Take Back Your Time: What the Bible Teaches About Stewarding Your Time
“I’m so busy.”
“I just don’t have enough time.”
“I’ll get to that when things slow down.”
How many times have you said some version of those words?
I know I have.
There always seems to be something else that needs our attention. Work. Family. Church. Home. Appointments. Errands. People who need us. Things we really do need to accomplish—and plenty of things that somehow find their way onto our plates without us ever intentionally putting them there.
And when life starts to feel too full, our first instinct is often to figure out how to manage it better.
We need a better planner. A better routine. A more efficient system. Maybe if we could just wake up earlier, put down our phones, organize our schedules, or finally learn how to manage our time, we’d be able to fit everything in.
But as I began working on Take Back Your Time, I kept coming back to a different question:
What if the goal isn’t figuring out how to do everything?
What if the better question is:
What has God actually entrusted to me—and how can I be faithful with it?
Your Time Isn’t Really Yours
That’s the idea at the heart of Take Back Your Time: Pursuing a Life of Biblical Stewardship.
We tend to think of stewardship primarily in terms of money. But biblical stewardship is much bigger than that.
Our time. Our abilities. Our relationships. Our opportunities. Our responsibilities. Our attention.
They all belong to God.
We are stewards of what He has placed in our hands.
And once I started looking at my time that way, the conversation changed.
Instead of asking, “How can I fit everything in?” I began asking, “What has God actually given me to do?”
Instead of, “How can I be more productive?” it became, “What would faithfulness look like here?”
And instead of assuming that every good thing in front of me must belong on my plate, I had to consider whether some things might be good—but simply not mine to carry.
That is a very different way to approach our days.
Four Questions That Can Change the Way You Look at Your Time
As I developed this four-week study, it began to take shape around four passages of Scripture—and four questions.
1. What has God placed in your hands?
We begin in Matthew 25:14–30 with the parable of the talents.
Before we can think about managing our time, we need to recognize what we’ve actually been given.
What responsibilities has God entrusted to you in this season?
What relationships?
What resources?
What gifts and abilities?
What opportunities?
We can spend so much time looking at what someone else has been given—or wishing we had more capacity—that we miss the responsibility of faithfully stewarding what is already in our own hands.
That’s why Week One is called ENTRUSTED.
One of the tools I created to accompany the study is a large Stewardship Map. It’s designed to help you physically get all of those areas out of your head and in front of you so you can begin to see what God has entrusted to you in this particular season.
And that becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
2. What is actually yours to carry?
This may be my favorite question in the entire study.
In Exodus 18:13–27, Moses is trying to handle the needs of the people essentially by himself. His father-in-law, Jethro, sees what’s happening and tells him:
“What you’re doing is not good.”
Moses was doing something important. The people genuinely needed help.
But the fact that something needed to be done didn’t automatically mean Moses needed to do all of it himself.
That’s an important distinction.
Sometimes our exhaustion isn’t because we’re being unfaithful. Sometimes we’ve simply picked up responsibilities that were never ours to carry alone.
There are things we need to do.
Things we can delegate.
Things that can wait.
And sometimes, things we need to release altogether.
Week Two, LIMITED, gives us permission to acknowledge something we already know but don’t always live like we believe:
We are finite people.
Having limits isn’t a failure of stewardship. Recognizing them can actually be part of stewarding well.
That’s also the thinking behind the Weekly Priority Planner Pad I designed alongside this study.
It isn’t intended to help you cram more into your week.
It’s designed to help you look realistically at what’s in front of you, choose your priorities, identify what can be released or delegated, and make a plan for the capacity you actually have.
3. What has your attention?
Week Three takes us to Luke 10:38–42 and the familiar story of Mary and Martha.
Martha was serving. That’s important.
Jesus wasn’t condemning service or telling us that responsibilities don’t matter. But Martha had become distracted by all that needed to be done while Mary had chosen to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.
And I think that distinction matters enormously in the world we’re living in now.
We have more things competing for our attention than perhaps ever before.
Our phones can interrupt us constantly. Notifications pull us away. We start one task and remember another. We sit down to read Scripture and suddenly discover we’ve spent fifteen minutes doing something completely unrelated.
But attention is also something we steward.
We can’t give our full attention to everything at once.
So Week Three, NECESSARY, asks us to notice where our attention is actually going—and to practice protecting it.
I’ve been using the Mindsight Wellness Tracker as one practical tool for this. It can be used as a simple focus timer for Bible study, reading, prayer, journaling, focused work, or anything else where you want to intentionally stay with the thing in front of you.
The timer itself isn’t the point.
The practice is.
For this amount of time, this is where I am choosing to place my attention.
4. How will you use what you’ve been given?
Finally, we arrive at 1 Peter 4:7–11.
This is where stewardship turns outward.
We’ve identified what we’ve been entrusted with. We’ve acknowledged our limits. We’ve considered what deserves our attention.
Now what?
We use what we’ve been given to serve.
Peter tells believers to use the gifts they’ve received to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace—and ultimately to do it in God’s strength and for His glory.
So the final week is FAITHFUL.
Not successful.
Not impressive.
Not maximized.
Faithful.
The question isn’t whether we’ve squeezed every possible ounce of productivity out of our days.
It’s whether we’re faithfully using what God has placed in our hands.
Maybe We Don’t Need More Time
That’s where this study eventually landed me.
Most of us probably don’t need another system promising to help us magically find more hours in the day.
We have twenty-four.
We have limits.
We have responsibilities.
And we have a God who already knows all of that.
Perhaps what we need instead is to become more aware of what He has actually entrusted to us—and more willing to release what He hasn’t.
To pay attention to where our days are going.
To protect what matters.
To serve the people He has placed in front of us.
And then to trust Him with what we cannot do.
Because ultimately:
Your time was never really yours to take back.
It was entrusted to you.
Study Take Back Your Time With Me
If this is something you’ve been wrestling with too, I created Take Back Your Time: Pursuing a Life of Biblical Stewardship as a four-week Guided Bible Study so we can dig into these passages together.
The printed study walks you through Scripture using observation, interpretation, application, reflection, and prayer—not simply reading what I think about the passages, but learning to dig into them for yourself.
Your printed study also comes with the 11″ × 17″ Stewardship Map FREE, so you’ll have a practical way to begin identifying what God has entrusted to you right from Week One.
Want Me to Walk Through It With You?
I’ve also created an optional Take Back Your Time Companion Video Course.
The workbook stands completely on its own, so you absolutely do not need the course to complete the study.
But if you’d like a little more guidance, you can add the course and join me for a video each week. We’ll talk through what we’ve learned and then put it into practice using the tools associated with each week’s lesson.
Everything is self-paced, so you can work through the study on your own schedule.
And whether you complete the study with me or simply begin asking yourself these four questions, I hope you’ll remember this:
You don’t have to do everything.
You are called to be faithful with what God has placed in your hands.
Plan with intention. Hold your plans loosely. Take the next faithful step.
