It’s the beginning of a new year.
When you look back on this year what will it be like?
2005 could be the best year you’ve ever had or it could be the worst.
It could be the year that grow the most and become more of who you were created to be OR it could be a year where you stay the same and you’re the same person next year that you are right now.
And you know what?
The scary thing is that there’s ONE THING that’s going to decide what kind of year it’s like…
And that one thing is: What you do with the time you have.
Do you know how many hours you have this year?
Let's say that most of us here get 8 hours of sleep that leaves us 16 hours a day.
That means you have 349 days left starting tomorrow (this was on Jan. 30th).
That means you have 5,360 hours this year.
What you do with those 5,360 hours is going to determine what you accomplish and who you become this year!
Arnold Bennett “How To Live On 24 Hours A Day” said this...
“Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions..."
He goes on to say…
“…you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to- morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you."
Then he says…
“You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness--the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!-- depends on that.”
There’s something that threatens our time this year. It’s something that we all deal with daily.
It’s something that seems to be getting worse and worse each year.
What is it? It’s busyness.
We live in a high tech time where we keep getting promised that we’re going to have more and more time, but we seem to have less and less!
“Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed," said Peter Drucker.
Busyness is a dangerous thing. Here’s why:
- Busyness has the potential to rob you of what you could become.
It has the potential to distract you from doing the things that would really matter most in your life and instead get you to focus on the things that urgent, but really don’t matter. - It has the ability to get you so focused on doing that you miss out being.
- It can cause you to miss out on the most important things: your relationships with God and others.
- It’ll cause you to miss opportunities that come your way this year, because you’re so overbooked you end up with no time for them.
And if you don’t guard yourself from busyness, all these things will happen and more.
I don’t want that to happen to you this year. I don’t want you to waste this year. I want you to use every minute of it you can, so that you become more of who God created you to be.
I want that for me too!
Today I want to look in 3 places in the Bible that will help us to defend ourselves against the dangers of busyness.
Hear the message below:
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