Lessons in managing your income!

Picture courtesy of Unsplash - Damir Spanic

Picture courtesy of Unsplash - Nathan Dumlao 

Picture courtesy of Unsplash - Aron Visuals 

Imagine that there is a bank which credits your account with £86,400 every morning, every day. It carries no credit over from day to day. At the end of the day anything you fail to use in the day is wiped out and the following day you receive another £86,400.

What would you do?

It goes without saying that you would draw out every penny and use it. Only a fool would throw away such a resource. Surprisingly, every one of us has such a bank. Its name is ‘time’.

Every morning it credits us with 86,400 seconds, the number of seconds in a day, and at the end of the day anything we have failed to put to good use is written off and lost forever. It carries over no balance and allows no overdraft. 

Each day it opens a new account for you, but if you fail to use any of the day’s deposit, the loss is yours. There is no going back, nor can you borrow from tomorrow’s deposit; all of us have to live by what we have today.

This precious commodity of ‘time’ is given to us by God, but although 86,400 sounds a lot, it soon runs out.  The Bible asks us a question and also provides the answer.  The question is, ‘What is your life?’ 

The answer given is this, ‘It is a vapour that appears for a little while and then vanishes away!’

So how can we use this elusive thing called time so we can find the biggest rewards?:

1. By making heaps of money that we can only leave behind when time runs out?  Or,

2. By making a reputation that will be forgotten in the mists of time? 

The Bible again gives us the answer. ‘Seek the Lord while he may be found!’ 

A very wealthy man by the name of King Solomon looked for fulfilment in possessions and pleasure and described his search as ‘chasing the wind’ because everything he gained, he could not keep.  

Another man by the name of Jim Elliot said this. ‘He is no fool who gives that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.’ What he meant was that he knew he could not keep his life forever – one day it would end, but he knew that knowing Jesus Christ gave him something that would not end and that was something he could not lose – God’s gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ.

Messages with Meaning (11/10/20) Written by Stephen Treseder for Your542day