Psalms 90:12 So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Ephesians 5:16 ...redeeming the time because the days are evil.
Ecc. 3:17 ...."a time for every purpose"
James 4:13-15 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into 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 we enter a New Year, remember the one constant true for everyone, rich or poor, male or female: each of us is given 8,760 hours in a Gregorian calendar year. That is, 1,440 minutes a day, or 525,600 minutes a year. Sounds like a lot, yet have you noticed how time flies these days?
Personally, I can't find enough hours in a day to accomplish all that I want to. When I was younger, I had all the time in the world. These days its rate of passage is just short of astonishing. It seems, for example, like yesterday, that 9/11 happened. It's been 21 years. Kids entering the army now weren't even born yet!
And time is one thing we cannot recapture once lost. Are we behaving like we have all the time in the world? We don't, and it was always an illusion to think otherwise. Time is precious. A heart of wisdom will rightly value the limited and uncertain portion allotted and will make the most of it.
Seize the day. Discover the purpose for the time. The Lord will guide and empower you to live meaningfully and fruitfully, even as if today is the last day of your life; (it actually could be). If you need to, repent. If you need to, reconcile; don't wait. Pray for the Lord's economy in your use of time. You'll be amazed at the ways He inspires, arranges, and invests your time with His wonderful purposes. Every minute of your life will be assessed according to His value. So make the most of it...
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]Throughout the United States today, everyone will be celebrating the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — a document through which leaders of the colonies in the New World broke free from the King of England.
The Hebrew expression in this verse from Isaiah is rich with meaning. The root “nus” (from the expression “raise up a standard”) is related to or sounds like numerous words which mean “sign”, “miracle”, “to drive away”, “to flee”, “cause to disappear”, “a waving flag”. This abundance of meanings in Isaiah’s poetic style reveals the multiple dimensions of God’s revelation; in this case, the way he deals with evil. The assertion in this word is that the Spirit of YHVH will be powerfully activated when evil comes.
The word contrite in Hebrew is ‘dakah’ which means one that is crushed to pieces. Paul wrote of being a ‘living sacrifice’ holy and acceptable to God. Being a living sacrifice means we often can walk off the altar. To be a continual living sacrifice we need to renew our minds day to day!
Recently, I’ve been impressed by the Lord to address the anxieties many are feeling about the future– how to be strong in the face of the intense opposition we’ll be facing as believers. One of the founders of the modern state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion once said, “Courage is a special kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared. From this knowledge comes an inner strength that inspires us to push on in the face of great difficulty. What can seem impossible is often possible with courage.”
For a season, I worked in Washington, D.C., for one of America’s largest Christian political organizations. Sometimes I saw how politics could get ugly and, more often than not, how it changed people — not for the better…but usually for the worse!
Have you ever felt uneasy, unsettled or unstable? Or maybe a better question is — who hasn’t? How do we overcome these feelings?
Is that a trend or something? I don’t know what it is but I’ve heard that phrase said quite a bit. We were even walking down the Wal-Mart isle to pick up a few things and my wife showed me a T-shirt with “I have issues” written across the front! I guess the world is coming to the sad reality that we really do have some issues.