Jesus

Jesus himself seemed to have a balanced life.

• Luke 2:52 ⁵²And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.¹

“If Jesus had chosen to live in modern America instead of ancient Israel, how would He act? Would He have consulted a pocket calendar? Would He have worn a watch? Would He have carried a beeper? Can you imagine Him being paged out of the Last Supper?

When I look deeper at the life of Christ, I also notice that there is no indication He worked twenty-hour ministry days. He went to sleep each night without having healed every disease in Israel – and He apparently slept well. Neither did He minister to everybody who needed it. Neither did He visit or teach everybody who needed it. There were many needs that He simply chose not to meet. Even when Lazarus became sick, Jesus was shockingly slow to mobilize. I would have had a helicopter there in twenty minutes. But Jesus delayed for two days.

Is this to imply that He was lazy or didn’t care? Of course not. But it is to imply that He understood what it meant to be human. Jesus was fully God and fully human, and His fully human side understood what it meant to have limits. Jesus understood what it meant to prioritize and to balance in light of those limits and how to focus on the truly important. We can learn a lesson from Jesus—it’s okay to have limits. It is okay not to be all things to all people all of the time all by ourselves.”²

So wisdom needs to be used in decision making. How do I decide what to do and what not to do? The next page offers some guidance and tips to good time management.

¹ Luke 2:52, NIV.
² Richard A. Swenson, M.D., The Overload Syndrome: Learning To Live Within Your Limits (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1998), 13-14.