What if we lived with influence in our lives? A simple way to begin to move into this role is to examine our time, talent, and treasures.

Time: What if we set aside time to pray for the spiritual and physical needs of our neighbors, friends, family? What if we asked them if there was anything specific we could pray for them about and actually set aside time to pray for them? Then after 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, or whatever feels comfortable we go back and ask them about what we were praying for? For some of us it might feel awkward but if we want to live lives of influence then we are going to need to take some risks. We can play it safe, have surface conversations, and never see anything exciting happen, but we will miss out on influence.

Talent: What if we gave our talents to others to be a benefit to help them? Talents are things we don’t even have to work at, they come easy to us, and we gave them away. That happened awhile ago a friend was at my house and said, “Michael, the handle on your kitchen faucet is broken? I said, ya, it gets loose, but you just have to bend it, press it, and twist it and it will work fine.” He simply said, “I will come by this week and fix it for you.” It took him about 15 minutes to completely replace my faucet. It would have taken me over a week and still wouldn’t have worked, but it is a talent for him and instead of just keeping that talent to himself, he gave it away.

Treasure: I know some of us start to twitch when we talk about money in church, but what if we gave money to schools and saw better education, provided people with clothing to get jobs, paid for counseling? Invested our treasures in our community and around the world. What if it wasn’t just tipping our hats as a courtesy, but we did it in such a risky way that people thought it was foolish!

There will be a distraction to influence when we start thinking about ourselves. What about our time, our talent, our treasure and we are fully capable of keeping the focus completely on us, however, that won’t lead to lives of influence. It will be safe, but we will miss out on experiencing a fulfilling experience that God intended for us to experience when we invest our time, talent, and treasures into the lives of others.