must develop the habit of identifying what matters most on your to-do list at any given point in time.
“If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”
In a given quarter, you should have one to five sets of objectives, each with one to five corresponding key results.*2
You will never be able to go deep at work or home until you believe this truth: you have more control than you think over when you respond to incoming messages.
With dedicated space on your calendar to respond to those interruptions, almost everything can be ignored for a few hours, enabling you to stay focused on the deep task at hand.
As Christians, we understand that no interruption is an accident. But remember, not even Jesus engaged every interruption and distraction. Doing the work God has called us to do requires tremendous focus. And that necessitates confining opportunities for interruptions to specific times on our calendars.
In other words, the less time you sleep, the less time you have to do good works for the glory of God and the good of others.
So yes, Sabbath is about stepping back and saying of our work and lives that this is “very good,” but it is also about saying no to the tyranny of more. It’s about declaring our freedom from slavery. It’s an invitation to “stop” (the literal meaning of the Hebrew word Shabbat).
Rest is a way of reminding ourselves that no matter how productive we are, no matter how many good works we accomplish, we are God’s beloved children, in whom he is well pleased.
loving your neighbor as yourself starts with getting eight hours of sleep.
In other words, Rogers was busy. And yet he was remarkably unhurried. As his biographer Maxwell King once explained to me, “[Rogers] did all this stuff and yet, everybody who ran into him reported the same thing, which is when they got in Fred’s presence, everything slowed down” (emphasis added).
As pastor Kevin DeYoung said, “He was busy, but never in a way that made him frantic, anxious, irritable, proud, envious, or distracted by lesser things.”
Matt Perman said, “You are satisfied with your day when there is a match between what you value and how you spent your time.”
If you think about it, time management might be more accurately described as energy management.
“Self-control is the ability to do the important thing rather than the urgent thing.”30
Which problem, once solved, is going to make most of my other problems easier to solve or disappear entirely?31
Opportunities that aren’t attached to some meaningful end aren’t opportunities—they are simply possibilities that stir up frantic excitement.
We’re not even called to be understood. Jesus certainly wasn’t.
What are we called to? We’re called to model Jesus’s example of counting the cost and eliminating hurry from our schedules. We’re called to glorify the Father by doing good works for others. We’re called to reflect Jesus by being purposeful, present, and wildly productive. In short, we’re called to redeem our time.
Discipline is a by-product of a Spirit-filled, Christlike life.
