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November 11 - November 26, 2024
God doesn’t need you or me to finish our to-do lists. If the things on our to-do lists are on God’s to-do list, he will complete them with or without us.
If we rely on god to handle all of the details then he takes care of the rest. I dont need to hold onto the feeling of not completing it as a failure.
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.
First and most obvious, time in the Word is how we commune with God. We spend time in the Scriptures not to get something from God but to “get God” himself. He is the prize.
“To live your life without God is the most unproductive thing you can do.”41
Instruction (what the passage is commanding you to do) Praise (what the passage leads you to praise God for) Confession (where you have fallen short of the passage’s instruction) Petition (for God’s grace in helping you live out the commands of the passage)44
To redeem our time in the model of our Redeemer, we must ensure that our yes is yes from the smallest to the biggest commitments we make.
Open Loop: anything personal or professional, big or small, urgent or distant, that you have any level of internal commitment to doing in the future
when you know you need to do something but “store it only in your head, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time.”9
“Stress comes from unkept agreements with yourself” and others.12
Failing to collect, define, and do the things you say you’re going to do is a much bigger deal than letting something slip through the cracks.
Jesus has told us, plain and simple, “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37, NKJV).
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
“What’s the number one skill we should be looking for as we consider investing in other founders and CEOs?” My answer came easily: “The ability to discern the essential from the noise.”
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”10
To discern the essential from the noise, at some point you have to turn off the information-and-opinion fire hose, get quiet, and simply think. Only in solitude can you separate the important from the unimportant and avoid getting stuck in the “thick of thin things.”
1 Corinthians are helpful here: “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable” (6:12, NASB).
Whether we’re basketball players, entrepreneurs, designers, working moms, woodworkers, or writers, what matters is doing our most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. But to do that, we must redeem our time. And to redeem our time, we need to get crystal clear on what matters most on our never-ending to-do lists. We must clarify what we’re saying yes to so we can say no to nonessential things along the way.
Jesus understood his purpose, and that allowed him to take the long list of things he could do and pare it down to the things he knew he should do to finish the work the Father gave him to do (see John 17:4). And with his work prioritized,
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 Jesus had to live with human limitations, we’d be foolish to think we don’t. The people on this planet who end up doing nothing are those who never realized they couldn’t do everything.10
How can we, like Jesus, identify the work that matters most and ignore everything else?
we have the power to choose what matters most rather than allowing others to choose for us.
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.
Contrary to what many popular books, movies, and seminars tell you, you won’t discover your life’s meaning by looking within yourself….You didn’t create yourself, so there is no way you can tell yourself what you were created for!14
The mission of your life is to glorify God. Period. Full stop. Highlight that. Write it down. That’s your why—your North Star. In the words of Mission Impossible, this is your mission—your only choice is whether or not you will accept
Spending all day in the shallows leads to what we might call “fake productivity”: work that makes us look busy but is terribly unimportant and fails to move us any closer to our goals.
Life’s too short to spend time on things that deserve only half our attention.
If Jesus couldn’t be in two places at the same time, neither can we.
you have more control than you think over when you respond to incoming messages.
In order to do more, most of us need to do less and rest more.
Taking bi-hourly breaks throughout our workdays is productive for our souls because it reminds us that God doesn’t need us to finish our to-do lists. Getting a full night’s sleep is productive for our souls because it reminds us that God is the only being who neither slumbers nor sleeps (see Psalm 121:4) and thus doesn’t need us to keep the world spinning. Sabbath is productive for our souls because it reminds us that “all time belongs to God and stands under the renewing lordship of Jesus Christ.”38 And ultimately all these rhythms of rest are productive for our souls because they are a means
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if you work with your mind, rest with your hands; if you work with your hands, rest with your mind.
But while Jesus was certainly busy, the Gospels never show him hurried. 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.”
There is a world of difference between being busy and being hurried. Being busy is an outward condition, a condition of the body. It occurs when we have many things to do. Busy-ness is inevitable in modern culture….By itself, busy-ness is not lethal. Being hurried is an inner condition, a condition of the soul. It means to be so preoccupied with myself and my life that I am unable to be fully present with God, with myself, and with other people. I am unable to occupy this present moment. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives.10
Busyness is having a lot of meetings on your calendar; hurry is scheduling those meetings back to back, forcing you to sprint from one meeting to the next without enough time to hear your own thoughts. Busyness is having a lot of errands to run; hurry is getting mad about choosing the “wrong line” at the grocery store because you have no margin for the thirty seconds you lost by choosing lane 3 instead of lane 4. Busyness is attending three Bible studies a week; hurry is not having enough time and stillness to listen to God’s voice in between those studies.
As Jesus’s example shows us, hurry isn’t just “the great enemy of spiritual life”; hurry is also the great enemy of our ability to be purposeful, present, and productive.
He had counted the cost and knew that adding anything else to his already busy day would have tipped the scales from busy to hurry.
We need to develop the habit of ensuring that every minute has a name before God gives us a fresh supply each morning.
Which problem, once solved, is going to make most of my other problems easier to solve or disappear entirely?
QUESTION #1: AM I THE BEST PERSON TO SAY YES TO THIS REQUEST?
QUESTION #2: IS THIS THE MOST GENEROUS USE OF MY TIME?
QUESTION #3: WOULD I SAY YES TO A HUNDRED SIMILAR REQUESTS FOR MY TIME?
QUESTION #4: DO I HAVE ROOM IN MY TIME BUDGET TO SAY YES TO THIS FAVOR?
QUESTION #1: IS THIS OPPORTUNITY ALIGNED WITH MY GOALS?
QUESTION #2: THIS IS A REALLY GREAT OPPORTUNITY…FOR WHAT?
Opportunities that aren’t attached to some meaningful end aren’t opportunities—they are simply possibilities that stir up frantic excitement.
QUESTION #3: AM I TRYING TO DO GOOD OR MAKE MYSELF LOOK GOOD?
QUESTION #4: WHAT WILL I SAY NO TO?
Delaying your response to requests for your time is much easier in email and texts than it is when you’re talking to someone on a call or in person, in which case I try my hardest to punt on a response if there’s any chance I will say yes. I’ll say, “Let me check my calendar and get back to you,” or I’ll utter every husband’s favorite excuse: “Let me check with my wife.”
