Introduction
Over the last few weeks we have been looking at what it means to follow a purpose-driven life. A life, in other words, where we strive to live according to the values and will of God for our lives. We said:
Today we come to the fifth step: Organise my time around my shape and my life mission.
In our reading today we heard St Paul advise the church in Ephesus “Live life with a due sense of responsibility, not as those who do not know the meaning of life but as those who do. Make the best use of your time.” Today's step involves us being responsible and making the best use of our time.
Time is our most precious commodity. It’s far more important than money. You can always get more money but you only have a certain amount of time allotted in your life. When you waste time you are essentially wasting your life.
Now there are lots of time management courses and books on the market. My friend Alison once went on a time management course and, when she got to the venue, she couldn't understand why the receptionist broke into helpless fits of giggles. Alison had turned up at the right time, to the right place on the right day - just the wrong week! I don't want to tell you how to manage your time so you can fit more in - but that is what many of us want. Instead, I want to tell you to do less!
God has a lot to say about time management but how do you do this? How do you make the best use of your time? By organizing it around your life mission.
You may find the notes on the back of the song sheet helpful as we go through today's sermon.
1. I need to devise my goals around my purpose.
Sometimes if you go on a time management course they say you can set and meet any goal you set yourself if you apply yourself properly. Now this is rubbish and it is dangerous rubbish as it means people get despondent and depressed when they don't meet the goals they set themselves. However, I am not saying it is wrong to set goals. St Paul was a purpose-driven goal-setter. 1 Corinthians 9:26 “I run straight to the goal with purpose in every step.”
You cannot achieve everything you want in life. You can achieve everything God put you on this earth to achieve in life. God shaped you and made you for a purpose. And when you find that purpose and start doing what God put you on this earth to do, you find that niche, and you’re going to say, “It feels so good! Now I know why I’m here on this earth.” You wake up in the morning and greet the new day ready to face it. The world says, Set any goal you want and go after it. God says, Base your goals on My purpose for your life.
2 Corinthians 10:13 “Our goal is to measure up to God’s plan for us.” Most books on time management and goal setting ignore the two most important facts in your life: 1) God has four purposes for your life, and 2) You are uniquely shaped. If you don’t take those two things into consideration and you set a bunch of goals and achieve them, you’ll still be unfulfilled.
Last week, remember, we said there are four purposes God has for every individual.
1. God wants me to get to know and love God. I was made to put God at the centre of my life. So I need to set some specific goals about getting to know God, and about learning to trust God. I need to set some goals about how much time I’m going to spend getting to know God.
2. God made you to become like Jesus. You need to set some specific goals saying, What kind of character do I need to work on? and how do I want to be different a year from now than I am today? What character qualities, specifically, do I want to work on? That’s a goal based on a purpose.
3. God made you to make a contribution to the world. God's given you certain gifts and talents. We call that your SHAPE . So you need to set some goals saying, How can I best make a contribution? Where am I going to get involved in giving my life away? Set some specific goals about where you’re going to make a contribution to help other people, to help make the world a better place.
4. God’s given you a unique life message. Maybe one of your goals should be in the next twelve months I want to discover what that life message is, what God put me on earth for. Then I’ve got to set a goal for how and where and when’s the best time and what’s the best way to share and to communicate the message God has to the world through me.
Goals are where the rubber meets the road. They put wings to your mission statement. And if you don’t set goals based around your purpose, you just have a little dusty document.
Why are goals so important? Because we always move toward what we focus on. If you don’t set any goals in your life then your life has no focus. What you tend to do is run around putting out fires all the time. You’ve got to have some signposts in life. And the goals you set based o n your purposes are the signposts in your life that show you’re making progress.
That’s the first step. Once you’ve set some goals based on your purposes then your start fulfilling your activities around those goals.
2. Organise my activities around relationships
I’m going to explain why the Bible teaches this but first let me ask you, how many of you have ever made or used a Things To Do list? We’ve all done this. You make a Things To Do list then you start to try to accomplish all the things on the list. There’s one problem with a Things To Do list. That is, the things on that list are not of equal value. In the office I love making little things to do lists. The problem is that I like crossing things off the list so I feel like I have a got a lot done. But I will do a lot of easy things - I have cleaned the paper clip tray, but still not written the sermon. I have fed the dog but still not returned that difficult phone call. I find it difficult to prioritise what is important and what is urgent.
I know what human nature is like. I’ve been a pastor for years. Most of us organise our lives not around relationships around the urgent and the unfinished. Almost all of your life is spent on doing the things I’ve got to do because I knew I should have done them two months ago and today’s the deadline so I have to get them done today. So you run around, as I say, putting out fires. Have you noticed that the urgent is not always important; it’s just urgent? They are two different things.
Then you do the unfinished. You make this long list of about 30 items and get about five of them done. Then you go to bed. The nest morning you get up and start on the list again with the things that are still unfinished, never asking “Should I be doing this in the first place?” The problem is with human nature we usually do the least important things first because they’re the easiest. And we like the satisfaction of – crossing six things off my list.
Ecclesiastes 8:6 “There’s a right time and a right way to do everything but we know so little.” That verse is saying your problem isn’t a lack of time, it’s we don’t know how to manage it. There’s a right time and right way to do everything. There’s a right way and wrong way to do everything.
We all have the same amount of time each week – 168 hours. Everybody in this room has the same amount of hours – 168 hours a week. In that week, the difference between those who really make their lives count and those who don’t is management. We all have the same amount of time, it’s just the way you use it.
The point is this your life mission is not done in a vacuum. It’s done in relationship to other people. There will never be a time in your life when everything is particularly organized just the way you want it and you can get up in the morning and do everything you want to do and get it done in no relationship with anybody else. There will always be interruptions. There will always be problems. There will always be responsibilities that you have.
But there is a way to organize it. I suggest and I believe the Bible teaches that the best way to organize your life is to build it around relationships. Specifically five relationships. Because the Bible says if I have not love, nothing else matters. Relationships are far more important than accomplishments in God’s book. So you need to look at the different relationships you have.
In the Olympics one of the events is called the pentathlon. If you remember this involves five events. There is pistol shooting, fencing, horseback riding, running, and swimming. The goal of a pentathla-ete is to be good in all of the areas, to balance the areas. Not just to excel in one and drop off in the others, but to try to keep them balanced.
Your life is a pentathlon. And it is built around five basic relationships. What you need to do is not only set goals based on your purposes but organize your activities around your relationships.
(i) Your relationship to yourself. Your personal life. That’s your personal development as a child of God. In St Luke's gospel we read: “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature in favour with God and humanity.” It says there that Jesus, as a young man, grew in four ways and they’re the four ways God wants you to develop. He grew in wisdom – intellectually. He grew in stature – physically. He grew in favour with God – spiritual development. He grew in favour with others – social development. God wants you to work on all of these areas. You need to plan time for personal development.
(ii) Family and Friends. We need to make sure our time planning involves time for our family, spouse and friends. One of the struggles in my life is finding time to spend with friends - and even finding time to call them. Luckily my closest friends are very understanding and ensure they keep calling me - even if I don't find the time always to call them. My time with Ian is precious and we have learned to jealousy guard our time together - despite our puppies' best attempts to become the centre of attention! In his advice to a young minister St Paul writes: “If people do not provide for their relatives, and especially for their immediate family, they have denied the faith.”
That’s pretty strong words isn’t it? It says that if you’re not balancing your life to involve taking care of your family you’ve denied the faith. Now this is sometimes difficult. Often we find that our families are sources of stress and pain. Many of us have re-defined family so, for example, my closest friend is more important to me than many members of my family. What I have done is re-define my family and many of us do this - however, the important thing is to realise that, however, we define this, we need to organise our life around this priority.
(iii) My church family. St Paul says “You belong in God’s household with every other Christian.” You cannot become all God wants you to be unless you get tied into and committed to a local church. It is impossible to become all God wants you to be unless you’re tied into a church family. You need to be a part of a church family. That needs to be in your time planning. Sometimes people tell me that they felt too low to come to church and yet I know that actually being in church, spending time in God's presence, receiving from God and spending time with other Christians actually gives us the strength to get through the low times. Staying away from church does us harm.
(iv) My work. Obviously, you have relationships with people that you work with. How do we nurture those relationships and make our places of work, for those of us who work, places of grace?
(v) My world or my community. We’re part of a larger community. You’re not just a church member and you’re not just a family member and you’re not just a person. Some of you are a partner, and some of you are a parent, and then you’re a professional, but you’re also a citizen. I hope I don’t have to say to you that you ought to vote. That is a responsibility of every Christian. We need to elect leaders of character. That’s part of your responsibility, to vote. Part of your responsibility is to pay taxes. Part of your responsibility is to obey the law. That’s part of your life too – your community world. And we are responsible for seeking to change the world in which we live to make it better, to make it more just.
What do you call a person who is successful in one of the areas but a failure in the others? Let’s say you are a success at work and you make a lot of money, but you lose your health or you lose your family and you make no contribution to your church family and you make no contribution back to the community, what does God call that kind life? A wasted life. A failure. Because in the pentathlon you’re not judged on one event. And you can’t get to heaven one day and say, “But I made a lot of money.” God’s going to say, “What about the other areas?”
The key is balance. I know this is difficult to visualize. Think of your life as a tree. The roots of the tree are God’s four purposes for your life – putting God at the centre, having the character of Jesus, making a contribution, and communicating your life message. Then your life mission is the trunk based on your SHAPE. The branches are the five key relationship areas of your life we talked about. The twigs are your purpose driven goals in each of those areas – goals at work, goals in the family, goals at church, goals in your personal life.
The truth is, if we were able to do a little brain surgery on you right now and cut the top of your head off and look inside your mind, we wouldn’t see a perfectly formed tree with all the activities relating to the different purposes. What we would see in your head is a heap of pine needles. There are all these different tasks because you are activity driven rather than purpose driven.
3. The final step in organising our time is: Harmonize my Time around my Values
This means if something is really important to me, I need to put it on the calendar. “Harmonize” means “to bring into agreement”. The problem is we say all the time, “This is important to me,” but we don’t ever schedule any time for it. If you don’t schedule it, it’s not going to get done. We tend to give priority to scheduled items. For instance, if you have a doctor’s appointment in three weeks on Thursday afternoon, your whole day that day is going to be revolving around it. Somehow it takes on a greater importance than everything else simply because it’s on the calendar. So whatever you need to do, you need to put on your calendar.
Goals must be translated into activities. Purposes must be translated into goals and goals into activities. And activities must be scheduled. If you don’t make time for the important things in your life, they’re not going to be there. I’m even talking about rest and recreation. They’re part of God’s plan for your life. If you don’t schedule time for personal development, you’re not going to have time for it. If you don’t schedule time for your family, you’re not going to have time for it. You need to write it in. Make appointments. Whatever you need to do, put it down on the calendar.
Purpose Driven Time Management is really based on two ideas. Do less of what I’m not shaped to do and more of what I am shaped to do. Do less of what everybody else thinks I ought to do or the world thinks I ought to do and do more of what God has shaped me to do.
I have just enough time to do God’s will. That’s why I said earlier, if you have too many things that aren’t getting done it means some of it obviously isn’t God’s will. He doesn’t expect you to do more than He gives you the time to do. So you’re either doing the wrong things or you’re doing the right things in the wrong way.
Conclusions
There’s no possible way to balance your life if you don’t have Jesus at the centre. You can take all the classes you want to but there’s no way to balance your life unless you have God at the centre because that’s what you were made to have at the centre of your life.
Prayer
Jesus, you said
"come to me you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest."
We know that you will not load more stress on us.
We give you our time and all the things we have to do.
Help us, Lord Jesus, to re-order our lives, to prioritise time with you, time
with our families and friends, time for church, time at work and time for our
responsibilities in the world.
Please help me, Jesus, be at the centre of my life.
I want to follow You from here on.
Amen.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.