Time is a precious gift of God. But what are Christians doing with this valuable asset? Are they using their time to promote their own self-interests or wisely investing it for the glory of Christ?  

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm are joined by data analyst Drew Davis, who shares his research on how people use their time. The trends are disturbing. The average American, for example, spends 2 ½ hours a day consuming television and radio—not to mention their time on their phone and tablets. And young people entering adulthood are playing more than working at an increasingly higher rate. Rather than squander time, their charge to believers is this: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:15-16).

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we've got Drew Davis, a data analyst, talking about use of time. Here's the deal. Christian culture uses time in a superior way. And we want to talk about the wasting of time in our own culture and really how time is such a precious thing.

Music So time is the most precious gift that we're given by God. It's a tremendous asset. And so we wanna talk about that. And Drew, you're a data analyst and you've been running some numbers on use of time, wasting time and things like that. Absolutely.

I think the use of our time is really important and unfortunately, a lot of people, especially people in my generation, are squandering that time and not using the free time that we have for profitable things. You know, you sent us the funniest clip from Charles Spurgeon. I'm gonna read it about wasting time and cultures because frankly, cultures use time differently. Absolutely. And there are people that say, oh, there are no superior cultures.

Well, there actually are superior cultures in the use of time, but this was so funny. Charles Spurgeon, he preached this, laziness is the crying sin of eastern nations. I believe that the peculiar genius of the Anglo-Saxon character prevents our nation as guilty of that sin. Perhaps we have many other vices. But in the East, almost every man is a lazy man.

If you tell a Turk in Constantinople that his streets are filthy, and it certainly is, for there is excrement that's never swept away. He says sitting with his legs crossed and smoking his pipe. The Lord wills it. If you tell him there's a fire at the bottom of the street, he does not agitate himself, but he says, God wills it. And he's talking about the differences in culture, and it has to do with what you're doing with your time.

Are you sitting there smoking your pipe, or are you actually taking dominion? And that's really the whole matter. Absolutely. And the irony is we work through the data is that the charts are going to show that we've had a reverse, east-west reversal. Now, the eastern preachers, the Turk and Constantinople could actually say that about us.

Absolutely. Isn't that amazing? Okay, go for it. All right. Well, the first chart we have up here that I thought would be helpful to look at is how much time different countries spend in minutes per day on TV and radio entertainment.

And so the redder the color, the more time the country spends on those forms of entertainment. So unfortunately, you can see the United States spends the most time at 148 minutes per day. We made America great again. Make America great again. Now just a clarification.

This has nothing, this is not including social media. This is not including staring into your phone, this is not including looking at your computer and surfing the internet. This is just radio and TV. Correct, yeah. It was really shocking when I pulled this up how much time is spent on there.

And you know, I think of the passages in the Bible, you know, that talk about, you know, looking at what is pure and what is right, and you know, how we invest our time. And if you look at most of the content that is produced on the TV and radio, Most of it isn't good. I mean I think most people would agree with that. And how do you find 148 minutes of good content to consume each day? And just to put it in perspective, so 148 minutes is two and a half hours, two and a half hours is 10% of the hours of your day, and that's not even subtracting out sleep time.

Remarkable. Okay, what else you got? It's shocking. Another view that I thought would be interesting to dive into is the average daily computer gaming and leisure time. So how much time are you playing games or just kind of fiddling on your computer?

Not working, not doing a school paper, not being productive, not answering emails, just pure entertainment. And as you'd expect, the 15 to 19 year age range spends a lot more time on the computer but even the the older categories are spending a shocking amount of time and you can see it progressively getting worse over the years. So yeah if you if you took out the yellow what you'd have is a is a pretty linear increase, so modest increases every year. The yellow is the outlier here. What year was that?

2020. 2020. What happened in 2020? COVID. So, people were at home, what were they doing while they were at home?

Now you know. Yes, unfortunately. So what saddens me about that is the Lord's blessed us with such a beautiful creation, right? He's given us the world to enjoy, to take dominion over. He's given us families and community and all these wonderful things.

And we're really just kind of trading that for kind of a dim virtual shadow, if you will, and just giving up our real-world experiences for the virtual world. So that's a good place to inject a scripture. It's really the famous one on time, which is Ephesians 5, 15, and 16. Paul writes, see then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. So I think the takeaway there is that it's foolish to fritter away your time.

Squandering time is foolish. And it's wise actually to collect up your time and stand guard over it, be really careful about the use of it. One interesting thing about these charts here is that the highest use is of course in youth, But then the use drops off in midlife, but tragically, it ramps up again when you're over 65. And when you're over 75, it really ramps. So now you've got an older generation couch potatoing their way through life.

And it's a tragic way to use your senior years. I'm a little sensitive to that right now, you know, what am I gonna do with my life? But I think it's just interesting that when you take the pressures of work off what's replaced with it. There is a ramp there but it's still nothing compared to the first bars of the the youngest people. Yeah.

So in light of that, next up we have a slide highlighting what percentage 15 to 24 year olds are working one hour or more per week. So this is not a full-time job. This is not a part-time job. This is just what percentage of our youth is even working one hour a week. And unfortunately right now it's pretty low, just over 50% as of a couple years ago.

Yeah, and look at the big drop-off right around 2000, like a crash. Yeah, So just to recap where we are so far, what are we doing? We're watching TV and we're on the computer. What aren't we doing? Work time is going down, Entertainment time is going up.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah So it really is a replacement it is we we were working in 1988 in 2023 were we're entertaining absolutely, you know as as kind of our economy has increased, right, and as productivity-saving technologies have kind of rolled out, I think what's sad is what we're seeing is, yes, there's some reduction in timed work, But we're not recapturing that time for profitable things, right? We're not honoring the Lord with our time as a culture, right? Obviously, our hope is that Christians and those that love the Lord would be working hard, but unfortunately, that's not true for our culture anymore. Yeah.

Here's what Peter says in 1 Peter 4 verse 3. He's writing to these believers and he says, for we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles. So a lot of these things that we're talking about is really what the world is doing, what the world loves, what the world is pursuing. I don't think it's a stretch to say, that's exactly what Peter's talking about. We're doing the will of the Gentiles.

We're waiting into spending our time on the things that the rest of the world is spending their time on. Peter actually pinpoints that and says, we've spent enough of our past lifetimes doing that. So we don't have a breakout between believers and unbelievers in these numbers, But what it ought to reflect is a radical difference between Christians and not. But what we suspect as people who are living in the world and have Christian friends in the world is probably the difference is not that stark. Yeah.

Hey, we've been advocates of 15 to 24 year olds working, like working a lot. Hey, we think the 15 year old should be working a lot and making money. And that family should find opportunities for that. But there should be hard work in those 15 to 24 years. And I mean, this chart is just astounding.

The whole world has completely rejected that idea of young people working. I forget the reference, but I'm sure it's Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. It's good to bear the yoke in your youth. In other words, hard work is really good in youth. Absolutely.

Idleness does not lead to good outcomes, right? If you're just spending your time entertaining yourself, right, that's gonna kind of transfer through to when you're a father and to when you're a husband. And it's not, you can't just flip that switch. So if you spent your whole youth entertaining yourself and not working, it's gonna be rough to make that transition. You know, I look at this chart and I think, wow, what if you said working 20 hours or more a week, what would that look like?

Much lower. Or 10. This is one hour per week. Or more. Or more.

I mean, full-time workers are in there, but so are one or two hour workers. Yeah. Yep. It's amazing. Okay.

And then next up we've got kind of a dashboard that displays two different sets of data, but I think they're helpful to show side-by-side. So on the left-hand side you can see the hours spent working per year in the United States. And you can see that starting around 1870 through, I think it was 2018, almost to 2020. And then on the right, you see the annual working hours by country in 2017. So you can kind of get a comparison for the United States historical, you know, perspective on how many hours a week we should work and then you can also see how we can stack up to some of the other countries.

It's so interesting what happened after World War II is how, you know, work hours kind of flatlined. Well, they dropped, but something happened. When was the EEOC invented? I don't know. I do not know.

But, you know, you have the creation of the 40-hour work week, and I'm not sure when that really came into vogue, but clearly something happened in America after World War II. Absolutely. And I would say, getting to spend more time in your home and less time out at work, I think, is a net benefit for a Christian father. Exactly. So there's lots of benefits, but I think the problem is that the family at large in America hasn't capitalized on this extra almost 1,200 hours.

We've got almost 1,200 hours a year that is not spent at work, but yet you don't see an improvement in communities. You don't see an improvement in families, right? We're not successfully capturing productivity gains and using that for profitable things. I think everybody's familiar with the term first world problem, meaning countries with affluence have a certain set of problems that countries without the prosperity know nothing of. And I think, I suspect this is the case here, meaning that it takes less money to subsist because we have so much prosperity.

Why do people in Cambodia and Myanmar work so much? Is it because the work ethic is great there or because you have to work that much to stay alive? My suspicion is you have to work that much to stay alive. Well, think about our trips to Africa, Jason. People are carrying wood.

They're cooking food. And hey, the technologies aren't there. And so there's so much more transactional work that has to be done. We have so many labor saving devices and, and so maybe as much work isn't required because of technology. But I, you know, there, there does seem to be a work ethic element in this.

Now you've got a 30-30 hour work week on average. Am I allowed to reference a Disney movie? A couple of decades ago, Disney put out a movie called WALL-E, and the whole premise of the movie was Earth had become unlivable and so the inhabitants of Earth set out into space but they were served by robots and everyone just kind of lays around and is fat and is served by the robots. I think we're like entering that world. That's a great comparison actually.

I think we are entering that world and I think you know referencing the earlier slides, right? That's why it's so important to put our time to good uses, right? Don't sit on the couch and watch TV for two and a half hours just because you don't have to be at the office. I was adding it up and I'm pretty sure if someone took the average amount of time the American spends watching TV per day in one year they could work through the entire sermon history of Sovereign Redeemer in just one year. Isn't that something?

That's amazing. Yeah, if you did the math on what else... You could be doing... Like what else could you do with that time? So in economics, you call it opportunity cost, meaning when you spend money, you lose the opportunity to buy whatever else you could have bought had you not spent it the first time.

Time is the same way there's an opportunity cost. When you fritter away time, you have lost the opportunity to do the other options. And some of the other options are just way more profitable for your mind, for your body, for your home, 444. Absolutely. Hey, Christians redeem the time.

Christians buy up as much time as they can for what's good. Christians don't fritter away their time. And all these numbers really bear witness to a culture that's really lost a sense of the value of time in terms of Christian virtue anyway. Hey, everybody's just as busy as the other guy. People say, Scott, you're so busy.

No, I'm not. I'm not any more busier than you. I have 24 hours just like you do. So what are you using your time for? That's really the big question.

Yeah, so there's always data, the data point. Where are we right now? What does the data say about where we are right now? Or we're showing what the data says. But there's also trajectory.

What's the direction? What's the trend line showing? So the data is not good, but the trend line is actually more disturbing because it means we're going to end up in a worse place tomorrow than we are today. What does that mean? Well, that means there's a flow and unless you're willing to swim hard against the flow, you're just going to be drifting from bad to worse.

Yeah. Hey, I think there are people that want, you know, the cultures of the world to be living on a universal income while they're playing video games at home and not producing anything. And the world is moving in this direction. You know, The church is usually a little bit behind the world. And so it's a dangerous, a dangerous cultural moment where believers have to break out of the culture.

Here to me, this is the crux of the matter. First Corinthians 620, Paul says, for you were bought at a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. What's Paul saying here? We're not at liberty to live the way that the charts are reflecting. We don't have that liberty.

Why not? Well, because we don't own ourselves. Why not? Because we were bought with a price. Jesus shed His blood to purchase the people, not so that we could fritter away our time, but so that we could live in the world to glorify Him.

Amen. Your time is not your own. Amen. Hey, thanks again, Drew. Absolutely.

Let's do it again. Keep running the numbers. Sounds good. Okay, good deal. All right.

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