To Be Like Jesus: Every Hour Is Valuable, March 8

 How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? Proverbs 6:9, NKJV. Go to the ant.... Consider her ways and be wise. Verse 6, NKJV. 

God has no use for lazy men or women in His cause; He wants thoughtful, kind, affectionate, earnest workers. Active exertion will do our preachers good. Indolence is proof of depravity. Every faculty of the mind, every bone in the body, every muscle of the limbs, shows that God designed our faculties to be used, not to remain inactive.... Those who will unnecessarily take the hours of daylight for sleep have no sense of the value of precious, golden moments.... 

Persons who have not acquired habits of close industry and economy of time should have set rules to prompt them to regularity and dispatch. George Washington [the first United States president] was enabled to perform a great amount of business because he was thorough in preserving order and regularity. Every paper had its date and its place, and no time was lost in looking up what had been mislaid. 

Men and women of God must be diligent in study, earnest in the acquirement of knowledge, never wasting an hour. Through persevering exertion they may rise to almost any degree of eminence as Christians, as people of power and influence. But many will never attain superior rank in the pulpit or in business, because of their unfixedness of purpose, and the laxness of habits contracted in their youth. Careless inattention is seen in everything they undertake. A sudden impulse now and then is not sufficient to accomplish a reformation in these ease-loving, indolent ones; this is a work which requires patient continuance in well-doing. Persons of business can be truly successful only by having regular hours for rising, for prayer, for meals, and for retiring. If order and regularity are essential in worldly business, how much more so in the work of God! 

The bright morning hours are wasted by many in bed. These precious hours, once lost, are gone never to return; they are lost for time and for eternity. Only one hour lost each day, and what a waste of time in the course of a year! Let slumberers think of this, and pause to consider how they will give an account to God for lost opportunities.—Gospel Workers, 277, 278.