You cannot stop time, but you can control it.
Men and women, time determines your destiny.
Everybody has 24 hours in a day.
Everybody has the same amount of time, whether you're a billionaire or a beggar, you still only have 24 hours in a day.
And everybody has the same amount of time.
And I think we could argue that the most common gift given to all of humankind is time.
Everybody's given the same amount of time.
It doesn't matter what your height is, doesn't matter the color of your skin, what your ethnicity is, what kind of family background you have, how talented you are, how smart you are.
Everybody has the same amount of time.
And so I want to challenge you in this series on maximizing your time that your future and your destiny is determined by how you use your time.
What you do with your time changes everything.
And when you look at life, life is built around time, capsules of time.
So we come to the end of a year.
The end of a year, we call it a new year.
And I love the word new because the old is passed away and the new has come.
And so whatever time frame you look at life, some people look at life and make changes in their life based on the new year.
Sometimes it's a birthday.
A birthday changes your age from what it was to what it now is.
And you can never regain that year again.
You can never be 12 years old again.
You can never be 35 years old again.
You can never be 65 years old again.
So time is limited.
It's constantly moving.
As a matter of fact, you cannot stop time, but you can control it.
And so when you go through different phases of your life, oftentimes we find ourselves asking, you know, what kind of changes do I need to make?
It could be a birthday.
It could be an anniversary.
It could be a new year in your life.
And so we begin to ask these questions about our lives.
And so I think time and some of these, I'm going to call them markers in time.
Let's say it's a birthday and let's say it's an anniversary.
Let's say it's the end of a year and the beginning of a new year.
It might be a graduation from college or graduation from high school or a promotion that you get at your job.
These are markers in your life for you to do a few things.
Let me give you a few, six thoughts.
Re-evaluate your life.
Re-assess your relationships.
Re-prioritize your future.
Redefine your spiritual and vocational purpose.
Re-establish worthwhile goals and refresh your physical, emotional, and mental health.
Let me give you those again.
Number one, re-evaluate your life.
So I want to challenge you to take time at different times in your life this year to re-evaluate your life.
Are you happy with who you are?
Are you happy with the person that you are?
If you're not, you need to be starting to ask the question, how do I re-evaluate my life?
Number two, re-assess your relationships.
This is really important because some relationships you're in are not helpful.
Everybody look at the screen.
Some of the relationships you're in are not helpful and you need to re-evaluate and re-assess some of the relationships that you're in.
Number three, re-prioritize your future.
Are you living in, are you being organized by with your time, with the priorities that are going to give you a better future?
So re-prioritize your future.
Number four, redefine your spiritual and vocational purpose.
Do you have a spiritual purpose?
Do you have a vocation that has a purpose to it?
Well, if you don't, redefine it.
You can always redefine your life.
Like I said, time can't be stopped, but time can be controlled and that's up to us.
Number five, re-establish worthwhile goals.
Are you, have you got goals that you've established that are worthwhile?
Or do you have some goals in your life that are just really, really taking you down?
Or maybe, like many people, you don't even have any goals.
Number six, refresh your physical, emotional, and mental health.
and mental health. I want to challenge you to maximize your time emotionally,
mentally, even physically with the kind of use of time that you have. So we
measure life by time. We tell people our age, people ask how old you are, you give
them an age. That's measuring life by time. Life is the passing of time and
what you become, this is so important, write this down, what you become is
totally dependent, not partial, be totally dependent on how you use your
time. So that little infant that's born who becomes one who is mighty in
leadership, one who has a great family, one who has a great marriage, one who has
other kids that they raise that are great kids, is someone who assessed his
time at some point and made priorities, the priorities, the purpose of his life,
how he defined his use of time, and that's somebody who used their time very
wisely. Ecclesiastes 3 says, I've seen the God-given task which God gives the
sons of men to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also he
has put eternity in their hearts. The word beautiful is the same word for
mature. In other words, time is given to us to do something beautiful with our
lives, to grow into maturity in our lives. I sometimes say to people, grow up before
you grow old. So that's about maturity. So Solomon, considered the wisest man in
the world at that time, was saying that God has given us all a task to do. He has
given us life to live in. He's given us time. And there's beauty. There's beauty
in our time when we're growing in maturity. That does not mean that life is
easy. That does not mean that our time is easy on this earth. I've been amazed in
my journey of all these years to be around people who have had really, really
hard lives. And then I've been around people who've had very, very easy lives.
And I can tell you that the people who have had the most difficulties in their
lives, but they harnessed their time, and they made their time something beautiful.
They were matured through their hardship. They were matured through their trials
and troubles, are the kind of people that make a great life. They have a
wonderful life. They have a joyful life. And so many people I've seen who've had
it kind of easy. It's been financially easy. Maybe they grew up in a home where
everything was provided for them. They don't do well. And I've heard the phrase
that hard men make life easy, and easy men make life hard. And I think that's
really true. And I want to be a hard man. I want to be a man that's found maturity
through beauty, and can handle difficulties well so that I can have an
easier life. And I can make life easier for others because I bring beauty to the
lives of others because I'm a hardworking guy. And so seek first the
kingdom of God. And when you seek first the kingdom of God, God makes your life
beautiful. God also says in this passage, He has made everything beautiful in its
time. He's put eternity in their hearts. So sometimes people we think in terms of
eternity as being the afterlife, like something that we're going to experience
after we die. And yet I believe we experience eternity in our lives the day
we give our hearts to Christ. So we give our hearts to Christ, and when we do so
what begins to happen in our lives is we begin to experience eternity in our
hearts right now. We experience the kingdom of God in our hearts right now.
That's where our lives become a thing of great beauty. Job said this, Job 14 5,
Since his days are determined, the number of his months is with you, you have
appointed limits so that we cannot pass. In other words, God has a limit to our
lives. He has a beginning and an end for our lives, and we can try to change that,
but we can't. God knows the limits of our lives, and He's given us a limited amount
of time to make an impact on this earth. And so again, let's make something
beautiful of our lives with the use of our time. Psalm 39 4, Show me, Lord, my
life's end, and the number of my days. Let me know how fleeting my life is.
So, this psalmist is saying that he wants to number his days, he wants to think through
the goals and the destiny of his lives, and he wants to build something beautiful in a
way that brings benefit to others and to the kingdom of God.
Ecclesiastes 8.6, For there is a proper time and a procedure for every matter, though a
person may be weighed down by misery.
You know, this past year might have been a really hard year for you, or maybe you're
coming up on a birthday, or maybe you're coming up on an anniversary or graduation.
Maybe you've been fired from your job, and your life, you feel like the last year or
two, or maybe even longer, has been one of misery.
Well, change that.
As I said earlier, let me repeat these again.
How about you re-evaluate your life, re-assess your relationships, re-prioritize your future,
re-define your spiritual and vocational purpose, re-establish worthwhile goals, and refresh
yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally.
So I challenge you that you need to maximize your time to become the person and find the
destiny that God has for you.
In my next message, I want to talk about how time has been given to us to change.
We do not have to remain the same.
We can make changes in our life.
God bless you.