Redeeming Your Time
CCCAG Jan 9h, 2019
Scripture- Eph 5:16-17, 2 King 20
Intro: 2nd message of the new years- the first (Beauty from Ashes) being about how God wants to use your past to propel you into your future, today- (title)
Has anyone here ever bought something that required a great deal of assembly?
When Tammie and I were still newlyweds we bought an entertainment center for the apartment. When we got it home, I realized that the instructions were mostly in some type of Oriental language, I suspect Chinese. Since there were diagrams that went along with the written instructions I figured that I'd be able to figure it out as I am generally pretty good at that kind of thing.
So I sat on the floor of the living room for a few hours putting this thing together. I'm getting ready to stand it up for the first time when I realized that I put on one of the central piece’s backwards, so that the unfinished side would be showing toward the room instead of the wall. Unfortunately, there was no way to quick fix this and I had to take every screw out and take off every piece to turn around this one board.
Talk about being frustrated about wasting that much time
Another thing that can be frustrating- Has anyone taken one wrong turn during a road trip and ended up going for an hour or 2 in the wrong direction? Any woman who is ever been married to a man who insists that he knows the exact right way to go probably has experience this at one time or another.
There is something ingrained in most people that absolutely hates to waste time. Yet many of us if we're really honest with ourselves as a church family and with our God would probably admit that we waste a lot of time in life.
The idea of wasted time is something that God has brought to the forefront of my life recently. This last December I turned 49 years old. They call this time of life “middle aged” and it's usually when most people, especially guys, have a midlife crisis because they realize that over half of their life is over.
I suppose in some ways I'm experiencing a midlife crisis but not in the typical way. The stereotype of a guy having a mid-life crisis is buying a brand-new sports car or start wearing a bad toupee. If I'm having any sort of a midlife crisis it's coming down to the realization of the importance of time.
God has a lot to say about understanding this concept of time. It’s one of the most valuable gifts that God has given us. Time is meant to remind us that our life here on this earth is limited. It’s why God set a calendar for the people of the Old Testament to follow. All the celebrations, all the festivals , all of the great temple activities all had to do with reminding the worshipper that time keeps ticking on and sooner or later we will be standing before Jesus Christ.
I think this really hit me going to Pastor Ron’s funeral last year. Pastor Ron was in many ways my spiritual father. The funeral message was given by one of his best friends whose name is Dean Niforatos, the crazy Greek Evangelist I have spoken of in the past. During the message Dean spoke from Ecclesiastes 12.
I’m going to do something a little different this morning in that I’m going to read that section of scripture to set the mood for our central verse.
Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say,
“I find no pleasure in them”— before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark, and the clouds return after the rain; when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men stoop, when the grinders cease because they are few,
and those looking through the windows grow dim; when the doors to the street are closed
and the sound of grinding fades; when people rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint; when people are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire no longer is stirred.
Then people go to their eternal home and mourners go about the streets.
Remember him (God)—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well,
7 and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
That is a powerful and sobering Scripture. It’s a plea from our wise Father God to consider how we use this gift He has given us.
This morning I want to talk about God's gift of time to each one of us and how important it is for us to use this gift in such a way that we will honor him.
This is incredibly important for us because once we get a sense that our time here on this earth is finite and will someday run out it will help us to order our days and live our lives in such a way that we can honor him in every way.
That will lead us to the principles found in the central verse that I want to explore today
Ephesians 5:15 NKJV
15 See then that you walk [e]circumspectly (carefully), not as fools but as wise, 16 redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
17 Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is
Prayer
The title of today's message is Redeeming Your Time. This morning we're going to look at 3 different principles about how to use this finite resource that God has given us.
The first principle that I want us to start thinking about is probably going to be the most difficult for us to appreciate and that is that our mortality is a gift from God.
I. The gift of mortality (Really?)
It is said that youth is wasted on the young. It’s true because when most people are young they have no concept of the value of time.
I was introduced to this concept in middle school. We were required to read a series of books by JRR Tolkien called The Lord of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings series was written as an allegory of Christian spirituality and if you have a biblical or Christian worldview you will see these ideas throughout his writings.
One of the topics in these books deals with the idea of mortality.
Within the world of Middle Earth, there is something called the gift of the Valar- given to humanity. In the LOTR series, the Valar are closely associated with the idea of a Trinity of God’s. The gift of the Valar to man is that they make humanities lifespan much shorter than the other fantasy races in Middle Earth.
We spoke briefly about this in class and I thought at that time that's not much of a gift. Why couldn't humanity live forever like the Elves, or several hundred or even a thousand years like the dwarves?
After I became a Christian and I started reading the first few chapters of Genesis and how sin resulted in humanity not being able to live forever. This problem was made even worse after the flood in that now we only live about 80 to 90 years old on average.
I was 23 when I accepted Christ and while I understood that that was part of God's judgment upon sin, I still had this thought in the back of my head about how unfair it was that we couldn't at least live several 100 years.
As I said earlier, I’m 49 years old. If I remain in decent health and drop some weight, baring illness or sudden injury my family on both sides typically live into their late 80’s so I could have about 30 years left.
My thinking on what mortality is has changed a lot in the last 26 years, and particularly in the last year.
I’m not as resentful about having a limited lifespan anymore like I was when I was younger. I've come to appreciate this idea of mortality and see it as a gift from a loving God Instead of only seeing it as a judgment from an angry God.
Mortality helps us to want to enjoy every moment God has given us, and to do the work that HE has given us to do.
Let me show you a biblical example of a man who came to appreciate his mortality when a sudden illness came upon him.
Turn to second Kings chapter 20.
We're going to read the account of a King in Judah name Hezekiah. He was one of the few godly Kings that ruled over the southern Kingdom and he was suddenly infected with some sort of aggressive skin disease, probably a form of leprosy.
Let's read the account here in second Kings chapter 20
2 Kings 20- In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to him and said, “This is what the LORD says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”
2 Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, 3 “Remember, LORD, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
4 Before Isaiah had left the middle court, the word of the LORD came to him: 5 “Go back and tell Hezekiah, the ruler of my people, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you. On the third day from now you will go up to the temple of the LORD. 6 I will add fifteen years to your life. And I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city for my sake and for the sake of my servant David.’ ”
7 Then Isaiah said, “Prepare a poultice of figs.” They did so and applied it to the boil, and he recovered.
A little background as to some reasons Hezekiah became suddenly ill.
There was this emerging Kingdom named Assyria that had just conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and was now poised to do the same thing to the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
Up until this point, for the most part Hezekiah was a decent king who mainly acknowledged God in his life and in how he governed the nation, But,
We know from the writings of the prophet Isaiah that he was also a proud and a bit of an arrogant man.
This proud man now had an army several times larger than anything that Judah could put in the field sitting on his northern border. Judah was facing imminent destruction, so God needed to get Hezekiah’s attention quickly and therefore allowed this illness in his life.
In other words, God used mortality to change this man’s direction.
Prior to this illness this proud man would have probably fielded in army that would have been slaughtered on the field of battle leading to the destruction of Judah.
God used the idea of death and mortality to change the course of Hezekiah’s thinking and his life. And that is how God uses our mortality in our lives – to center us and remind us, and make us realize that we only have a certain amount of this commodity we call time.
That is why this principle of mortality is a gift to us because it keeps the idea about a limited time on this earth front and center so that we spend the time that God has given us very wisely.
And that leads us to the next point
II. The stewardship of time
Whenever the word stewardship comes up in a church everybody's mind automatically goes to finances or money, and that is often a focus in church because Jesus talked a lot about money. But we aren’t talking about money today.
The funny thing is, you can have all the money in the world – you can be a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezo’s and have billions of dollars at your disposal and yet never appreciate that with all of that worldly wealth, it is nowhere near most valuable commodity in existence.
Rich man and Lazarus (if time)
The most valuable commodity you possess right now is time. You can’t get more of it no matter how much money you spend, how much you try, how much you diet, or how much you exercise.
God's word said that it is appointed for man once to die and then the judgment. You have a set date and time of your death. We all do.
Life isn’t about what you can accumulate.
There is a popular saying that you never see a U-haul following a hearse.
Your wealth will not follow you into the grave
Your possessions will be given to someone else or sold in the money given to someone else
Your position and education cannot be transferred and will die with you
The only thing that follows you into eternity is how you used the time God gave you. All those other things we just listed may factor into your rewards someday but ultimately it's going to come down to how you spent your time.
That’s why this is so important for us to understand right away in the New Year- You need to focus on the big stuff first.
Illustration-
One day an expert in time management was speaking to a group of business students at Harvard. To drive home a point, used an illustration those students will never forget.
As he stood in front of the group of high-powered overachievers- students who will be hired by the biggest companies on earth and he said, "Okay, time for a quiz."
Then he pulled out a one-gallon, wide-mouthed Mason jar and set it on the table in front of him. Then he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, "Is this jar full?"
Everyone in the class said, "Yes."
Then he said, "Really?" He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the space between the big rocks. Then he asked the group once more, "Is the jar full?"
By this time the class was on to him. "Probably not," one of them answered. "Good!" he replied. He reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in the jar and it went into all of the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked the question, "Is this jar full?"
"No!" the class shouted.
Once again he said, "Good."
Then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim. Then he looked at the class and asked, "What is the point of this illustration?"
One eager beaver raised his hand and said, "The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard you can always fit some more things in it!"
The expert smacked that eager beaver in the head shouting, NO!
The point of the story with the rocks and the gravel and the sand and the water is NOT that you can always cram more in.
The point is that you need to put the big rocks in first.
The reason so many of us drift in our relationship with God is because HE is the biggest rock we have to focus on getting into our jar first.
Today’s Christian has instead filled our jar with water, and then the sand, and then the gravel and we wonder why we can’t fit the biggest rock of all- God into our lives.
So when we talk about the stewardship of our lives and how we spend our time we need to focus on the big rocks before we consider the gravel, the sand, or the water.
The gravel the sand or the water are not necessarily bad they had to be put in their correct order and priority.
Let me make this very clear- from the bible’s point of view-
The big rocks in a Christian’s life are your relationship with Jesus Christ, if you are married then your marriage, then the rest of your immediate family (very important that the marriage come before the kids), then your church and church family. Period.
Then everything else (career, jobs, hobbies, fun stuff) is the gravel, the sand, or the water.
If we can get this right in our lives, this is what will cause us to have the largest impact for Jesus Christ in this world. Not only will this help us to impact our world for Jesus Christ, but it’s the way that we can live a fulfilling life filled with hope, joy, and peace because we will be living in the middle of God’s will for us.
The final point I want to make today is this-someday we will give a reckoning of our time.
Reckoning- That’s an old way of saying- everything we do will be brought into account when we stand before Christ-
III. The reckoning of time
Noah Webster, who published the famous Webster’s dictionary once said
The most important thought that ever occupied my mind is that of my individual responsibility to God
Earlier I said it is appointed for man once to die (Heb 9:27), and then the judgement. Part of that judgment will be how we spent our time here on earth.
We began today’s message in Ecc 12, and now we will end there-
13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the duty of all mankind.
14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
I hope today’s message helps us to appreciate the wisdom of God in giving us a time limit to our lives. This limit will help us to appreciate and value the time left to us, it will help us steward that gift appropriately, and when we stand before him to given an account of how we spent this precious gift, we will not be ashamed.
Lastly,
Understanding that, accepting that, and learning to live in peace and joy because of that is probably one of the most important principles to living a life that will echo into eternity.
Communion
Conclusion
Altar Call
