If you’ve ever felt unequipped or unsure of yourself or your call from God, you’re certainly not alone. All throughout scripture God calls people who make excuses, feel insecure, don’t like themselves, ore don’t believe they’re the right person for the job. And guess what, he proved time and time again that His call on their lives and ours is ON purpose, FOR a purpose.

We live in a celebrity culture and often that affects the church as well and keeps God’s people from experiencing the powerful life He intended for us, because all through Scripture and down through history we see that God takes ordinary people, in ordinary places and empowers them to do extraordinary things!

We live in a “hustle” culture. If you want to get more done, the world will often tell you to “work harder,” “burn the midnight oil,” or “sleep when you’re dead.” But the biblically-based, scientifically-verified truth is that rest is a counterintuitive key to being wildly productive. In order to do more, most of us need to do less and rest more.

When Jesus came to earth, he temporarily traded in his Godly omnipresence and accepted the unipresence of being a human being. He could only be in one place at a time. He had to prioritize the many good things pulling at his attention because he was laser-focused on “finishing the work the Father gave him.” We can apply these principles of prioritizing our yeses and accepting our unipresence to our work and lives today.

As we look to the life of Christ for principles of time management, we notice that Jesus always ensured his “yes” was “yes,” from the smallest to the biggest commitments. He also fought to block out noise and create room for silence, stillness, and reflection, which we see all throughout the Gospels as he retreated to “lonely places.”

Time is something that if not managed well can easily feel like gets away from us very quickly. Have you even tried to manage your time, but feel like you just don’t have enough of it? How do we make sure that we are accomplishing our every day life tasks, as well as preparing ourselves for the work God has for us when there just doesn’t seem to be enough time? Today we will look at 5 biblical truths about our time, and how we can better manage the precious time God has given us.

At just the right time, Jesus came into the world. He came to free us from the crushing weight of the law. We could never be good enough to earn salvation, so Jesus lived a perfect life on our behalf. Why? Because of love. God wanted us to be a part of his family. Out of love, he adopted us through the work of Christ. We are now the sons and daughters of God. Jesus is our savior and we can rest in the love of the Father.

The circumstances of life have a way of robbing us of joy. Disappointment, frustration, and loss can suck the very life from us; however, Jesus’s birth reminds us that, no matter how hard life is, we don’t have to go through it alone. God has come to us full of grace and truth, and that should bring us joy. We can trust that Jesus’s presence with us will reveal the truth about our lives and at the same time offer us the grace to see things change.

The announcement of Jesus’s birth was delivered to shepherds who lived on the fringe of society, in the fields, watching their sheep by night. If a king were born to the world, you would expect these shepherds to be the last ones to know about it. Yet, the heavenly angels told them that peace was coming to the earth for those on whom God’s favor rested. What a shocking message! God’s favor was even on the shepherds. They were being offered peace; and if it could be given to them, we can rest assured it is offered to us as well. Now that is good news for a world in turmoil!

The prophet Isaiah writes one of the most classic of all Old Testament prophecies about the coming birth of Christ. The passage he writes is born of gloom and darkness. The world had felt the full weight of sin, and it had wreaked havoc on all of creation. What Isaiah offered in chapter nine was something the Jewish people needed more than anything—hope. Hope that one day someone would come to make all things right and restore what had been broken. The birth of Jesus was the fulfillment of that hope and this fact offers us hope in our lives today.