April 20

Time, the stuff of life

“For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14).
“We are . . . sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding” (1 Chron. 29:15).

God hath given to man a short time here upon earth, and yet upon this short time eternity depends.
—Jeremy Taylor.

“Time is the stuff of life”—
Then spend not thy days while they last
In dreams of an idle future,
Regrets for a vanished past.
—W. E. H. Lecky.

Feel your pulse—it beats—what does it declare? That your time is going; for at every stroke it has one less to give. Look, therefore, on time as ever coming nearer to its end, and spend its golden moments as in your dying day you will wish to have spent them.

As a follower of Jesus, shun as much as possible such upbraiding reflections as these upon a dying bed or in the eternal world: My Savior never spent one idle moment. But, oh, how much of my time that should have honored Him was idled away! What far brighter holiness might I have reached! How much better might I have served my Lord! How much more might I have done for Him Who did so much for me, had I but well improved that time I trifled uselessly away.
—J. G. Pike.

Lose the day loitering, ’twill be the same story
Tomorrow, and the next more dilatory,
For indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute!
What you can do, or think you can, begin it!
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated;
Begin it, and the work will be completed.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

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