Our 1st Gift To Manage: Time -- Part 1

I didn't get a chance to record my talk last Sunday so I'm going to post it in segments here. Here's part 1....

God has given you (and will give you) all of the "raw materials" and opportunities you need to reach your full potential.

At the end of our lives, no one is going to be able to blame God that he didn’t give them what they needed to make it in this life.

Whether you reach your full potential, or not, will be based on how you managed what you've been given. Did you waste your gifts or cherish them?

For the next 5 Sundays, we're going to look at 5 of the most important raw materials you've been given to form your life with. I'm calling these 5 raw materials of life "5 Gifts" that God has given you to manage.

We all like getting gifts. I don’t know anyone who hates getting gifts!

But a gift always leaves us with a choice: Will you accept it and use it or will you reject it and throw to the side?

I found this online…

An American Express survey about Christmas gifts found that the fruitcake was chosen most often (at 31%) from a list of "worst" holiday gifts. It even finished ahead of "no gift at all." When asked how to dispose of a bad gift, 30% would hide it in the closet, 21% would return it, and 19% would give it away. This suggests that the Christmas fruitcake might get recycled as a gift for the host of New Year's party.

What are you going to do with these 5 gifts God’s given you?

Will you accept them or reject them? Use them or abuse them?

An unaccepted or unused gift isn’t any better than no gift at all!

Over the next 5 Sundays, we'll look at the five of the top gifts that we all need to manage if we want our lives to be better and different.

Today we’re going to look at the first gift.

It’s Time!

If you think about it, this is a pretty amazing gift. Let’s look at this gift and really see what we’ve been given…

Everyday we’re given 1440 minutes. If you sleep 7 hours you end up with 1020 awake minutes to use. That’s it!

This gift is the basic building blocks of our life! You have just 1020 minutes to make today better or different than yesterday.

This is the only gift we’re going to look at that’s refillable. We're all given a new equal amount of each day. We get a NEW 1440 minutes everyday!

I get the same amount you do. Old and young get the same amount. Rich and poor get the same amount. All the other gifts we’re going to talk about will be things that some of us have more of OR some of us might have less of.

We all get a new amount of time each day, but this is the scary part…

None of us know how much TOTAL amount of time we’re going to get in life. Only God knows!

Ps. 139:16 says...

"You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed."

None of us know how much time we have left.

Some of us here will live longer lives than others of us. We don’t get to decide how long we live. We only get to decide how meaningful we make our lives!

Time really is an incredible loving gift that God has given us!

I want to unwrap this gift today and really look at it to see how we can receive it and use it in the best ways.

The first thing I want you to notice…

PACKAGE: God packaged time for us in two compartments: Day & Night

Genesis 1:1-5 says...
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface. Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that it was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day" and the darkness "night." Together these made up one day.

Have you thought about how much of a blessing this is?

I had a really stressful day the other day.

The cool thing was to get to go to sleep and get a new start! Without day and night life would be one long, monotonous experience.

It also let’s us deal with life in bite sized pieces! You only have a small chunk to deal with called “today”! Actually, the chunks of time you really have to use are even smaller – they’re called “now”.

You can’t mess with yesterday and change it. It’s gone! God’s done that to try and force us to let it go and only deal with now. You can only learn from the past and redeem it.

God gave us the future called “tomorrow” so that we’d have something to plan/aim for and something to inspire us in our “nows”.

Here’s our problem... A lot of time people try and live in tomorrow!

In Matt. 6:34 Jesus said...

"So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today."

There are things that we can control in life and things we can’t. When we worry and spend time on the things that you can’t control just causes the things you actually have influence over to get worse!

Plan for tomorrow, but don’t worry about it.

Don’t try and live in the joy or pain of what you think MIGHT happen tomorrow!

Example:

Last week I was worried about a conversation I was going to have. I started imagining the conversation and the results. It made my NOW really stressful!

Guess what? When I finally had the conversation, none of what I imagined happened! It was a totally good conversation with good results!

I had wasted my "nows" worrying about my tomorrow!

***I'll reveal to you one of God's instructions about time that helps us in this workaholic world when I post Part 2 TOMORROW! :)