Give Your Time to God: Part 1 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. Isn’t it great how God keeps reaching out to us in our lives day after day, week after week, year after year? God is always there, reaching out to us. He loves us so much, and that constant loving care that takes the initiative in our lives just makes us want to love Him too, doesn’t it?

Well, this week, I want to talk to you about the three most precious things in our lives.

So often for us, our time is so precious, our money is so precious, and our relationships are so precious. And what we need to learn to do in life is to give all of those things to God. And this week I want to focus on the first one of those, giving your time to God.

Let me read you a few verses out of the book of James in the Bible, starting in chapter 4, verse 13. He says:

Come now, you who say today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit. Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.

What is your life, for you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.

As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

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Well, I wanted to spend a few days looking at this passage with you, but I remember at one time reading of an interview that someone had with the famous evangelist who recently died, Billy Graham.

And they were asking him in all the amazing experiences he had had all over the world, meeting with many of the world’s rulers, close relationships with many of the presidents of the United States. What was the most amazing thing that he had experienced in life?

With hardly a pause, he answered the brevity of life.

Well, brevity isn’t a word we use all the time, but it just means the briefness, how short life is. That was the thing that had most amazed him in life. It’s true, isn’t it? When you’re young, you don’t really think about that very much. It’s like when you go to a day-night cricket match, and when you start off, your team comes in 2nd, and they’ve got a run rate that’s in front of them. They have to get so many runs per inning in order to win the match, and at the beginning it seemed so easy, of course, anyone could get that run rate.

But as the match goes on and the innings start to run down, you realise that run rate is getting higher and higher, and you think, no, we need more time for our team to win. Well, that’s how life is, isn’t it?

When you sit down to take an exam at uni, you’ve got 2 hours for your exam, it seems like heaps of time. But as the time starts ticking by, you realise actually 2 hours is not very long to finish this exam. You start writing more fast, thinking more frantically.

Well, the Bible says this.

It says, all flesh is like grass. And its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers. The flower fades. But the word of the Lord abides forever.

And what I want you to recognise today as you think about time in your life, is that time is fleeting. It’s going by so fast, before you know it, it’s going to be almost gone.

I’m not trying to be negative or pessimistic. It’s real. It’s how life is. And whether you’re young or middle aged or old, you need to live your days with this awareness. Time is running out. I have a limited amount of time to do what pleases God, what honours God in this life before I go to be with Him. Live your life for the things that count, because time is short.

I’m John North.

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