bible and theology on Procrastination

Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the holiday shopping season for men is Christmas Eve.

The habit of always putting off an experience until you can afford it, or until the time is right, or until you know how to do it is one of the greatest burglars of joy. Be deliberate, but once you...

Extravagant wastefulness in time might prove the most productive thing you choose for yourself.

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard t...

Delayed gratification may be an important key to success in life, points out Mark Batterson. In a variety of experiments, the most famous from 1972, Walter Mischel studied how young children delayed g...

While I am busy with little things, I am not required to do greater things.

I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.

If your idleness is a complete slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile. Or if it is that idleness which so...

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.

A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

When we insist on doing too much, we are not only inflicting the damage of this choice on ourselves, we are sharing this damage with those we love the most.

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease t...

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

Failures are divided into two classes — those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other wo...

Gracious God, when I think of how you created all things in a step-by-step manner, I am reminded of my own impatience. There are so many times, Lord, when I want you to move at my pace, not yours. I c...

Building anticipation into one's preaching simply calls for one basic understanding of the task of the pulpit: the goal is not to get something said but to get something heard.

The repetition of small efforts will accomplish more than the occasional use of great talents.

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A slothful man may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly...

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

Faith is a voluntary anticipation.

God intended man to have all good, but in . . . God’s time; and therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God ha...

The key is this: Meet today's problems with today's strength. Don't start tackling tomorrow's problems until tomorrow. You do not have tomorrow's strength yet. You simply have enou...

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely an...

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily--open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is bett...

For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.