"Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar has a great idea for dealing with housework. When you get behind on your dusting he suggests you buy some get well cards and spread them around your living room. When company comes, they’ll see the cards and figure you’ve been sick.
Zig’s strategy might work, but here’s another idea for dealing with dusting. Ask yourself which items you dust around are really useful or meaningful to you. Items that remind you of a Godly heritage or honor your parent’s memory for example should be displayed as inspirational reminders. But too many of our shelves are simply covered with meaningless little trinkets.
If you have clutter that falls into that category, start purging away those dust magnets and spend time with God instead. Once you’ve gotten rid of the little breakables, assign dusting to the children. With a little training, even a five year old can learn to dust shelves. And delegating dusting to them will be a great way for you to redeem the time.
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"If you died today would you feel you had achieved God’s best for your life? That may be a difficult question. Because all of us say we want God's best. But the reality is few Christians ever seem to feel they are living out God's best in their lives. How can we change that?
Getting God’s best for your life really just means getting God’s best hour after hour. If you really tried, could you experience God’s best for your life in the next hour? Sure you could. At the end of that hour could you do it again? I don’t see why not. In fact, if you tried, you could probably keep experiencing God’s best, hour by hour, over and over again, until eventually you would be getting God’s best for your life.
Let’s do whatever we need to do today to experience God’s best. Because spending time doing something less than God's best is not really redeeming the time.
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"I recently came across a news article that quoted US Government statistics showing average per capita spending on artificial hair is 9 cents. When I saw that, my first thought was not about artificial hair, but on why the government was taking money from my family in the form of taxes and using it to calculate per capita spending on artificial hair.
To me it was another little evidence of how far our society has abandoned the idea of individual responsibility in exchange for more government nanny services. In 1 Peter 2 the Bible teaches there are two basic functions for Government. The praise of those who do good and the punishment of evildoers. When government strays beyond those Biblically mandated functions it results in people spending time doing jobs that often shouldn’t be done or which could be done better in the private sector.
Remember, whenever an individual or a society strays from God’s plan they fail to redeem the time.
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"I would not believe this story if I had not heard it from a reputable source. But I once learned of a lady who was fixing supper when a grease fire erupted on the stove. Thinking quickly, she raced into the bathroom and got a towel to smother the fire. But on her way back, the phone rang and what do think she did? She answered the phone.
You say, “Why would anyone answer the phone when there’s a fire on the stove?” The answer is she had developed a lifelong habit of being controlled by the urgent instead of the important. A ringing telephone often creates a great sense of urgency in people. There is a feeling that we have to jump up and answer it no matter what we’re doing.
Make it a practice when you have guests or during family devotions to let the answering machine take the message or at least screen it. Determining what things are important, not just urgent, is a big part of redeeming the time.
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