Use your time

Suppose that we allot ourselves a generous eight hours a day for sleep (and few need more than that), three hours for meals and conversation, ten hours for work and travel. Still we have thirty-five hours each week to fill. What happens to them? How are they invested? A person’s entire contribution to the kingdom of God may turn on how those hours are used. Certainly those hours determine whether life is commonplace or extraordinary.

The intrepid missionary Mary Slessor was the daughter of a drunkard. At age eleven she began working in a factory in Dundee, and there spent her days from six in the morning until six at night. Yet that grueling regimen did not prevent her from educating herself for a notable career.

in Dumbarton fourteen hours a day. Surely he had excuses for not studying, for not redeeming the little leisure left to him. But he learned Latin and could read Horace and Virgil at age sixteen. At age twenty-seven, he had finished a program in both medicine and theology.

Similar examples are so numerous that we have little ground today to plead insufficient time for achieving something worthwhile in life.

J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership, Spiritual Discipleship, Spiritual Maturity Set of 3 Sanders Books (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2017).