In Good TimeSample

Time’s Priority

The American economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay in 1930, predicting that his grandchildren would work a mere 15 hours a week. He foresaw that technology would deliver us from the burden of work. In fact, his fear, nearly a hundred years old, is laughable today. Keynes worried we’d have too much free time—and find it difficult to know how to spend it.

We’ve fully arrived in the digital age, and despite our technological gains, we don’t have more time, only the sense that time is moving faster and faster. We can’t keep up! The temptation, of course, is to believe that time-anxiety is a modern phenomenon, something produced by the smartphone. But in Jesus’s famous Sermon on the Mount, we recognize a familiar time-anxiety. Those men and women gathered on the hillside were just as worried as we are about time running out.

“Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” Jesus asks the crowd. Interestingly, time wasn’t measured in precise hours in Jesus’s day. Instead, time was measured by crude instruments like the sundial and the water clock. Yet it still seems that ancient people had, like us, a nagging sense, that they needed to make good on the time afforded to them.

Our temptation today is to think that we can beat the perils of time by getting more done. An entire industry sells consumers on the idea that there is more than enough time, if you know how to manage it. But that isn’t Jesus’s tact here. To time-anxious humans, he doesn’t say plan better, work harder, run faster.

First, he says: trust. Trust in the God who feeds the birds and clothes the flowers of the field. You’re of greater value than these, and God will never neglect your needs. Don’t worry, Jesus says! God is looking out for you—and even knows your needs before you ask. Second, Jesus says: commit. Commit yourself to the priority of my kingdom. Follow me by loving what I love, by working as I work, by resting as I rest. That’s where your time is best spent—not in chasing the short-term goals of money and status and professional achievement.

The only day we’re guaranteed is today—so let’s seek the eternal priorities of God and his righteousness. Everything needful will be added by God!