
Is it true pressure is good for performance?
I see so many young men and women abuse time just because they have strength coursing through them now. Time is the unit of measurement for life. You see, it may sound like only a student ‘thing’, but we all do it – what we call the last-minute syndrome.
Your chances of making mistakes are high under pressure. I hear some people say I work well under pressure, but the truth is no one gives their best under pressure; peace of mind is the key to excellent delivery.
We all need to learn how to manage, appropriate and efficiently SPEND our time. So, if you are a student and you SPEND your time for any other thing other than your primary purpose, you are not efficiently allocating your time. It will show when the results are pasted.
One of the ways people get into trouble with their own God-given allotted 24 hours is the inability to say ‘No’. They don’t know how to decline every request, so regardless of the apps out there to help them track time, they are unable to do so because they do not have the slightest idea of where they are heading for the day – no clear-cut goal.
With a clear-cut goal and ensuing objective, you set for yourself pathways to take for the day. It becomes a roadmap guiding your actions; just in case when something alien to the elements of your map shows up to demand your attention, you are thus guided to choose whether to attend to it immediately, delegate it, do it later or never at all.
With dedication to such a roadmap, you are able to minimize interruptions into your precious time. You are able to say “No, I am not going with you”, “No, I am busy”, “No, I need to read”, “No, I need to spend time with my family”, “No, I need to pray”, “No, I need to work out”.
And to each ‘No’ you issue out a request, what you are invariably doing is foregoing the alternative to invest your time in that family, prayer, activity or task. In practical terms, say with studying to acquire a skill or knowledge, what you have done is invest time to learn a skill to exchange for money in due time. So, you paid with TIME for it.
Invariably, when you don’t purposefully spend time, you have wasted that currency freely given to you by God for your profiting.
How misspent time can waste your life
Like I said, wasting time is wasting the gift of God to you. God’s gift is for your good, and when you waste that gift, it’s tantamount to not doing what God wants you to do, especially when it has to do with God’s good for your life.
Let me show you something I learnt years ago:
When the children of Israel came out of Egypt, God commanded them, saying,
“This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Ex. 12.2).
So, to that nation of people, that particular month became the first month of the year, hence, the starting point for numbering the collective days of the entire nation.
In the Bible we can notice that some days are ignored and unrecorded. Why is this so? First, let us see how many years there were from the time of the exodus to the beginning of the building of the temple by Solomon.
“And for about the time of forty years as a nursing-father bare he them in the wilderness. And when he had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land for an inheritance, for about four hundred and fifty years: and after these things he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet. And afterward they asked for a king: and God gave unto them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for the space of forty years. And when he had removed him, he raised up David to be their king . . .” [Acts 13.18-22a]
Now David had been king for 40 years (see 2 Sam. 5.4).
So how many years were there from the exodus to the fourth year of the reign of Solomon when he began to build the temple?
Let’s do some calculations based on Acts 13 up there:
40 years in the wilderness
450 years in the land of inheritance
40 years of Saul as King
40 years of David as King
Adding further the 3 years of Solomon’s reign before he commenced building the temple, the total reaches 573 years.
Can you see that? Yet, in 1 Kings 6:1 when the same story was recorded it says:
“And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord.”
Here we are told of 480 years, not 573. If you take away 480 from 573 you will have a difference of 93 years! There is a discrepancy! How can two stories have different time stamps or time record?
Yet in 1 Kings 6:1 when the same story was recorded it says:
“And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord.”
Here we are told of 480 years, not 573. Why is there such a discrepancy? Is the record of the book of Acts incorrect, or even that of 1 Kings? No, neither record is wrong. By comparing the records of Acts with those in the Old Testament, we find the unquestionably correct 40 years in the wilderness, Saul’s 40 years, David’s 40 years, and Solomon’s three years before he commenced the building of the temple.
The calculation is 93 years less. Where are the missing 93 years? For years I studied it and I thought, “well God knows!”. However, one day, I was reading the book of Judges, and in searching the book of Judges, I discovered the following facts:
The theme of the book of Judges, which is: “when there was no KING in Israel, EVERYONE did what was right in their own eyes.”
The book of chronicles records the days of the judges as the days when there was no king in Israel or the word, or a teaching priest. If you do a careful search, you will find the missing years as thus:
Judges 3:8 = 8 years
Judges 3:14 = 18 years
Judges 4:2-3 = 20 years
Judges 6:1 = 7 years
Judges 13:1 – 40 years
TOTAL- 93 years
What does this mean to us, historically, Acts recorded those years; spiritually, the Prophets took out those years as wasted because they did what they liked, not what God willed for them. God had looked upon those days as wasted times, so it wasn’t credited to them.
So, when we don’t discern our purpose under God we are wasting time.