your time belongs to God

It’s something everyone has, and it’s something everyone spends. Time living, time waiting, time doing. How do you spend your time? Do you give the majority of it to the world laboring for their businesses that don’t further God’s kingdom? Do you spend more time worried like those in the world, hustling so you can keep the things that you have? Do you spend it looking more like the world than you do a servant of God?

Thanks to God, I’ve had a lot of time to examine how I’ve been spending my time, and I realized that I wasn’t giving it to God. My time was given to the world. I became its servant. I didn’t realize at the time that the modern employer was just a dressed-up master and servant relationship of the past. So I gave the world my eight-hour days and forty-hour weeks, doing everything that I could to push its mission, grow its kingdom, and reap the only thing I wanted from it: money.

I thought it was okay because, after all, I needed money to pay bills; I needed money to take care of my younger sister and then my cat. I didn’t see how much of the world took me over, taking me away from God. I didn’t see how it was a problem that my Bible sat unopened beside me as I answered phone calls, emails, and chats so the world could get more money. I didn’t see how it was wrong to work for money and not God’s glory. I didn’t see any of it until God took the time to let me break down after I begged Him to get me out from under my worldly employer.

No longer do I operate as a volunteer of God, where He gets my leftover time. I am now fully a servant of God, and it’s all thanks to Him that I can say that because the world didn’t want me to. At almost every turn, I was refused the time to rest, refused the time to heal with Him, but when God says yes, no one can say no (Revelation 3:8).

So how do you spend your time? If you were like me in the past, cry out to God for help. Because God can help you if you sincerely want Him to. He can rearrange your life so you are laboring for Him six days a week and resting on the Sabbath day (Exodus 20:8–9). You can have a life where you are fully using your gifts for His glory (Matthew 25:14-30). I have that life now. And while I’m very glad that I do, I’m not going to act like it’s all sunshine and rainbows.

I’m still waiting for this season of lack to end, but I am waiting in hope because I serve a God who keeps His promises, not just for my sake but for His (Isaiah 48:9-11). He promised to provide what I need if I diligently seek Him, and I am holding Him to that promise (Matthew 6:31-33).

And that’s why you should too.

You were bought with a price (1 Corinthians 7:22–23). Don’t follow the world that says you have to be a person who happens to be Christian, and not a person who is fully all in for God no matter what. Remember who you are as you hold on to the promises of God and keep waiting on Him even in a trial that seems like it’s never going to end.