For Christmas I was given a copy of D. A. Carson’s The Gospel and the Modern World. Though it goes without saying when it comes to his writing, I highly recommend this collection of essays, thoughtfully selected and arranged by Bryan Tabb. Throughout 2026 it’s my intention to read through Carson’s work—employing John Piper’s “disciplined blocks”—and occasionally reflecting on it in my own writing. This article is the first of such offerings, exploring Carson’s exhortation to consider the Bible’s many axes along which Christians must pursue balance. One such axis is our use of time and the multitude of responsibilities God places on his people.

The Many Demands on Our Time—God’s and Otherwise

As Carson writes, “The Bible exhorts us to discharge many responsibilities, all of them time-consuming: to work, love our neighbour, love our spouse, bring up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, pray, meditate on God’s Word, meet together with other believers for mutual edification and corporate praise, bear witness to the gospel with unbelievers, and much more.”

Fulfilling those responsibilities is difficult enough, but they’re made even more complicated when we remember that time is a zero-sum game—you can’t compress, condense, manipulate or bend time, as some misguided folk believe. However we allocate and distribute our time, the sum total doesn’t change. “One cannot allot more time and energy to one responsibility,” writes Carson, “without correspondingly diminishing one or more of the other blocks.” Fidelity and obedience to God must therefore reckon with the finitude of time.

Faithfully using our time is further complicated by what Carson identifies as “the peculiar rush of duties that befall us in peculiar circumstances.” Someone falls ill. You’re swamped with home admin. Work is unseasonably intense. Perhaps you binged the last season of Stranger Things or stayed up after midnight playing Halo Infinite, which has left you tiredly scratching for more hours in your week. Even the most deliberate stewards of their time will succumb to unforeseen circumstances and unusually chaotic seasons.

All of this is to say: finding a biblical balance in our use of time isn’t straightforward. But the start of the year is a great time to reconsider it, perhaps recommitting to more wisely stewarding our time as the Lord teaches us to number our days (Psalm 90:12). As Carson puts it, “The needed balance in the face of such demands turns on right priorities in using the time God has given us.”

Let Grace Shape Your Priorities and Prevent Guilt

Crucially, in the pursuit of a better balanced, God-honouring use of our time we must refuse the feeling that we’re “dismal failures because we cannot squeeze thirty hours of living into twenty-four. We have all the time that God has wisely allotted; there is no more.” You could probably scroll and stream less. Sure. Chances are you should be getting to sleep earlier. But when it comes to assessing our use of time we need to remember that God is gracious and we are finite. “This isn’t a call to laziness,” as I argued last year. “It is an invitation to reckon with your own limitations,” learning how to “operate within our weaknesses.” Yes, you have finite time, from hours a day to years in a lifetime. But don’t forget that you yourself are finite. Redeeming our time must start with grace—not guilt.

That being said, “We can work away at making our use of time more efficient; above all, we can pursue godly priorities,” so concludes Carson. More than the ability (“we can”), I’d argue that it ought to be our ambition (“we must”). This is surely one of the implications of Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians 5:15-16.

Here we might circle back to the modern habits I already alluded to, though worth particular mention is likely the time we waste on social media—digital consumerism. Tony Reinke isn’t exaggerating in 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You when he insists, “we all need to stop and reflect on our impulsive smartphone habits because, in an age when our eyes and hearts are captured by the latest polished gadget, we need more self-criticism, not less.” Such self-criticism should be extended to how much we stream. Even conservative figures suggest that most of us spend somewhere between 15 and 20 hours in front of our televisions per week. That’s around 20% of our waking lives. Add doomscrolling to that and we’re looking at unprecedented amounts of time glued to a screen. I’m not saying you can’t; I’m merely asking if this reflects a biblical balance.

Use Your Time in a Manner Worthy of the Gospel

The New Testament exhorts Christians to live a life worthy of the gospel (Philippians 1:27; Ephesians 4:1; Colossians 1:10). Carrying that out we must always be vigilant against collapsing our works into worth, mistakenly thinking that we make ourselves presentable and worthy before God. Our obedience is a response to the gospel, enacted by the Spirit and empowered by his grace. In one sense, therefore, we’ll never live a life worthy of the gospel—the Christian is someone who reckons daily with their own profound unworthiness and God’s unconditional love. Yet this isn’t to suggest those exhortations are paper tigers. We ought to feel their weightiness, driving us simultaneously into the gracious embrace of God and towards glorifying our Lord in all places and times.