Our Return on His Investment

Investing Twenty-four Hours a Day. No matter how busy we are (or think we are), the fact still remains that every one of us has exactly the same amount of time to the split second; it is the difference in what we do with it that makes the difference in people.

If you had a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,400, but carried over no balances from day to day and allowed you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening canceled whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the day, what would you do? Draw out every cent, of course.

Well, you have just such a bank, and its name is Time. Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off as lost whatever of these you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balances. It allows no overdrafts. Each day it opens a new account with you. Each night it burns the record of the day.

Each moment in life is a precious gift from Almighty God.

If you fail to use the day’s deposit, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against the morrow. You must live in the present— on today’s deposit. Invest it so as to give your utmost for His Highest. It was for that reason God gave you the “account” in the first place and as surely will He demand a reckoning of you. All stand before the judgment seat of Christ (John 5:22, Romans 2:16, and Romans 14:10).

After all, each of us (regardless of whether we want to acknowledge it or not) were created by and for the sole purpose of serving Jesus Christ. Our existence through salvation is the most wondrous gift; for which we owe God everything in return (Ephesians 2:8-10).

Suppose we deliberately analyze a week of Mr. Average Person’s time and see what we can learn. It has 168 hours in it; 8,760 hours in every year. For the people in this country who have jobs, those 168 hours are said to be usually divided more or less like this-- seventy-seven hours for sleep, meals, personal care, which means brushing your teeth, dressing, shaving… all the rest of it. Forty or fifty hours are devoted to work. (Modern authorities consider a work week unusual which has more than forty hours in it.) Ten hours are spent in cars, subways, buses, traveling to and from work. That leaves forty-one hours unassigned, which can be counted as leisure in its broadest sense…

Squander or Invest. The plain, unvarnished facts are that most of us—yes, even the most busy of us—waste enough time in odd minutes (just plain squander them) that if organized and conserved and used to make dreams come true would more than accomplish our ends as appointed by God.

Franklin reminds us that “If time be of all things most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality, since lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough always proves little enough. Let us then be up and doing, and doing to a [for His] purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity.”

Pray, listen, and obey (1 Thessalonians 5:15-22, James 1:22-25).

Excerpts from “Investing Leisure Time” By Frank H. Cheley – Copyright, 1936, By The University Society Incorporated: Adapted to a Christ-centered viewpoint by Matthew Foutch – November 22, 2011.  Image by By KimCarpenter NJ.