I Will Redeem the Time
0 Amens
Intro.
Our sermon series for this New Year started last Sunday, and we kicked it off by looking at the guiding principle of a life that is NOT wasted. You will want to write this down. You will want to remember this forever. The principle is that “I will make Christ look great in every area of my life, whether I live or whether I die.” So while you live you magnify Jesus, and in your death, you magnify Jesus. We as believers are the telescope others look through to see the greatness of Jesus. And in magnifying Jesus in everything we do, so that when we come to the end of our lives we don’t look back and say “I’ve wasted it,” we saw that we HAVE to start NOW. Not tomorrow, not next year, or the next. We have to begin this 1 Big Resolution Right NOW, This Year, b/c every day we live not making Jesus look great through our lives is a day we’ve wasted. And days add up to weeks, which add up to months, which add up to years wasted.
To magnify Jesus in all of our lives so that our lives are not a waste there are a lot of areas of our life as individuals and as a church that we need to hold up to the light of God’s Word. See when we hold our lives up to the light, the light exposes the things in us that are dark. The sin, the rebellion, the evil holdouts that cling to us, and try to force us to continue to rule our lives. And when you rule your own life, which is really an illusion, you are saying to Jesus, “I don’t want you on the throne. I’d much rather be there myself. I can do a better job of it than you.” Then we look at our lives and say, “What a mess. How did I get here?”
Today what we’re holding up to the light is our time. As we do that we’ll see 2 major themes. 1 is how we spend our time. 2 is what the world is doing around us as we’re spending our time.
Why is time the 1st aspect we’re looking at as we consider not wasting our lives this year? B/c I believe how we spend our time affects every other area of our lives. It shows what your values are, what you believe in, support, what your priorities are. Importantly it tells other people what those things are for you. It’s not just for you, but for everyone who knows you. As they observe you, believer, Christian, follower of Jesus, spending your time, the unbelieving world will then be able to say, “This is how a Christian spends his time.” And depending on how you spend it, they will either say “That’s the same way I spend it mostly,” or “They spend their time differently than I do. I wonder why?” Or maybe they’ll say, “They spend it differently than I do, how dumb are they?”
The Bible warns us to consider how we spend our time, and not just to tell us to evaluate it but to instruct us too. I’ll be the 1st to say the Bible is not your time management tool. Calendars, planners, to do lists, those are all helpful things, but the Bible gives us the tools to help us learn how to faithfully fill those other things. As you filter how you spend your time through the lens of the Bible you will be able to see if you are heading towards wasting your life, or making the most of Jesus in it.
Now before we go any further, I need to say something that we should all be able to agree on without much explanation. The Bible says “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” That includes you. That includes what you call your life. That includes what you call your time. So at the outset we need to see that what I call my time isn’t really my time. It’s God’s time. He’s allowed me to be a steward of it. A steward is a manager of someone else’s stuff. So God’s put me in charge of managing His time that He has given me. If He gives me 80 years then I’m responsible for managing His 80 years that He’s allowed me to have. A good steward manages His master’s stuff well. How well do you manage God’s time, that He’s given to you? This is a major part of not wasting your life this year. There are really 2 options Biblically speaking. You either manage it wisely or foolishly. That’s a popular Biblical category, the wise and the foolish. Let’s look at Ephesians chapter 5:15-17. (READ).
I. Wise versus Foolish Time Stewardship
Paul starts out by giving us instructions on managing the time we’ve been given, and then he tells us an important reason why, which we’ll see in just a minute. So first Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells us to “walk circumspectly.” Walking in the Bible is a way of speaking about the way that you live your life, so we could say he’s telling us to “live our lives circumspectly.” That’s another one of those older big words, and it basically means to be careful of what’s around you. So he says “Take great care in the way you live your lives,” and then explains how he means that.
Verse 15, “walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise.” “Take great care to live your lives wisely and not foolishly.” It’s easy to see what Paul means by both wise and foolish living because he explains it. Look back at the middle of chapter 4 starting in verse 17 (read through 20). A foolish person is the person who lives their lives ignorant and totally unmindful of the one true God. A foolish life is a wasted life. Paul calls it futile which is almost a synonym for a waste.
Now let’s look at the way most people live their lives. Television. 99% of households in the US have TV. That means that here, even the poor people have televisions. In fact we have an average of over 2 sets per house. In our homes, the television is on, but not necessarily watched, just the incessant noise of the things on for an average of over 6 hours a day or 42 hours a week 2,184 hours a year. 66% of Americans watch TV while eating. We spend an average of 2 months every year watching TV. Here’s another scary stat. The # of minutes that parents engage in meaningful conversation with their children (not brush your teeth, clean your room, go to bed) is about 3 ½ minutes per week. How many minutes do the kids watch TV a week? 1,680 minutes. That’s over 480 times more TV than meaningful conversation.
What about surfing the internet? People with computers and online connections spend anywhere between 14 and 30 hours a week on the internet. That’s 728-1560 hours a year and I believe that number is greater now than it was when these stats were published. You’re at work and bored? Surf the internet. You’re at home and bored? Surf the internet. You’re at home with your wife and kids? Surf the internet AND watch TV. I’ve seen couples that literally spend each night in front of the TV with laptops in their laps all evening long. I’ve done it too by the way, but I make it a point not to.
How about sleeping and eating? We average about 8 hours a night sleeping, but many of us get less than that. That comes to about 56 hours a week, and 2912 hours a year, which about 121 days out of a year. We spend about 1-2 hours a day eating depending on how long you linger at the table. Usually it’s closer to 1.
So, each average day we spend about 4 hours watching TV, about 2-4 hours on the internet, about 8 hours sleeping and about 8 hours working if you have a full-time job. That makes up 22-24 hours out of a 24 hour day. You have to eat. You have to sleep. You have to work. What out of these activities do you NOT have to do each day? That’s not to mention commute times, taking the kids to extracurricular activities, grocery shopping, running errands, and household chores that have to be done.
We literally fill our lives up with stuff don’t we? This is the average, and this is in America, a country that claims to be Christian for the most part. If we live this way, then we’re living just like everyone else. So here’s the question I’ll pose to you; Is this wise or foolish living? I won’t answer for you, I’ll let you make up your mind. Is this what Paul had in mind when he said (READ v. 15).
II. Wise Stewardship of Time Means Redeeming the Time (16)
Look again at verse 16 (READ). If we don’t want to waste the time God has entrusted to us, then we have to redeem it. In this context that means “making the best use” of the time. Making the best use of the time. Now, we’ve already seen what the average American, and this includes Christians or at least people who’d say they’re Christians, does with their God-given time. We absolutely fill it with all kinds of stuff.
Here’s the thing though. That does NOT mean that the things we do have no eternal, redeeming value. The typical Christian response or preacher’s response here is, “YOU NEED TO COME TO CHURCH MORE!!!” And they say that with a fire/brimstone look on their faces and in their voices. While gathering together each week as a body of believer is VERY important as we’ll see in a few weeks, that’s not necessarily the 1 solution to the problem of wasted time.
Here is the message we need to hear this morning: Redeeming the time, or making the best use of the time can include doing many of the things we’re already doing, but doing them in a way that glorifies and magnifies Jesus. Don’t stop taking your kids to football practice so they can replace that with door to door evangelism. Instead, teach them that football practice is a time not only to be better football players, but to make Jesus look great through them. This goes for parents too. At little league baseball games the most embarrassing things tend to happen. Otherwise normal parents turn into raging maniacs! Yelling at the kids, yelling at the coaches, yelling at the part-time non-professional refs. That is how to waste your time.
Instead, use the time spent at the game to magnify Christ by the way you treat others you’re around. Use it as an opportunity to engage people and pray for the opportunity to share the Gospel. Grocery stores. Is there anything redeeming about time spent buying food? YES. It happens in the way you stand in line. In the smile on your face to the busy, and very unprofessional single parent working two jobs to support her children at home, and maybe isn’t the rosiest person on the earth at all times b/c she’d rather have a husband and a be home taking care of her kids instead of scanning your Doritos, Ice Cream, and Hamburger Meat. Make her day. Redeem your time. Treat her as if she were Jesus child, and not a slow cashier.
At the restaurant. Oh boy, my glass has been empty for 2 minutes! His tip just went down ½ a percent. What’s the minimum I can get away with tipping this college student working his way through school? My bill is 20 bucks. I’ll leave a dollar. Redeem the time. Be Jesus to the people at the restaurant. Your neighbor. His trees have grown over the property line and now your petunias aren’t getting enough sunlight! What do you do? This year if you want to waste you life and waste your God-given time, then march over to his house, bang on his door and demand that he get out and cut his trees! That’ll show him what you stand for!
I could keep going. The point is that we don’t give up life to be better stewards of God’s time. We use God’s time and the life He’s given us as opportunities to magnify Him. What about the wasted time watching TV, surfing the internet, or whatever it may be? Be wise as Paul says here. Don’t be the average, beat the average. If you spend more time on being entertained than you do on the things of God, you are not making the best use of the time. Shave time off the entertainment. I got an idea. If 3.5 minutes is the average meaningful conversation between a parent and a child, why not bump it up to 3.5 hours a week!? Stop letting Barney, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, The Wiggles, and whoever other dreadful TV show babysit your kids and talk to them. Teach them. Redeem the time. Same goes for your spouse, your parents, your grandparents, and your friends. I could still keep going but I won’t.
III. The All Important Reason
Besides being good stewards of our God given time, we are called to impact a world that is evil. I researched a lot about the last 100 years this week preparing for this sermon to demonstrate the evil world we live in today. Look at the end of verse 16 (READ). The days are evil. Paul said that about his day, as a Roman Jewish Christian living in the 1st century. A place where Jews and Christians were burned alive, torn apart, sawn in two, strung up on crosses, fed to lions, blamed for disasters and chased out of town, entertainment like wrestling today except the end was deadlier and bloodier. The days WERE certainly evil. What about today?
We have to redeem the time, make the best use of the time, not waste the time, b/c today is just as evil. Did you know that in the 20th century, more than a 100 million people were killed in wars and by dictators? Did you know that genocide, which is killing your own people, and so-called ethnic cleansing claimed millions of lives last century. Did you know that from 1973-1998 over 38 million unborn babies were killed? The newest fad in horror movies is gratuitous, purposeless, torture, violence, and killing, and we see the movies in droves. A man walked into an Amish school and killed children and adults. A man walked into a church a few weeks back and started shooting. Again I could go on.
While we are spending our time watching TV, playing video games, surfing the internet, and going to soccer practice, the world around us is dying and going to hell. The days are evil and they always have been. There’s just more people now than their used to be. More information. More sources of violence, sex, and immorality to choose from than in the past, and in the midst of that we come to church, feel very religious, and then go home and live life whatever way we feel like living.
There’s a saying that “Nero fiddled, while Rome burned.” Are christians today little Neros? We play the fiddle and dance like nothing is wrong while the world burns to the ground? What is more tragic than wasting your life by wasting your time Christian brothers and sisters? What are you gonna do about it? Paul’s answer was redeem the time by living wisely and then look at verse 17 (READ). Understanding the will of God for His people.
Do you know what His will is for us? Paul goes on to tell us even as he’s already detailed it pretty clearly. A wise Christian is filled with the Holy Spirit. I’ll save that sermon for another day.
Conclusion
Examine your life. We’ve said, or I hope you’ve said, “I will not waste my life this year.” How about this? Start with the time. The God-given time He has made you a manager of. How long do you have? 2 days? 2 year? 50 years? It doesn’t matter. No matter how much time you have left, you have time right now to start making the best use of your time.
(WRAP UP AND INVITATION)
Read MoreOur sermon series for this New Year started last Sunday, and we kicked it off by looking at the guiding principle of a life that is NOT wasted. You will want to write this down. You will want to remember this forever. The principle is that “I will make Christ look great in every area of my life, whether I live or whether I die.” So while you live you magnify Jesus, and in your death, you magnify Jesus. We as believers are the telescope others look through to see the greatness of Jesus. And in magnifying Jesus in everything we do, so that when we come to the end of our lives we don’t look back and say “I’ve wasted it,” we saw that we HAVE to start NOW. Not tomorrow, not next year, or the next. We have to begin this 1 Big Resolution Right NOW, This Year, b/c every day we live not making Jesus look great through our lives is a day we’ve wasted. And days add up to weeks, which add up to months, which add up to years wasted.
To magnify Jesus in all of our lives so that our lives are not a waste there are a lot of areas of our life as individuals and as a church that we need to hold up to the light of God’s Word. See when we hold our lives up to the light, the light exposes the things in us that are dark. The sin, the rebellion, the evil holdouts that cling to us, and try to force us to continue to rule our lives. And when you rule your own life, which is really an illusion, you are saying to Jesus, “I don’t want you on the throne. I’d much rather be there myself. I can do a better job of it than you.” Then we look at our lives and say, “What a mess. How did I get here?”
Today what we’re holding up to the light is our time. As we do that we’ll see 2 major themes. 1 is how we spend our time. 2 is what the world is doing around us as we’re spending our time.
Why is time the 1st aspect we’re looking at as we consider not wasting our lives this year? B/c I believe how we spend our time affects every other area of our lives. It shows what your values are, what you believe in, support, what your priorities are. Importantly it tells other people what those things are for you. It’s not just for you, but for everyone who knows you. As they observe you, believer, Christian, follower of Jesus, spending your time, the unbelieving world will then be able to say, “This is how a Christian spends his time.” And depending on how you spend it, they will either say “That’s the same way I spend it mostly,” or “They spend their time differently than I do. I wonder why?” Or maybe they’ll say, “They spend it differently than I do, how dumb are they?”
The Bible warns us to consider how we spend our time, and not just to tell us to evaluate it but to instruct us too. I’ll be the 1st to say the Bible is not your time management tool. Calendars, planners, to do lists, those are all helpful things, but the Bible gives us the tools to help us learn how to faithfully fill those other things. As you filter how you spend your time through the lens of the Bible you will be able to see if you are heading towards wasting your life, or making the most of Jesus in it.
Now before we go any further, I need to say something that we should all be able to agree on without much explanation. The Bible says “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” That includes you. That includes what you call your life. That includes what you call your time. So at the outset we need to see that what I call my time isn’t really my time. It’s God’s time. He’s allowed me to be a steward of it. A steward is a manager of someone else’s stuff. So God’s put me in charge of managing His time that He has given me. If He gives me 80 years then I’m responsible for managing His 80 years that He’s allowed me to have. A good steward manages His master’s stuff well. How well do you manage God’s time, that He’s given to you? This is a major part of not wasting your life this year. There are really 2 options Biblically speaking. You either manage it wisely or foolishly. That’s a popular Biblical category, the wise and the foolish. Let’s look at Ephesians chapter 5:15-17. (READ).
I. Wise versus Foolish Time Stewardship
Paul starts out by giving us instructions on managing the time we’ve been given, and then he tells us an important reason why, which we’ll see in just a minute. So first Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, tells us to “walk circumspectly.” Walking in the Bible is a way of speaking about the way that you live your life, so we could say he’s telling us to “live our lives circumspectly.” That’s another one of those older big words, and it basically means to be careful of what’s around you. So he says “Take great care in the way you live your lives,” and then explains how he means that.
Verse 15, “walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise.” “Take great care to live your lives wisely and not foolishly.” It’s easy to see what Paul means by both wise and foolish living because he explains it. Look back at the middle of chapter 4 starting in verse 17 (read through 20). A foolish person is the person who lives their lives ignorant and totally unmindful of the one true God. A foolish life is a wasted life. Paul calls it futile which is almost a synonym for a waste.
Now let’s look at the way most people live their lives. Television. 99% of households in the US have TV. That means that here, even the poor people have televisions. In fact we have an average of over 2 sets per house. In our homes, the television is on, but not necessarily watched, just the incessant noise of the things on for an average of over 6 hours a day or 42 hours a week 2,184 hours a year. 66% of Americans watch TV while eating. We spend an average of 2 months every year watching TV. Here’s another scary stat. The # of minutes that parents engage in meaningful conversation with their children (not brush your teeth, clean your room, go to bed) is about 3 ½ minutes per week. How many minutes do the kids watch TV a week? 1,680 minutes. That’s over 480 times more TV than meaningful conversation.
What about surfing the internet? People with computers and online connections spend anywhere between 14 and 30 hours a week on the internet. That’s 728-1560 hours a year and I believe that number is greater now than it was when these stats were published. You’re at work and bored? Surf the internet. You’re at home and bored? Surf the internet. You’re at home with your wife and kids? Surf the internet AND watch TV. I’ve seen couples that literally spend each night in front of the TV with laptops in their laps all evening long. I’ve done it too by the way, but I make it a point not to.
How about sleeping and eating? We average about 8 hours a night sleeping, but many of us get less than that. That comes to about 56 hours a week, and 2912 hours a year, which about 121 days out of a year. We spend about 1-2 hours a day eating depending on how long you linger at the table. Usually it’s closer to 1.
So, each average day we spend about 4 hours watching TV, about 2-4 hours on the internet, about 8 hours sleeping and about 8 hours working if you have a full-time job. That makes up 22-24 hours out of a 24 hour day. You have to eat. You have to sleep. You have to work. What out of these activities do you NOT have to do each day? That’s not to mention commute times, taking the kids to extracurricular activities, grocery shopping, running errands, and household chores that have to be done.
We literally fill our lives up with stuff don’t we? This is the average, and this is in America, a country that claims to be Christian for the most part. If we live this way, then we’re living just like everyone else. So here’s the question I’ll pose to you; Is this wise or foolish living? I won’t answer for you, I’ll let you make up your mind. Is this what Paul had in mind when he said (READ v. 15).
II. Wise Stewardship of Time Means Redeeming the Time (16)
Look again at verse 16 (READ). If we don’t want to waste the time God has entrusted to us, then we have to redeem it. In this context that means “making the best use” of the time. Making the best use of the time. Now, we’ve already seen what the average American, and this includes Christians or at least people who’d say they’re Christians, does with their God-given time. We absolutely fill it with all kinds of stuff.
Here’s the thing though. That does NOT mean that the things we do have no eternal, redeeming value. The typical Christian response or preacher’s response here is, “YOU NEED TO COME TO CHURCH MORE!!!” And they say that with a fire/brimstone look on their faces and in their voices. While gathering together each week as a body of believer is VERY important as we’ll see in a few weeks, that’s not necessarily the 1 solution to the problem of wasted time.
Here is the message we need to hear this morning: Redeeming the time, or making the best use of the time can include doing many of the things we’re already doing, but doing them in a way that glorifies and magnifies Jesus. Don’t stop taking your kids to football practice so they can replace that with door to door evangelism. Instead, teach them that football practice is a time not only to be better football players, but to make Jesus look great through them. This goes for parents too. At little league baseball games the most embarrassing things tend to happen. Otherwise normal parents turn into raging maniacs! Yelling at the kids, yelling at the coaches, yelling at the part-time non-professional refs. That is how to waste your time.
Instead, use the time spent at the game to magnify Christ by the way you treat others you’re around. Use it as an opportunity to engage people and pray for the opportunity to share the Gospel. Grocery stores. Is there anything redeeming about time spent buying food? YES. It happens in the way you stand in line. In the smile on your face to the busy, and very unprofessional single parent working two jobs to support her children at home, and maybe isn’t the rosiest person on the earth at all times b/c she’d rather have a husband and a be home taking care of her kids instead of scanning your Doritos, Ice Cream, and Hamburger Meat. Make her day. Redeem your time. Treat her as if she were Jesus child, and not a slow cashier.
At the restaurant. Oh boy, my glass has been empty for 2 minutes! His tip just went down ½ a percent. What’s the minimum I can get away with tipping this college student working his way through school? My bill is 20 bucks. I’ll leave a dollar. Redeem the time. Be Jesus to the people at the restaurant. Your neighbor. His trees have grown over the property line and now your petunias aren’t getting enough sunlight! What do you do? This year if you want to waste you life and waste your God-given time, then march over to his house, bang on his door and demand that he get out and cut his trees! That’ll show him what you stand for!
I could keep going. The point is that we don’t give up life to be better stewards of God’s time. We use God’s time and the life He’s given us as opportunities to magnify Him. What about the wasted time watching TV, surfing the internet, or whatever it may be? Be wise as Paul says here. Don’t be the average, beat the average. If you spend more time on being entertained than you do on the things of God, you are not making the best use of the time. Shave time off the entertainment. I got an idea. If 3.5 minutes is the average meaningful conversation between a parent and a child, why not bump it up to 3.5 hours a week!? Stop letting Barney, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, The Wiggles, and whoever other dreadful TV show babysit your kids and talk to them. Teach them. Redeem the time. Same goes for your spouse, your parents, your grandparents, and your friends. I could still keep going but I won’t.
III. The All Important Reason
Besides being good stewards of our God given time, we are called to impact a world that is evil. I researched a lot about the last 100 years this week preparing for this sermon to demonstrate the evil world we live in today. Look at the end of verse 16 (READ). The days are evil. Paul said that about his day, as a Roman Jewish Christian living in the 1st century. A place where Jews and Christians were burned alive, torn apart, sawn in two, strung up on crosses, fed to lions, blamed for disasters and chased out of town, entertainment like wrestling today except the end was deadlier and bloodier. The days WERE certainly evil. What about today?
We have to redeem the time, make the best use of the time, not waste the time, b/c today is just as evil. Did you know that in the 20th century, more than a 100 million people were killed in wars and by dictators? Did you know that genocide, which is killing your own people, and so-called ethnic cleansing claimed millions of lives last century. Did you know that from 1973-1998 over 38 million unborn babies were killed? The newest fad in horror movies is gratuitous, purposeless, torture, violence, and killing, and we see the movies in droves. A man walked into an Amish school and killed children and adults. A man walked into a church a few weeks back and started shooting. Again I could go on.
While we are spending our time watching TV, playing video games, surfing the internet, and going to soccer practice, the world around us is dying and going to hell. The days are evil and they always have been. There’s just more people now than their used to be. More information. More sources of violence, sex, and immorality to choose from than in the past, and in the midst of that we come to church, feel very religious, and then go home and live life whatever way we feel like living.
There’s a saying that “Nero fiddled, while Rome burned.” Are christians today little Neros? We play the fiddle and dance like nothing is wrong while the world burns to the ground? What is more tragic than wasting your life by wasting your time Christian brothers and sisters? What are you gonna do about it? Paul’s answer was redeem the time by living wisely and then look at verse 17 (READ). Understanding the will of God for His people.
Do you know what His will is for us? Paul goes on to tell us even as he’s already detailed it pretty clearly. A wise Christian is filled with the Holy Spirit. I’ll save that sermon for another day.
Conclusion
Examine your life. We’ve said, or I hope you’ve said, “I will not waste my life this year.” How about this? Start with the time. The God-given time He has made you a manager of. How long do you have? 2 days? 2 year? 50 years? It doesn’t matter. No matter how much time you have left, you have time right now to start making the best use of your time.
(WRAP UP AND INVITATION)
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