Envision that you are on a ship clinging tightly to whatever it is that you have on this earth that you treasure the most. Imagine whatever it is that you value so highly slipping out of your grasp only to fall out of reach. You lounge forward in a final futile attempt to catch hold of it, only to see it fall forever into the depths of the sea, unable to ever be retrieved again.
This is exactly the picture that John Foster uses in his book from the early 1800s entitled “The Improvement of Time.” In it, he points to another treasure that moment by moment is wasted by being dropped over the edge, but its loss is many times unnoticed. The 234-page book’s entire intent is to convince the reader not only of the value of time but to also see how easily it slips away from us, never to be seen or utilized again.
The Value of a Minute
When we are young, we are constantly given unheeded warnings on the speed and shortness of life. Usually, they passed over our heads under the assumption that the “old” men and women giving them were out of touch. But did you realize that God gives the very same warnings?
The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Psalm 90:10
Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. James 4:4
In Ephesians God tells us that he has things for us to do. We are His workmanship and He has created and prepared things for us to do. We only have this life to do them. There is no second shot. There is no reset button on this journey that we are on. When we reach the end of our lives, as Christians we will give an account for the life that God has given us. I’d like to leave no task that God has prepared for me undone.
In John 9 Jesus tells us that “We must do what God has for us now while it is day for night is coming when no one can work.” We will never accomplish what God has created us for if we aimlessly drift through this life, allowing it to passively pass us by. It’s our choice to either spend ourselves on the things that matter: God, His Kingdom, and His mission, or to spend our lives on cheap thrills, comfort, and ease. But only one decision will have anything to show for it in the end.
Minutes Easily Spent
Imagine having $40,000,000. You would likely give little thought to dollars spent here and there. Some costs are paid so gradually that the total expense paid slips away without notice. But when those small payments here and there are totaled, the sum would be staggering. When it comes to the investment of our lives, I think many of us spend them in that way; wasted, not all at once for we are far too wise to make such a mistake. Instead as fools, we spend our life savings of time on little trinkets here and there. Our time purchases nothing of great value, worth investing in, but it is spent in such small instances, that it concerns us very little.
If you are an average man or woman in the United States your life will likely consist of just over 40 million minutes. What are you going to do with them? It would be easy to excuse wasting a great deal of it, but be careful, you just might find at the end of it all you wasted more than you realized.
No Getting it Back
There is no way of getting time back, once spent it is gone for good. If time has slowly been falling out of your hands beneath the surface of the sea you cannot dive down to retrieve it. The moments were wasted. All you can do moving forward is to fight to keep more from drifting away. I don’t know how much time is left in your bank, but you have some. You have one life to live. Spend it where it counts and make it count.
So teach us to number our days, That we may present to You a heart of wisdom. Psalm 90:12