The Time of Your Life

By T. M. Moore | Published Date: December 31, 2012

“So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance.” Matthew 25:28, 29

~ Where’s the time?
Our generation never seems to have enough time to do everything we want to do. “Where does the time go?” we ask, as if somehow the moments of our lives slip away without our noticing. “I just don’t have the time!” is the complaint we hear from many when challenged to a more demanding life of discipleship and service in the Kingdom of God.
Of course, it’s true that we all have just exactly the same amount of time. But if I understand the parable of the talents correctly, it may actually be possible to gain more time than others in order to pursue the things that matter most in life.
The parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30) relates the familiar story of three servants entrusted with unequal amounts of their master’s wealth, and charged with the duty of making more of it. Two succeed, while one squanders the opportunity by timidly hiding his talent rather than investing it for his master’s benefit. At the end of the parable the unfaithful servant is chided and his amount of money is taken from him and given to the one who made the best use of that which he had been given. Thus, the parable ends with Jesus saying, “to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance.”

~ A most precious gift
Jonathan Edwards, that great Puritan preacher and theologian, explained that of all the gifts God gives to His people, excepting that of salvation, the gift of time is the most precious. Everything we are and do takes place in time. Each of us has just as much time as all the rest of us – 24 hours in every day. But some people seem actually to have more time than others, which is apparent by what they are able to accomplish with the time they have.
I once worked a summer with a master builder and craftsman named Ernie Daniels. Ernie loved the Lord and loved doing his work as unto the Lord. He knew every tool and its proper use, and there wasn’t a construction or repair task that Ernie had not accomplished at some point in his career.
One day Ernie had several tasks to take care of which he felt he could accomplish on his own. So he gave me one task to do – reverse a wrongly-installed door knob in a hotel door – and then told me to spend the rest of the day cleaning up the workshop. Simple enough, I thought. Except that I’d never done this task before and, once I got the door knob apart, I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get it back on correctly.
It took me nearly the entire afternoon to complete this simple task. By the time I finally got back to the workshop, Ernie was already there and had cleaned the whole place up without me. He graciously laughed at my ineptitude and assured me it was OK. Ernie understood that I was not trained to use my time in this kind of work, and so it made sense that, since he was, and was vastly more experienced in such tasks than I, he would get more out of his time than I would.

~ Called to do well
Following Jesus Christ is just like this – except that believers do not have the excuse of saying, like I did to Ernie, “This just isn’t what I do well.” All believers are called to follow Jesus Christ, all the time of their lives, and to devote all their time to growing in Him and bearing fruit for His Kingdom. As Paul put it, believers in Jesus Christ must learn to “make the most” of their time for the cause of Christ and His Kingdom, for any time not wholly invested in seeking the Kingdom and glory of Jesus Christ will be lost to the forces of wickedness and unbelief (Eph. 5:15-17).
The time of our lives is a gift from God, which He bestows on us, moment by moment, so that we will use it for His glory and Kingdom. Our calling is to receive and master the use of this gift, and God’s promise is that, if we will, we will never lack for time to grow in the Lord or to further the purposes of His Kingdom.


- This study by T.M. Moore,and others like it, are made available at ColsonCenter.org.