Performing a “Time Audit” of Your Life

One of the benefits of a new year is stopping to take stock of our lives—to assess whether we’re actually spending our time doing what matters most. We’ll never live the life God intends for us unless we intend to, and intending starts with an honest look at how we’ve created our schedules.
Our Spiritual Formations team has created a great tool to help us “audit” our most precious resource—our time. Check it out:

Five Life Resources:

1. Spiritual – Every person’s heart yearns for something. Additionally, Jesus said that man was not meant to live on bread alone. Think of your soul as something with an appetite – and we are what we eat. Every human shares the same problem in that we love and trust the wrong things. When we love and trust things more than God, we begin to direct our lives toward those things in ways that do not bring glory to God.
2. Relationships – God made people to live in community with others. The only aspect of creation that God did not deem good was that Adam was alone without Eve. More importantly than the basic need for others, Christ’s death created a new community that is essential for engaging in the pilgrimage from grace to glory: the local church.
3. Physical & Emotional Energy – Our bodies have minds and muscles. Each of which need, at times, to be strengthened, fed, healed and rested. We are prone to worship or abuse these resources just like any other.
4. Finances – Possessions are a resource that will either be stewarded by us or will come to control us. We are prone to love things more than God who gives them; this is idolatry. When we see God as the one who owns everything and ourselves as the steward, they become a means to bless others and glorify God.
5. Time – Time is the resource that governs all the others. Your time is your life. As your time goes, so goes your life. We will invest or waste our time just like any other resource. Our lives are “a vapor” and the time we have is a resource and a gift from God to be stewarded just like the others. 

The Summit Margin Audit

1) List the 3-5 resources you view as most valuable in your life. What depletes them most? What “recharges” them?

2) Time Audit. We have 168 hours every week. This tool is meant to give you a snapshot of how you are spending yours and how you wish you were spending yours.

Complete columns #1 & #2 and be ready to reference it for subsequent questions.

 3) Prioritize. Think through your Time Audit and major commitments over the last year, and then complete column #3.  What are your current priorities based on your time and resource commitments?

 

4) Simplify. We can create margin by combining commitments to intersect and therefore reserve resources. What are some ways that you can cause intersection between different activities? How can your small group do this together?

Begin completing column #4.

5) Stop. Based on what you have discovered so far, what are some commitments or resource drains that you need to bring to a close in the near future.

6) Start. What is something you need to start that will allow you to steward and prioritize your resources biblically in order to glorify God.

7) Build habits and rhythms. Reflect on your activities, the time they take, the resources they use and give, and the changes that may need to be made.

by J.D. Greear, Pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, a position he has held since January 2002.

The Hard, Adrenaline-Soaked Truth About 'Toxic Masculinity'

Retired Marine Corps general James Mattis testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on his nomination to be the next secretary of defense on January 12, 2017. As Mattis, a warrior and gentleman scholar, steps into the spotlight a number of colleges are referring to personas like his as "toxic" for our youth. Who is right?

Have you felt the touch of “toxic masculinity” lately? Maybe you just didn’t realize when its steely grip grabbed you by the back of the neck, say some academics at Duke and more.

Wait a second, you say, what is toxic masculinity? Quite right, we need a definition. This is a relatively new and controversial academic idea. Urban Dictionary took a swing at it and came up with this: 

n.) A false idea that men are expected to be as manly as possible even though they're definitely not regularly expected to drink gallon sized beers in under three seconds, grow out gravely beards by mere thought alone, kill sharks with their bare hands….

The Good Men Project blog does a better job: “Toxic masculinity is a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression.”

So right, it’s a negative thing that must be repressed, as if manliness is a psychological disorder that only leads to aggression and violence, say these academics.

Basically, they say telling young men to “man up” or “grow a pair” is making young men do violent things. They say old-school patriarchal elements of society are pushing them to prove themselves to their peers in destructive ways. Man’s caveman traits, they argue, run toxic with adrenaline unless our young men can swear off being men.

Never mind that these academics are ignoring thousands of years of things like Christian virtues, Confucian principles, knightly conduct and gentlemanly codes developed and used to channel boys’ natural aggression in positive ways as mentors show them how to be stand-up men living a chivalric code. All that is passé.

Actually, it’s worse than passé. That portion of human history is too loaded with things these academics want to wipe away—and, to some extent, they already have diminished, which is the actual reason colleges are dealing with boys who never learned to be gentleman.

Now, instead of taking an honest look at what makes men, some colleges have opted to condemn manliness.

CampusReform.org is reporting that “Oregon State University invited students to attend a ‘healthy masculinities conference’ where they will ‘engage in collective imagining to construct new futures for masculinities, unrestricted by power, privilege, and oppression.’”

Advertisements for Oregon State’s “masculinities conference” ask: “Join us in a collective examination of the histories and legacies that shape present day masculinities. Through a day of presentations, panels, workshops, and artistic expression, learn how to engage systems of power.”

Meanwhile, Ithaca College is holding a workshop called “MLK Week: Educational Workshop - From the Batman to J. Cole: Masculinity and Violence.” Students are going to study “hegemonic masculinity and its role as the wheel that rotates a cycle of violence.” This workshop’s goal it to help “willing individuals to begin to recognize, acknowledge, own, and disrupt the toxicity of manhood in order to end violence.”

Duke University even has a “Men’s Project” sponsored by the university’s Women’s Center. It says it will “examine the ways we present—or don’t present—our masculinities, so we can better understand how masculinity exists on our campus—often in toxic ways—and begin the work of unlearning violence.” (Okay, don’t even let yourself imagine the fallout that would occur if a Duke’s Men’s Center sponsored a “Women’s Project” in order to help women understand and solve their issues. First of all, come on, a Men’s Center at Duke! Secondly, well, come on.)

Certainly, sexual assault and worse are a problem on college campuses, but these academics are trying to cure a problem with more of what is causing a societal problem. They are trying to further emasculate young men instead of, you know, teaching them to be gentleman.

If teaching young men how to be gentleman sounds stodgy to someone, then point out to them that becoming a gentleman is about finding real, heart-thumping ways to test yourself that will help you become your best self. There is an ancient formula behind this process used by every society and institution we all agree made or makes people of character. In my book This Will Make a Man of You I show how the same method, a process now being misunderstood and destroyed, has always been used to help men (and now an increasing number of women) prove themselves in positive ways as they thereby become upstanding members of society.

Even the mad streets of Pamplona, Spain, during an encierro (the running of the bulls) does this every July by helping youth test themselves in something real. Running with the bulls, like any real rite of passage, requires you to face a physical test, a dangerous trial. You need to follow certain rules to make it through. The rules make your chances of surviving uninjured higher, but they also make it safer for everyone. For example, if you break the rules by grabbing a bull’s tail and so make the bull stop and turn around in the street then that bull will begin to gore people. Not doing this—and many other things—shows respect for the bull, for yourself and for those in the street with you. That understood respect is the beginning of a real gentlemanly code of honor.

This is hard for people who avoid reality to comprehend. It is about proving yourself in some real thing, a thing that will require you to struggle and live up to something greater than yourself—places like karate dojos, boot camp and, yes, volunteering at a soup kitchen can do this if done with your mind open. Those are growing experiences.

A group of academics telling boys not to be men will only make the problems associated with young men who haven’t learned to be gentleman worse.

by Frank Miniter, Forbes Magazine contributor

Turning Your Gaze Away From Yourself

The following words written some 66 years ago by the last of the great Princeton theologians J. Gresham Machen couldn't be more relevant to our moral therapeutic culture and gospel-light churches (and to the men to whom we minister:

 

Turning Your Gaze Away From Yourself

If you want health for your souls, and if you want to be the instruments of bringing health to others, do not turn your gaze forever within, as though you could find Christ there. Nay, turn your gaze away from your own miserable experiences, away from your own sin, to the Lord Jesus Christ as He is offered to us in the gospel. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” Only when we turn away from ourselves to that uplifted Savior shall we have healing for our deadly hurt.

It is the same old story, my friends—the same old story of the natural man. Men are trying today, as they have always been trying, to save themselves—to save themselves by their own act of surrender, by the excellence of their own faith, by mystic experiences of their own lives. But it is all in vain. Not that way is peace with God to be obtained. It is to be obtained only in the old, old way—by attention to something that was done once for all long ago, and by acceptance of the living Savior who there, once for all, brought redemption for our sin. Oh, that men would turn for salvation from their own experience to the Cross of Christ; oh, that they would turn from the phenomena of religion to the living God!

That that may be done, there is but one way. It is not found in a study of the psychology of religion; it is not found in “religious education”; it is not found in an analysis of one's own spiritual status. Oh, no. It is found only in the blessed written Word. There are the words of life. There God speaks. Let us attend to His voice. Let us above all things know the Word. Let us study it with all our minds; let us cherish it with all our hearts. Then let us try, very humbly, to bring it to the unsaved. Let us pray that God may honor not the messengers but the message, that despite our unworthiness He may make His Word upon our unworthy lips to be a message of life.

(J. Graham Machen, “The Importance of Christian Scholarship,”

What Is Christianity? [Eerdmans, 1951])

The Best Way to Begin a New Year

I look forward to the day we own our house free and clear. We have been making payments on the mortgage since the day we moved in, but the end is finally in sight and four or five years from now we should be done at last. (An advantage of buying a small house and staying in it!) The moment the bank withdraws the final payment, we’ll be free and clear: free from further financial obligations and clear of all liens or other encumbrances. It will be ours all the way. We trust this will put us in a good position to transition into the second half of life—the half when we need to devote attention to our children’s education, marriages, and independence. And, of course, the time when we may finally be able to upgrade that worn parquet flooring that was installed before we were even born.

A new year is coming, and the best way to begin a new year is to know that you are free and clear. This morning I was reflecting on the great words of Isaiah 43:25, where God says, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Here is a great promise about the extent of God’s forgiveness. God blots out our transgressions so he can forget our sins. He deliberately erases from his accounts every record of what we have done wrong. As the records disappear, so too does his memory of the misdeeds. Ray Ortlund points out that “God locates his very identity in blotting out our sins and remembering them no more” and then, by way of illustration, works up a helpful little scenario:

Satan, the accuser, comes before God and says, “Look at that Christian down there. Why do you still love him? Don’t you remember what he did to you last week, and again on Tuesday, and then again yesterday?” And God says, if you’ll allow me to put it this way, “No, I don’t remember. Gabriel, where does that believer stand with us? Check the database.” Gabriel logs on, but the only information that comes up on the screen is the righteousness of Christ freely credited to that sinner, because that’s how God honors himself as God. “I blot out your transgressions, I splice your bad plays out of my game film, for my own sake.” So God says back to Satan, “I’m not saying your facts are wrong, but you’re not telling the whole story about that Christian. What matters most to me, for my own sake, is not that person’s record but Christ’s record for him.” That is grace. That is God.

That is God, indeed. And why does God do this? He does this for his own sake. In fact, he must do this for his own sake, for there is no other reason to do such a noble deed. He cannot do it for our sake, for we have no right to such grace, we have no righteousness to plead. No, it must be done for God’s sake and God’s glory. God loves to display his glory before us, his people, so we can direct our praise, our adoration, to him.

If you have turned to Christ in repentance and faith, you are free and clear. You are free of all the burden of the sins you’ve committed, clear of all record of wrongdoing. You are now free to live for God’s glory, clear from the need to earn your own righteousness. There is no better way to begin a new year than with the knowledge of your freedom and the desire to live for the glory of the one who has extended such grace. Christian, you are free and clear.

Tim Challies serves as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario, and is a co-founder of Cruciform Press.