Free Time

“Daily life is so filled with hundreds of choices to either give in to selfish whims or yield to Christ's Spirit...

“How did you spend your free time? Doing what you felt like doing? Or pouring out your life for Him?”

-Leslie Ludy, Wrestling Prayer, p60-61

Hello fellow followers of Christ,

This question and thought has been bouncing around in my mind this week, and it has been really stirring and convicting me:

“How do you spend your free time?”

Is your free time “me time?”

Or do consider each extra moment that you have as an opportunity to bring extra glory to Christ?

I started thinking too, what does it look to change Me-Time to glorifying God time?

One could take free summer, with which we can serve God in many ways: acts of service for our communities, missions trips, Bible studies, street evangelism, among other things.

But what about those free minutes or seconds?

Even our free moments ought to be taken to serve Christ.

How?

By giving our thoughts to Christ.

(2 Corinthians 10:5b)

“...Bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”

It's pretty difficult to wrap my little mind around that concept.

But Psalm 1 talks about meditation on God's Word, which is amazing. (Dr. Bill Gothard talks in depth about meditation in Achieving Daily Success, which I highly Recommend!)

A very powerful way that we can dedicate our thoughts to Christ.

Here's an interesting perspective that helps me to think of dedicating every second to Christ.

Imaginary Story:

One bright summer afternoon, your family is out and about doing errands and activities, and you just walk into your home as you return from a local Ultimate Frisbee game. You open the door, and to your surprise you find huge stacks of $1 bills, in brick sized bundles, each stacked in gigantic 4 x 4 x 4 feet cube shapes, and each cube according to your estimation, contains about 100,000 bills, all throughout your house.

“Wow!” You say. “What's goin' on here?”

The stacks of money nearly fill up every single room in the house, except for a walkway through each room.

You start walking down the aisles of money, and think to yourself: Is this all for me and my family? I can do so much with all of this money!”

You walk into your bedroom, and see just one cube of money.

Interesting. You think to yourself, all the other rooms are filled with cubes of money. I wonder why this one only has one cube.

To your shock, you see one bundle on top of the cube, where the dollar bills are literally evaporating into thin air.

“What?!” You exclaim in amazement, as you slowly and cautiously walk forward.

As you observe with a closer view, and pick up a bundle, you see and feel one bill at a time disappearing every second.

You find a note on top of a nearby stack which says:

Dear [insert your name here],

Each dollar bill represents 1 second of your life.

Don't ever forget

That your time on earth is limited.
Use each second wisely.

Love,

God

How do you spend each free second?

Godly Perspective

We are each given at most 3,153,600,000 seconds. (Pretty conservative... because that is if we live to be 100 years old)

I've already spend about 600 million of those (at most, most likely) 3 billion seconds, at 19 years old.

Crazy.

Imagine all the things you could do with $3,153,600,000.

Probably too much for us to even comprehend.

Now think about this...

Each second can be thought of as more valuable than a dollar,

Because each second can be invested in eternal treasure in heaven.

Is there anything in your life that you should give up,

In order to invest in things that glorify Christ?

Let's take every extra moment to meditate on the awesome goodness of God,

To say a prayer of thanksgiving for all the blessings He's placed in our lives,

To pray the requests of our brothers and sisters in Christ,

To earnestly ask God to save the lost,

And let's take our free time and do something that Jesus would be proud of!

God bless you all this week!

Love in Christ,

Landon

Psalm 90:12

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”