Some Thoughts on Time

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Time is one of the greatest gifts that God has given man.
God is so good that He has given every human being the same number of hours each day, that is, twenty-four hours.
God has no favourites as far as time is concerned. He has not given some ten hours, others fifteen and others twenty-four hours.
Time is a very perishable gift.
People may vary in natural and spiritual endowments, but what ultimately makes the difference between them before God is how they used the time that was given to them.
Each person meets each second, minute and hour twice. He meets it the first time when it comes upon him. He will meet it the second time at the Judgment Seat of Christ to give account for it.
Every second, minute, hour or day that is lost, is lost for ever.
A fool may waste money, but the greatest fools waste time.
I once met a fool, a great fool, the greatest fool. He wasted a second, every second and soon found out that in one month of thirty days, he had wasted 259,200 seconds.
The devil ensures that your time is stolen one second at a time and so ensures that you do not realize it.
The person who wastes 15 minutes every hour will waste twenty-five years if he lives to be one hundred years.
A man who sleeps 8 hours a night and lives to be 75 has actually spent one-third of his entire life, that is, twenty-five years in worshipping sleep.
The believer who tithes his time should give God 2.4 hours everyday and 16.8 hours a week.
The believer who gives God less than 2.4 hours a day is stealing from God.
Those believers who do not tithe their time and also give God an offering of it, are robbing God. “Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How are we robbing thee?’ In your tithes and offerings. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me; the whole nation of you” (Malachi 3:8-9).
God cannot demand a tithe and an offering from a man that does not include the man’s time.
If a person decides to give God a tithe of his time and then an offering of 5%, he owes God 15% of his time every day which comes to 3.6 hours each day, and 25.2 hours each week.
God is a Master Planner. He planned world salvation from before the foundations of the world. He has fixed a time for everything. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1).
All who want to be like God plan their time even as He has planned His.
Those who do not plan their time have decided that time, events and circumstances will rule them.
Those who plan their time and keep to it succeed.
Those who do not plan their time have planned to fail.
Those who are to succeed give the majority of their time to their priority projects.
To tell what a man worships, look at his distribution of time. His God or god has the largest share.
To tell who a man’s God is, see whose appointments he keeps faithfully.
Those who worship the goddess of sleep give her the largest portion of their time.
Those who worship idleness give the goddess of idleness many hours a day, and that time is determined by the number of hours that are not put into useful work, or that cannot be accounted for.
Those who walk close to the Lord redeem the time because the days are evil.
Prayer ought to be life’s priority. Winners give prayer fixed times on their timetables.
Winners give the best time to their priority projects. They give the times when they are strong, alert and fresh to their priority projects.
Winners leave secondary, tertiary and unnecessary things out of their timetables.
Anything that is not put on a timetable is a thing that you have decided does not need to happen.
Jesus gave His time only to the “musts” of His life. At the age of twelve He said, “I must be in my Father’s house” (Luke 2:49). Later on He said, “The Son of Man must suffer”. He also said, “I must do the works of Him who sent me” and many other instances.
Winners give their time to their God-appointed “musts”. They leave all else aside.
Fools make programmes and timetables and then put them aside.
Unless there is a determination to keep to a planned programme, planning is a fool’s work.
Do not allow the undisciplined ones to introduce indiscipline into your timetable.
One of Satan’s goals is to cause believers not to use their time well.
The person who takes two minutes to say what he could say in one minute is an enemy of time. He is also your enemy.
A person who does not know how to get straight to the issue at hand but must go round and round before coming to the real issue, has decided to steal your time and reduce your rank in the Kingdom of God.
Your worst enemy kills your time. Run away from him. He will soon get at you.
Those who do not obey God immediately, waste His time. They are His enemies.
Anyone who wastes your time is acting the role of Satan. He is standing in the path that God has ordained for you. Say to him, “Get behind me, Satan.”
“Give your eyes no sleep and your eyelids no slumber” (Proverbs 6:4).
“How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep?” (Proverbs 6:9).
“A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond, and want like an armed man” (Proverbs 6:10-11).
“I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man without sense; and lo, it was all overgrown with thorns; the ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down. Then I saw and considered it; I looked and received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man” (Proverbs 24:30-34).
“Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread” (Proverbs 20:13).
“Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger” (Proverbs 19:15).
“A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich” (Proverbs 10:4).
“A son who gathers in summer is prudent, but a son who sleeps in harvest brings shame” (Proverbs 10:5).
“The sluggard does not plough in the autumn; he will seek at harvest and have nothing” (Proverbs 20:4).
“The soul of the sluggard craves, and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied” (Proverbs 13:4).
“The desire of the sluggard kills him for his hands refuse to labour” (Proverbs 21:25).
The person who postpones what should be done immediately for the time afterwards, is a poor student of time.
The disobedient postpones what God wants done now.
Fools do not know the difference between acting now and acting in the future.
Fools confuse the opportunities of today with those of the next day, without realising that they are not the same.
When prayer time is lost it can never be recovered.
Procrastination is the thief of time.
Fools spend time starting projects but never give them the time needed to complete them.
Wise men invest time in completing projects, even when the work of putting finishing touches is uninteresting.
Men are rewarded for completed projects and not for projects started.
The wise person labours to maintain zeal from the start to the finish. He continues to the end even when he does not feel like it.
The time spent on completing projects is the wisest spent.
It is better to finish one project than to start ten.
Dreamers start projects but never finish them.
Real men dream projects and labour hard to realize them.
The greatest use of time is spending it in removing obstacles that stand in the way of finishing that which has been started.
The best use of time cannot be separated from hard work.
Overcomers labour and toil.
God’s ablest soldiers overcome all barriers in the way of God’s call on them.
There will be no lazy people in heaven, for heaven is the dwelling place of God who works hard.
Lazy people are sometimes too lazy even to believe God; for in a sense, faith is work.
Overcomers use all their energies to do what they are to do in the shortest possible time.
“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
One of the secrets of Paul’s life was hard work.
“Him we proclaim, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom that we may present every man mature in Christ. For this I toil, striving with all the energy which he mightily inspires within me” (Colossians 1:28-29).
“For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, especially of those who believe” (1 Timothy 4:10).
“But one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).
The victorious Christian life is one that knows toiling, striving, straining, pressing on, buffeting, and other hardships as normal.
“I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27).
“He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength” (Isaiah 40:29). “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:30-31).
God renews the strength of those who labour and grow tired, so that they can labour some more.
The overcomers do not sit down when they are faint. They are “faint yet pursuing”.
God shall reward the quality and quantity of labour. They are obtained through the right use of time.
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).
Lord, teach us to give You daily accounts of the use of our time, so that we shall not be surprised on that Day