10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 – Part 9
August 21, 2005
Dear Friends:
The ninth thing I wish I knew when I was twenty is:
#9 – Redeem the time.
Time is an interesting and unique asset. You either use it or lose it. You can’t store it up. The second you are living in will not come around again. From a Biblical perspective, it is redeemed or lost. “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Eph. 5:15-16)
Time, to me, is like a bank account. You can make deposits or withdrawals. You can invest an hour doing something lasting and positive or spend it on frivolous or, even worse, sinful activities. The way we spend or invest our time to a great extent determines who we are, what is important to us and what our circumstances are.
A few years ago, USA Today ran one of its little graphical blurbs about how people spend their time. It said the average adult in the US had 39.4 hours of free time compared to 34.8 hours in 1965. On average, this is how the time was spent:
- 15 hours of TV
- 6.7 hours of socializing
- 4.4 hours communicating via phone/mail/talk
- 2.8 hours reading
- 2.7 hours on hobbies
- 2.2 hours on education
- 2.2 hours on sports
- 1.2 hours on groups
- .9 hours on cultural events
- .9 hours on religion
- .4 hours on radio/recordings
Notice these in particular; TV gets 15 hours per week while education gets 2.2 hours and religion only .9. Hopefully these are not true of believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.
So let’s put this in perspective. We have roughly 40 hours per week to either invest or spend. Let’s say we decide we are going to spend some of those 40 hours like this.
- We are going to spend 30 minutes per day reading our Bible.
- We are going to spend 2 hours per week in Bible class (outside of Sunday worship).
- We are going to spend 3 hours per week doing something nice for someone that is completely altruistic.
- We are going to spend 3 hours per week reading something good (educational, Bible-oriented).
We have invested 11.5 hours of our 40 hours. In other words, we can do these things and still have 28 hours left to do something else. The point is that doing these minimal things hardly puts a dent in our free time.
Even if we really don’t have 40 hours per week of free time like the “average” guy to do what we want, we still need to reflect on how we use our time. Are we investing it or spending it? My experience overtime has taught me that I need to fill my life with the things of God. It often shows itself now in that I have too much on my plate, but I would rather have too many God-centered things to do than not enough. I know that those vacuums in my life where I have not planned on redeeming the time, the time gets wasted in often frivolous pursuits.
Just think what could be accomplished if the average person threw their TV out and dedicated it to something useful. With just those 15 hours per week you could get a college or a master’s degree, read a good book every week or two, learn a foreign language for missionary work (or even Hebrew or Greek), spend significant time in charity work, teach many people about God’s Truth and on and on. If you did that for 10 years, think about the good that could be achieved. I guarantee if you do it, you won’t look back and regret that you missed 10 years of yet another reality show on TV.
Have a great week!
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