* Some points in this sermon have been gleamed from a message by Andy Stanley*
OPEN: - start by collecting special offering - $1 dollar from every person. Have ushers collect it and bring the money up to the pulpit.(Don’t reveal the purpose of the money)
OK so the way we are going to start this morning is I want us all to take off our watches and put them in a place where you can’t see it. And if you think that is scary, I’m going to do the same thing. Watches, cell phones, anything that tells you what time it is. Now my guess is that some place during the message you are probably going to try to check what time it is. – and my point in taking that ability away from you is underlining a basic concept we all need to get a hold of this morning:
There is something more important than knowing what time it is – What’s more important is knowing how you are spending your time. Many times during the day we all check to see what time it is. But very seldom to we actually check to see how we are spending our time. When we check our watches it is the same time for all of us. – but the real issue for all us is not what time it is but; “How are we spending the time that we have?” When we started this series we said that all of issues in our life when we’ve done really stupid things. We’ve all made really bad decisions, we’ve all made really bad choices, we all have moments in our lives which we wish we could redo. Instead of being wise, we’ve been foolish. So we’ve been exploring what it means to walk in wisdom. I don’t think there is any other arena where this is more important than the area of our time. Time is our life. Someone has said, “Time is money.” You can run out of money and life goes on. You can run out of earth stuff, and life goes on. But you can’t run out of time and have life left – when you run of time – that’s it. Our time is our life. If you haven’t said it yet, I guarantee that you will – you will come to a point in your life and you look back and you will say, “What did I do with all that time?” It seems like it always comes as a surprise to us that we didn’t use our time wisely, doesn’t it? There comes these moments when we look back and we say – how could I have been so frivolous? How could I have been so foolish to waste my times like that? What in the world was I thinking? I should have done something with that time! Where did my 20’s go? What happened to my 30’s – Where did my 40’s go? What happened to all that time? And that’s when we discover that the most important question is not what time is it? – but what am I doing with my time?
Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil. Using time wisely - he’s talking about opportunity here, by the way, because the word he uses here is not kronis. - The NIV picks up on that. There are two different words for time in Greek. Kronis is a Greek word that means time like a clock, time like a calendar, time like a sequence of minutes and hours. Kronis is the word from which we get chronology, the flow of events in history or chronograph, something that keeps time. But the word here is kairos and it means eras or epics or opportunities. We are to redeem the opportunities, the moments that can be grasped for God and for good and for glory for Him.
This slide is a picture of a statue the Greeks had. The Greeks had a god for everything and the name of this one is opportunity – kairos. In one of the ancient Greek cities this statue stood in the very center of the city. It was carved and chiseled by a man named Lysipus. It had wings on its feet and it had a great lock of hair in the front and it was bald in the back, from the middle back completely bald. And underneath the statue was a great base and carved in Greek on the base was this dialogue: Who made thee? Lysipus made me. What is thy name? My name is Opportunity. Why hast thou wings on thy feet? That I may fly away swiftly. Why hast thou a forelock? That men may seize me when I come. Why art thou bald in back? When I am gone by none can lay hold of me. Opportunity. The believer who walks in wisdom knows to make the most of opportunity. Notice when Lysipus created this statue – he had him holding a set of scales. Why do you think he choose to do that? Because he realized that people who handled opportunities (time) foolishly lived an unbalanced life.
Notice when Paul mentions time here, it is your time. You and I have a predetermined, particular amount of time – a personal amount of time. Actually in Greek the definite article appears in front of the word time – it is “the time” it is not some indefinite a time, or some time, or any time, or times, but the time. It’s a marked out amount of time. God has prescribed time in a very accurate determined dose. God has given us definite time. How we spend it or invest it is up to us – but the amount of it is totally up to him.
In I Peter 1:17, there is a very important statement. If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth; (1 Peter 1:17) In other words, Peter is saying you have a definite set time bounded by God’s sovereign choice.
David said in Psalm 39:4-5, “Show me, O LORD, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” Lord, please tell me how much time I have so I’ll know how weak I am and I can really use the time I have. And then he further said in the next verse, “You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man’s life is but a breath. Selah.”
James put it this way in Chapter 4:13-17 “Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins. James said, “Tomorrow you don’t know if you have tomorrow.” Time! You see the whole aspect of life is built around time in Paul’s thinking here. Wisdom in verse 15 leads you to think of time in verse 16. Why? Because I believe the greatest squandering of wisdom occurs in the use of time or the lack of it.
Psalm 103 puts it this way: “As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” (Psalm 103:15-16)
The very last thing we should be careless with is time. It is our most precious commodity. I have very little tolerance with people who want to waste time. I’ve found that there are lot of people who want to spend time and waste time and they want you to join them in them in the foolish way they waste their time.
Why all this biblical teaching on the topic of time?
Your Heavenly Father who has given you an allotment, cares very much how you
spend/waste/invest your time. God wants you live to live in a way that gets maximum impact out of your life. Wasting the time that he’s given you on this earth, doesn’t make sense to God. I mean wants to get to the end of their life and look aback and think to themselves – “Man I’ am so glad that I just wasted all these years.” Nobody wants that. God wants you to know that your days are numbered and he wants you to get maximum impact relationally, maximum impact spiritually, maximum impact with every moment he has given to you. What else would you expect from Him? - when you look at all the topics the Bible could have went into after telling us to live with wisdom - the very first thing he says is make the most of every opportunity. Redeeming the time – get maximum value - squeeze as much as you can out of every moment that you live. That’s what wise people do. We live in evil days – we live during a time when the urgent matters will keep us from giving attention to the important matters. We will constantly be investing in an irreplaceable commodity – time in things that in the end will not matter. Life – our culture, the urgency of the world’s agenda, will steal your time from you – and you will not be able to replace what God has allotted. The world will keep you very busy doing what it wants you do – not what God wants you do – not what God has planned for your life. The devil would love for you to waste your time in relationships and activities that will simply use up the allotment of time God has granted to you.
When God is giving you an opportunity for glorifying Him and serving him grab that in the midst of an evil day. Can you imagine what a heartbreak it is for God to create a world like our world and fill it up with every good thing and when it’s all made and done He says, “It’s all good.” And then to see the thing corrupted and botched and made vile as it is today, as it has been since the fall of man, as it continues to increase in its corruption. Can you imagine how that just breaks his heart? Can you imagine how it must be for God to see the days of the world that He made so filled with evil but then – and catch this – but then to know that he has designed a time and a place for his children – he determines the time and the places where we have our being – and sovereignly arranges history so that he divinely appoints Christians to be exactly where he wants them to be – and he gives each of them a golden jewel of opportunity after opportunity and after opportunity in the midst of an evil culture to trust him and shine their light – to use his power, his wisdom, his knowledge, his spirit to change this evil corrupt world - to get maximum impact with the resources he faithfully provides – and what do we do? We waste our time with excuses and self-centeredness, and half-hearted commitments
Ill - I would call a man a fool who threw away jewels. I would call a man a fool who threw away money. I would call a man a bigger fool who threw away an hour.
– Demonstrate by throwing money out the window you previously collected
– Some of you are sitting here are upset because I just threw your money out the window. In fact I would bet it’s all you can do – not to get up out of your seat and go chase down that dollar bill that blowing around in the wind out there. Maybe you’re getting an idea of how God feels when you waste the time he has given to you. Yet you are perfectly content to throw away time and you worry about money. Your dollar bill can be replaced, but you can’t replace the time he’s given to you.
Let’s pretend that I pull you aside this morning and say I have some very good news for you. And I tell you that an anonymous donor who loves you very much has decided to deposit 86,400 pennies into your account each morning, starting Monday morning. For those of us who might be mathematically challenged, that’s $864 a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. But I add, “There’s one stipulation... you must spend all that money that same day. No balance will be carried over to the next day. Each evening the bank must cancel whatever sum you failed to use.” With a big smile, you thank me and thank God for being so very good to you. You have time to plan your spending strategy the rest of the day. You grab a pencil and start figuring; $864 times 7 equals over $6,000 a week... times 52. That’s almost $315,000 a year that you have available to you if you work hard to spend it all each day. Remember, whatever you don’t spend is forfeited. You could probably spend it, but it would take some planning wouldn’t it? I mean who would want to throw away any money left over at the end of the day? There would be a great sense of loss if it wasn’t used properly.
So much for “Let’s Pretend.”
Now let’s get back to earth - Every morning someone who loves you very much deposits into your bank of time 86,400 seconds of time---which represent 1,440 minutes---which, of course, equal 24 hours each day. Now you’ve got to remember the same stipulation applies, because God gives you this amount of time for you to use each day. Nothing is ever carried over on credit to the next day. There is no such thing as a twenty-six hour day. (Though some of us wish there were). From today’s dawn until tomorrow’s dawn, you have a precisely determined amount of time. As someone has put it, “Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you want to, but you can spend it only once.” Are you careful about the way you are spending your allotment?
Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. (Gal. 6:10) Every day God gives you opportunity. Every day there’s an opportunity to do a righteous thing and to shun a sin. Every day there’s an opportunity, there’s a golden jewel that God places in front of you that can be grabbed for His glory. Some people are always going to pray and they’re going to get down to business to study the Bible and they’re going to serve the Lord and they’re going to tell their neighbor about Christ and they’re going to read the Bible. They just never get to it. The greatest fool in the world is the fool who wastes time, who spends opportunity without a return. As we have opportunity we ought to grab it. What about your personal time? You’ve been telling the Lord for years that you’re going to spend some time with Him. Do you do it? Or do you just let opportunity after opportunity go by and never redeem the time? What about time with your spouse? Do you take those precious times when you could contribute to him or to her what he needs or she needs? What about the children God’s given you? Not many years and they’re gone. What have you contributed? What have you done? What have you given? What does the time have to say? What about that ministry, those spiritual gifts, that thing you’re always going to do for the Lord, but you can never really get to doing it because everything isn’t just perfect the way you wanted it or because you’ve got other things to do?
The only piece of eternity you’ll ever hold in your hand is the opportunity of this moment, that’s it. You can’t live in the past; you can’t live in the future. It’s now and that’s the end of it. We hold an opportunity in our hands. That is the only piece of eternity we’ll ever hold.
Opportunity has a very limited season of availability. There are many biblical texts, which warn people that opportunity has a limited shelf life. You read in the Bible such a statement as, “The door was shut.” (Gen. 7:11) Too late! When Noah and his family were in the Ark God shut the door. It’s was too late. Opportunity was gone. When the virgins came with an unprepared lamp, the door was shut, too late. The marriage would go on without them. The words of the Lord Jesus Christ ring down through history, “The night comes when no man can work.” I hear the Lord say to the people of His day, “You shall die in your sins and where I go you cannot come.” I hear the Lord say to the churches of the New Testament, “I will remove the candlestick.” I hear God call to Israel year after year, time after time, century after century, until that nation finally turned its back on God and God called out to them through the prophet Moses and through those all the way down to Isaiah and beyond Isaiah and yet they were a stiff-necked and hard people who wouldn’t hear and wouldn’t listen. And God’s heart was broken and Jesus finally uttered it when He said, “How I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her brood, but you would not.” Lost opportunity! There comes a moment for all of us when opportunity is lost. Jesus says, “I stand at the door and knock” – and you say, “What do you want me to do?” How about opening the door dummy? This is your opportunity for real change. Take advantage of the opportunity.
When will you start walking in wisdom? When will see the times for what they really are? When are you going to finally study the Bible? When are you going to finally teach? When are you going to finally pray? When are you going to finally share Christ? When are you going to finally minister your gift?
So what’s the wise thing for you to do with your time? In light of your unique past (the way things have been) in light of current situation (the way things are) and in light of your future hopes and dreams – what is the wise thing for you to do? What is it that you need to stop doing? Not because it is bad, not because it is nec. evil – but because it is robbing from you from making those increment investments that you need to make in order build a cumulative positive investment in your family, your spiritual development, your loved ones. What’s the wise thing to do in light of your past? Some of you grew up in homes where is was like “Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver” Others might have grown up where it was more like Ozzie Osborn. Your family culture wasn’t like Leave it to Beaver – it was more like Bevis and Butthead. If you’ve never been exposed to good healthy atmosphere in relationships – what’s the wise things for you to do? If you look back over the last couple of months in your relationships with your spouse and you know that you guys are not running on all 8 cylinders – and the church just happens to be offering a Sunday school class on marriage – in light of your recent past – what’s the wise thing to do with your time? What do you need to stop doing – and what do you need to start doing? In light of your current situation - what wise changes do you need to make in the way that you are using your time? What needs to be taken out – what needs to be put in? Are you going allow complacency or slothfulness or anything at all rob you of an investment you know God is calling you to make? How about your future? - your dreams and hopes of where you want to be – of where you want to end up – what’s the wise thing for you do today?
- Now note this: Be very careful when you answer those questions. That’s what Scripture says isn’t it? Be very careful that you are not injecting your own agendas into the answers. Be very careful that you don’t answer the question in way that gives you the liberty or the justification to keep on doing something that is not wise. Don’t sit there and come up with an answer to the question and sign God’s name down at the bottom of the page because you’re looking to find a way of rationalizing a behavior that has a negative impact on your life or in the life of another person. Run the answers through the grid of God’s Spirit. The Grid of God’s Word. And the Grid of God’s people. ---- What happens if what God’s people are saying doesn’t agree with what I think God’s Word says? - this gets a little tricky – but here’s the bottom line, someone isn’t really hearing from God’s Spirit. Somebody has a personal agenda they don’t want to abandon. They have something about the use of their time they in which they want their own way. Ill. let’s use an illustration – Is it a wise thing for me to spend my time drinking? (I only pick on this issue because it is mentioned next in the passage in Eph.) What do you think God’s Spirit would say? (this by the way includes whatever intoxicant your want to choose) What does God’s Word say on the topic? Then how about getting the counsel from God’s people? When you get those three things lined up and you still insist that you want to waste your time getting drunk – is that wise? No it’s a picture of foolishness. Ill of picking Barnabas and Paul to go on the first missions trip “It seemed right to us and the Holy Spirit for them to go.” The Spirit works through His Church.
CLOSE: The issue is not; “What time is it?” - The issue is; “What are you doing with your time?” Are you spending your time foolishly? Are you wasting your time frivolously? Or are you investing your time – making the most of the opportunities God has given to you. “Only one life – it soon will be past – only what’s done for Christ will last.”
