“I’m swamped.”

I’ve said it, you’ve said it, I think we’ve all said it at one point or another.

Increasingly, it feels like time happens to us—like we’re running a race that’s impossible to win. We have too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it. In short, we’re swamped.

The Bible tells us that more than 2,000 years ago, Jesus’s disciples were “swamped” in a different way.

Luke 8:22-23 says that “One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake.” So they got into a boat and set out. As they sailed, Jesus fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger.”

You know the rest of the story. Jesus “got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm.”

This passage perfectly illustrates the core premise of my new book, Redeeming Your Time, namely that the solution to the disciples being swamped by the wind and waves is the exact same solution to our being swamped by our to-do lists and hurried schedules. The solution is found in Jesus Christ. How? In two ways.

First, Jesus offers you peace before you do anything. Nearly every time management expert says that the path to peace and productivity is found in implementing their system. This is what we might call “works-based productivity,” which claims that if you do exercises X, Y, or Z, THEN you will find peace. I start with the opposite premise in what I call “grace-based productivity,” which says that through Jesus Christ, we ALREADY HAVE peace, and we do time management exercises X, Y, or Z as a response of worship.

Here’s the second way that Jesus is the solution to our time management problem: Jesus shows us how God would manage his time. Now, of course the gospel biographies do not show Jesus walking around with a to-do list, calendar, or smartwatch. But they DO show him having to prioritize where he spent his time, dealing with distractions at work, fighting for solitude, and seeking to be busy without being hurried. In other words, the gospels show Jesus facing many of the same challenges we face today as we seek to redeem our time. And because he was infallible God, we can assume that Jesus managed his time perfectly, providing us with the ideal model to follow.

In Redeeming Your Time, I’ll show you 7 timeless time management principles from the life of Christ along with more than 30 hyper-practical practices to help you live out those principles in the twenty-first century.

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