Dale, just as there are spiritual laws which govern my spiritual universe, so there are physical laws which govern my physical universe. When you violate them, you reap what you sow. I created you to be a human being. Therefore, I don't expect you to operate outside of your human limitations. Human beings require a certain amount of sleep each night to be able to function properly. When you violate this need of your humanity, you are operating outside of your created limitations and bad side effects will result. In some cases, like in your driving, not only did you put your own life in danger but also the lives of others as well.

I then asked the Lord how much sleep I needed a night. He gave me a specific number that I have been religiously submitting to ever since.

If Jesus doesn't expect us to operate outside of our humanity, then he expects us to put in our schedules the amount of sleep necessary to be fully rested. If your schedule is so busy that you are not getting your needed sleep then you are outside of Jesus’ will for your life and definitely busier than He wants you to be. It is okay to be human. Therefore, before scheduling study time and your other activities (besides first Daily Feeding on Jesus, ministry involvement, and aerobic exercise) you need to first also put down your necessary required sleep to be fully rested each day to meet the demands of your daily schedule.

Meals: Before I was saved I was studying to be a priest. I was very religious and very much an ascetic. An ascetic is someone who punishes his body because he thinks punishing his body is somehow spiritual and will gain him his salvation. One day I found out that I was saved through faith in Jesus' blood alone, that there was nothing I could add to what He had already done on the cross except rest in that completed work by faith (Gal 2:16). But because I had been an ascetic for so long, even after I was saved for a time, by habit, I carried on my ascetic practices. One of these practices involved not eating more than one meal a day, and fasting one or two complete days a week.

At the same time I was carrying on this practice and habit, I found myself depressed most of the time. One day in conversation with a friend named Gene Wilson, he made a comment to me that the only time he got depressed was when he did not eat regularly. The Holy Spirit went right through me with that statement, and I decided from that day on that I would eat three meals a day except for special times that Jesus led me into a fast for a purpose. The end result was I was no longer depressed. I only get depressed now when there is a specific reason for it, but not as a daily lifestyle. Therefore, before you schedule anything else, make sure you put in your schedule ample time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It is okay to eat. Eating, when done properly, is spiritual.

Play: By nature I am a workaholic. Before I was a Christian, I was a workaholic; and after I was saved, I simply passed my zeal into Christian service. Several years ago I was involved in ministries and Bible studies every day of the week. One Sunday my Pastor gave a very good motivational message about the need of Christians to do more for the Lord. Of course, he was talking to those Christians very reluctant to do anything outside of their own desires with their time. But being the sensitive workaholic I was, I received this for myself and went forward for prayer. As I was striving (and that was exactly what I was doing) in prayer, the Pastor walked over to pray with me. As he was praying for me he received a word of knowledge from the Lord for me and so he gave it to me: Dale, my instruction to you is to take one night a week and go bowling. I thought at first my Pastor did not understand why I had come forward, but he had discerned in His spirit that more involvement in ministry was not what I needed. My need was the opposite: a need to take some time for relaxation. Jesus said in Matthew 11:28-30,

"Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light."

Therefore, before you put down any of your other responsibilities, along with all that has already been mentioned, you need to first put down time for play. You need time for relaxation to build up your strength again for the rest of the weekly schedule you have to face. You will need to pray and ask Jesus how much time a week for you individually this should involve.

Before you schedule anything else, schedule time for quiet time, ministry involvement (if you are in this school of Evangelism you already know when this is), aerobic exercise, sleep, meals, and play. When you have done this your schedule will look something like this link.

These are the permanent life time aspects of your schedule. They will never stop being a part of your weekly schedule. The time in your schedule you have left over is what you have to work with the rest of the week to accomplish your other God given goals which are temporary and changing as they are individually completed.

The eighth step in the creating of your weekly schedule is to count up the left over hours after doing all the above steps. See if this amount of hours matches the left over hours required for your other responsibilities of the week calculated. If it does not then revise the required hours for each activity to match the hours available.

If in revising time for each activity your left over time is not adequate to meet all of the present listed activities, then you are taking on more than Jesus presently expects of you to accomplish. Remember, Jesus does not expect nor want you operating outside your humanity. Pray and ask Jesus to show you presently what needs to be dropped or set aside for a future time so your present available time is adequate for the goals He presently wants you to accomplish. Be assured, this will not include Daily Feeding on Jesus, ministry involvement, aerobics, sleep, meals, and play. These never change.

Once that is accomplished, the ninth step is to then pray and ask Jesus to show you how best to put these left over activities on the schedule and then begin by faith putting them on the schedule.

Tenth, once you have everything on the schedule, ask Jesus to show you if there is anything you might have forgotten to put on the schedule. If there is, make the necessary adjustment in your schedule to fit it in. At this point your schedule should be complete. It should look something like this link.

Realize that the first few weeks you may have to make some minor adjustments as you recognize some activities need more time than originally discerned and some less. I usually make two to three adjustments before I have a final stable schedule.

Finally, by faith, acknowledge Jesus in your weekly schedule, confess your inability to live it out in your own strength, and claim Jesus' promise in Proverbs 3:6: "In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight."

WARNING: Your plan of time management, designed through the leading of the Holy Spirit will not work unless you are willing to die to self. Jesus said in the Gospel of John 12:24-25,

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his soul loses it; and he who hates his soul in this world shall keep it to life eternal."

Your soul is what you become and manifest through your physical body in personality, vocation, and life-style: 1) as a result of your heart response to what you have learned through your mind, body, spirit, conscience, and emotions; and 2) as a result of those abilities and talents God has chosen to give you individually (Prov 6:32, Matt 16:24-26, Ps 106:13-15).

Jesus has a plan for your life. Specifically, a plan for your soul development. The only way that His plan for your soul development can come about is through the yielding of all your personal rights. Especially is this true in the areas of vocation, marriage, peace with relatives, the right of many time-consuming friendships unless ordered of the Lord for a purpose, and use of all time during the week (Rom 12:18, Prov 18:24).

Jesus said in Luke 14:33, "So therefore, no one of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions." Giving up our rights to fulfill our desires does not mean necessarily that God will not grant these desires to be fulfilled, but only that we release the right to do anything to bring about their fulfillment in ourselves. The disciple of Jesus relies on Jesus and Jesus alone for all his needs and for the fulfillment of any of his desires. Jesus said in John 10:10, "The thief comes only to steal, kill and to destroy; but I came that you might have life and might have it abundantly." Jesus loves us and wants the best for us and since He created us, only He knows best how to manage our lives and when is the best time that our desires should be fulfilled. David the Psalmist said in Psalm 31:14-15, "But as for me, I trust in You, O Lord, I say, ‘You are my God. My times are in Your hand.’" If one does not completely yield his rights to Jesus, Jesus will not be able to develop that soul-life in that person, and that person will not be able to submit to the weekly schedule Jesus has given him. You must make a willful choice and say, Jesus I believe that you love me, not because I necessarily feel that love or because my circumstances necessarily provide my senses with the evidence of that love; but I choose to believe that you love me because Your Word declares you do (Jer 31:3); and since Your Word is true I choose to trust You with every detail of my life and to fulfill my desires when it is best for Your kingdom (Matt 6:33) and when I can enjoy it the most (Heb 1:9, Ps 16:11).

If a person, who desires to be a disciple of Jesus and let Him be Lord over his time during the week, does not take this step, he will be tossed back and forth like a ping-pong ball because Satan will ever throw doubts into his mind and will lead him away from the purpose of God's kingdom to try and fulfill the desires of his flesh in his own strength. Satan will try to get him to act out of fear.

Fear is a questioning of God's love. What happens when we allow fear to be a motivating factor in our decision making? A questioning of God's love, if accepted, will then lead to unbelief.

Unbelief is refusing to trust God and believe His love will lead you to the paths of righteousness and the fulfillment of your desires when it will best benefit His kingdom and when you will best be able to enjoy it (2 Chron 20:20). Once Unbelief enters your heart, it then leads to pride.

Pride is taking self-initiative to do something about one's problems, needs or frustrations, rather than waiting for Jesus' initiative through the Holy Spirit. It centers in the word I (See Romans 7; Ps 27:14, 138:8; Is 41:10). When a person is walking in pride he cannot resist lust.

Lust is since, now, one does not believe that Jesus loves them enough to give them the right answer concerning their problems, needs, and frustrations when the time is right and it is best, it leads to the logical conclusion that He will also not fulfill one's desires either when it is the right time and best. The end result is now an angry attempt to fulfill one's lust and desires also. Paul states in Romans 1:28-32 about a person who stops acknowledging Jesus in their thoughts and ways and submitting to His counsel concerning those thoughts and ways,

"And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanders, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them."

Whenever you question Jesus' love and allow fear to take control of you, the spiritual pattern described above will always result. It is an absolute spiritual law. Of course confession of known sin and repenting to only act and speak out of Jesus' initiative will as quickly stop the pattern.

Once the choice is made to trust in Jesus to fulfill our desires, we are then free to serve Him with a whole heart; then when the enemy does come and attack, as he surely will, we can then say with our lips, I don't care what is going through my head I choose to believe what the Bible says and that is that God loves me and will accomplish what concerns me in His time (Jer 31:3, Psalm 138:8).

Jesus says in John 12:26 that where He is, there shall His servant also be. "If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there shall my servant also be; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him." Because you have acknowledged Jesus in your schedule and life, if you want to be where Jesus is in your life, He will be where you are supposed to be in your life and in your use of time.

According to Galatians 5:22-23 the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and peace. Therefore, Jesus is telling you that not only will He be present in your scheduled activities; but also when you obey Him in these committed times, you will be practicing a principle of what it means to walk in the Spirit and experience the fruit of the Spirit of love, joy, and peace.

Once I have committed by schedule to Jesus, if in my schedule I have down at the moment play, but try to study, I find it unfruitful. I cannot get anything accomplished. This is because Jesus wants me to play now. But if I am at a study time in my schedule, I find that as I sit down to study, I know exactly what to do, Jesus' peace and joy is with me, and my study time in itself is a joy and fruitful.

If you try to do more than Jesus wants you to do in your weekly schedule, you will find a lack of the fruit of the Holy Spirit. This happened to me one semester while in college. Jesus had told me specifically not to take more than 12 1/2 credits a semester because I was working 25 hours a week. To take more than this would result in a lack of quality study time in each of the classes I was taking. This one semester I got anxious, I wanted to get through my degree; so at the beginning of the semester, without the Lord's permission, I decided to add another 3 credits to see if I could handle it. In the second week of school I was tense, irritable, without the fruit of the Spirit of love, joy, and peace. As a result, one day as I was walking over to the Aerobics center at the University, I prayed: Jesus, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and peace. I don't have any. What is wrong in my walk with you? About a half-hour later while doing my fifty push-ups, the Lord brought to my mind Psalm 127:2: "It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors; for He gives to His beloved even in his sleep." Then the Lord said to me, Your schedule is to heavy. Drop one of your courses. I did, made the necessary adjustments in my schedule, and the love, joy and peace of the Holy Spirit returned. Jesus knows what he is doing with our lives. Submit to His will in the use of your time during the week and the speed of His establishing your life. If you compromise and take your life into your own hands, you will produce flesh: wood, hay, and straw; not Spirit: silver, gold, and precious stones (1 Cor 3:10-15). You also will destroy your soul-life and be a stumbling block to Jesus’ Lordship over other’s lives because your life will always be rubbing against the Holy Spirit in other’s lives because you will be out of Jesus' Lordship over your life. "There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." (Prov 14:12).

How does keeping a schedule keep the devil from defeating you in the pursuit of your goals and keep you from failing? First, because you are faithful to your schedule and are not allowing the distractions of Satan to draw you away from your commitment to that schedule, you end up succeeding and accomplishing what you have set forth to do. By applying these principles I have managed in my short life to complete three college degrees and the Layman Evangelism Ministry Book Series listed on the following order form this link and this website. By applying these principles, I succeeded in writing for other's blessing this chapter on time management and this textbook on Evangelism. At this writing, through present time management, I find the time to go out four times a week and share the Gospel at two colleges and two indoor malls in the town I am living in.

Second, it keeps Satan from being able to attack you by freeing you of all worry. If Satan comes along and says, Hey! When are you going to get that paper done, and your laundry? And what about your family and wife? You need to be spending time with them! You can respond: Be gone Satan! All of these things are already planned in my weekly schedule, so they are already taken care of. Thus, there is no distractions in your studies, work and play, and thus your study, work and play time is quality time. It takes you less time to get the same amount of material done in your work and studies since all the distractions of worry are gone.

Third, because you have planned in your schedule play and miscellaneous times, you have something to look forward to and, as a result, you can cope better with your pressures of studies and work.

Fourth, you will be healthy because you are eating right, sleeping right, and getting sufficient exercise on a regular basis.

Fifth, you will accomplish ten times more in a week because of adherence to the schedule.

"All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness." (Heb 12:11, Matt 25:14-30).