No, there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do…
Jim Croce must have had me in mind when he wrote Time in a Bottle. It’s the story of my life—ideas to chase through, books to read, people to see, and letters to reply to. And some day, I promise myself, I’ll learn how to chip and putt. I even have an ‘ideas’ book in which I jot down all the things that I want to do. Reading back through it is a depressing experience. It is a catalogue of unfinished schemes and dreams.
If I could promise you that by the end of this article I would have solved all your problems with time, there would be no need for further introduction or motivation. To varying degrees, we all feel the incessant pressure of time. We all have more to do than we can squeeze into the day—unless, of course, we are unemployed or ill, in which case we feel the oppressive weight of time in another way.
There are times when I feel that, somehow, it just isn’t right. Does busyness and time—frustration come with being a Christian? Most of my Christian friends seem to suffer from it. For many of us, it was part of our Sunday School education:
You have only just a minute,
Only sixty seconds in it.
Didn’t choose it, can’t refuse it,
But it’s up to you to use it.
You will suffer if you lose it,
Give account if you abuse it.
Only just one tiny minute
But eternity is in it.
Is this a piece of sound Christian wisdom or the product of an obsessed mind? How should we manage our time? Is it wrong to be busy? Should we have a more relaxed attitude?
Let us look briefly at how these questions have been answered by three authors, two of them modern and one ancient, before trying to sketch some conclusions of our own.
You-can-do-it
American pastor and author Gordon MacDonald tackles the time question in his book Ordering Your Private World (Highland Books, 1987).
‘Recapturing your time’ is just part of Mr MacDonald’s prescription for a more productive, organized, God-honouring life. For our private world to be healthy and in good order, we must seize hold of the limited time at our disposal and budget it for maximum effectiveness. Unseized time is gobbled up by the trivial at the expense of the weighty, the urgent at the expense of the important, the publicly noticeable at the expense of the privately crucial.
Mr MacDonald’s approach is appealing. It promises me that I can get more done and be more productive, if only I am willing to take the initiative and budget the precious time God has given me. Within this framework, his suggestions are full of common sense.
However, they make me uneasy. Perhaps it is a knee jerk reaction to the go-get-’em-you-can-do-it Yankee enthusiasm that pervades the book. The real weakness is in his tacit acceptance of a very modern, very worldly way of thinking about time. He follows the American tradition of equating time and money. They are both ‘commodities’ to be budgeted and spent wisely. Christians should be thoughtful, disciplined stewards of time, just as with money. And in commending this approach to time, Mr MacDonald cites the Lord Jesus as the ultimate time manager—the Lord of Time.
The only problem is that Time as a ‘commodity’ is a very modern notion, dating from the industrial revolution and the invention of accurate time-pieces in the 18th century. How to get 26 hours out of every day (the title of a recent work on time management) would have meant nothing to Jesus and the Bible writers. They didn’t divide the day into 24 hours and they just didn’t think about time as a thing to be spent or wasted or maximised or organized. Clock-time is a very modern concept, and has more to do with the demands of industry than the demands of godliness.
Gordon MacDonald seems blissfully unaware of these considerations. Faced with the question, “I’m so disorganized—how can I get things done?”, Mr MacDonald’s solution is basically discipline and organization. But one wonders whether this concentration on disciplined, budgeted time management is entirely healthy.
Just relax
Someone who is very aware of historical considerations is Robert Banks in his book The Tyranny of Time (Lancer, 1983). Rather than giving us tips for managing our time, Mr Banks challenges our whole view of time.
He regards the unremitting pace of modern life as detrimental to our health, our social and political vitality, our families, our thought, our leisure and our spirituality. When we try to fit as much as possible into the day, and squeeze the last drop of life out of each hour, we suffer for it. Though we dream of having more leisure, and fill our lives with labour-saving technology to achieve this, the pace never slackens. Even our recreation is frenetic.
Mr Banks traces the causes of this modern malady to a number of factors:
- the industrial revolution, with its demand for an efficient, reliable labour force
- the invention and spread of clocks (which roughly coincided with the above)
- the development of Isaac Newton’s theory of ‘mathematical time’
- the adaptation of Puritan and Calvinist ideas into a secularised ‘Protestant Work Ethic’.
It all makes fascinating reading, and his analysis of how we have got to where we are makes sense. As we modern Christians read our concept of time into passages like Ephesians 5:16 (“redeeming the time”), we give biblical force to our concern about ‘wasting time’. When this is combined with a godly desire to see the Kingdom of God advance, and a not-so-godly reliance on our own efforts, the result is the super-busy modern Christian.
While Robert Banks doesn’t go so far as to say that being busy is inherently less godly than being relaxed, he comes close at times. He certainly suggests that we should rethink our attitudes and adopt a less ‘activist’ approach to life. We should put Time in its proper place. Becoming like Christ is more important than ‘getting things done’, even if they are things we regard as ‘ministry’. We need time to work, and time to rest; time for family and friends; time for teaching our children; time for reflection and prayer and study; and time for fellowship. If our chronic busyness is squeezing these things out, then we should cut down. He is not suggesting we should destroy the clock—just put it in its place.
The practical suggestions Robert Banks makes about how we should reform our attitude to time are less convincing. His own values shine through a little too strongly and have a taste of brown rice about them. Others may disagree.
An exhortation to improve time
It is interesting, having looked at these two modern writers, to consider the perspective of the 18th Century American theological giant, Jonathan Edwards. His sermon ‘The Preciousness of Time and the Importance of Redeeming it’ was delivered in 1734 and his preoccupations are, I suspect, very different from ours.
From Edwards’s point of view, Time was precious because “our etemal welfare depends on the improvement of it”. For him, redeeming or improving the time was not a matter of efficiency or ‘getting things done’. It concemed whether we spent our time in loving trust and obedience to God, or in idleness, wickedness and worldly pursuits.
We might be as busy as anyone. But if we are not using our time to store up a treasure in heaven, then it is time lost forever—time for which we will have to give account to God. Our brief time here on earth is our only preparation for eternity, and we must use it to our advantage.
If you should reckon up how many days you have lived, what a sum would there be! And how precious hath every one of these days been! Consider, therefore, what have you done with them? What is become of them all? What can you show of any improvement made, or good done, or benefit obtained, answerable to all this time which you have lived? When you look back, and search, do you not find this past time of your lives in a great measure empty, having not been filled up with any good improvement? And if God, that hath given you your time, should now call you to an account, what account could you give to him?
Jonathan Edwards’s advice on how to improve time is threefold:
- do it now; improve your time while you have it, for once it is gone it is lost forever. Improve those parts of your time which are most precious; for instance, make best use of the time you have with God’s people (or as he puts it, “improve your sabbaths, and especially the time of public worship, which is the most precious part. Lose it not either in sleep, or in carelessness, inattention, and wandering imaginations.”)
- don’t fritter away all your leisure time in “unprofitable visits, or useless diversions or amusements”. Some degree of diversion is necessary but, Edwards exhorts, “so much, and no more, should be used as doth most fit the mind and body for the work of our general and particular callings”.
We can perhaps detect the seeds of legalism in Edwards. He himself was certainly no legalist, but his ideas could lead in that direction. I can imagine guilty Christians lashing themselves for every minute not spent in prayer or study or earnest ‘profitable’ conversation. Surely this is not the normal Christian life? Jesus came to take the weight off our shoulders, not load us up with more.
All the same, Edwards’s emphasis on using time for godliness rather than useless or ungodly activity is a timely reminder. In its focus on etemity, and the account we will have to give for our lives, it is not unlike the words of Jesus: “As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no-one can work.” (John 9:4).
Justifying our existence
A few worthwhile ideas have risen to the surface as we have sifted through the material offered by these three very different authors. How should we tie it all together?
Ultimately, we must solve our time problem by going back to first principles. As with any contemporary issue that is outside the thought-world of the Bible, we must proceed obliquely, and with some caution.
The lessons we leam from Scripture about Time will be indirect, and we should be careful not to apply them with too much vigour—lest we end up making pronouncements that the Bible does not make.
The frenetic pace of our lives and our problems with time can be traced to at least three errors.
1. Not believing in justification by faith alone.
How we think about time, and our use and abuse of time, should be govemed by who we are in Christ. In Christ, we have been justified by his grace. We are mercifully free of the pressure to achieve and succeed. There is nothing for us to contribute to our salvation except our need. The justified person is free from the pressure to do.
How much of our time pressure arises from an irrational commitment to doing—that is, from a lingering commitment to good works? Unless we are doing, many of us feel we are ‘wasting time’. Justification tells us that we are free from this. There is no time pressure in the Kingdom of God. We aren’t let into heaven on the basis of our cost efficiency. There is nothing we have to ‘do’. Our activism runs counter to our Evangelical emphasis on justification and grace.
(In case you misread me, justification also tells us that we are no longer to live for ourselves, but for him who died in our place. We should not use our freedom to indulge the sinful nature, which in this case might mean laziness or pursuing our own interests.)
2. Not believing in God’s sovereignty.
A second reason why many Christians cram so much into their days is that they feel that their contribution is indispensable and that, somehow, God’s kingdom won’t advance without them. Put like this, we can all shake our heads and say, “How Arminian!”. But this undercurrent runs deep and subtle through many a Calvinist breast. We say that God is in control and that we cannot thwart his plans, but our hyperactivity suggests that we aren’t too sure what God would do without us.
3. Wanting to maximise the quality or quantity of our leisure time.
This is a personal failing that others may identify with. I want to do everything! And I want to be good at everything I do. I add to my busyness (or my sense of busyness) by not being satisfied with one or two modest leisure pursuits that refresh and invigorate me. I always want more—and better. The search for a more enjoyable, fulfilling lifestyle is centred on Self, not on Christ.
I do not think I am alone in this. I sense that many of my Christian friends are ‘short of time’ because their lifestyle expectations are so high. Their lives are filled with activities, courses, sport, music, and an exhausting social life.
How can we solve our problem with time shortage? Time is only a problem for activists—for people who are committed to accomplishing or enjoying to the full, whose single-minded purpose is not in God. Maybe we need to ‘justify our existence’ by allowing Christ to justify it for us.
