Wisdom & Time Part II

Transcript

Well, last week we as Jared mentioned, we looked at Psalm 90 and we also considered the background of Psalm 90, which I believe to be in Numbers chapter 20. It’s those incidents that took place in Moses’ life when his sister Miriam died. He sinned against the Lord and striking the rock when God told him to speak to the rock, which meant that Moses wouldn’t be allowed to enter into the promised land. Then later in that same year, Aaron dies and then actually at the very end of that year, Moses himself dies and God buries him. And Moses is looking that part of the lot of his history. He writes the psalm the song Psalm 90 which deals with us with the with the shortness of our life faith that talks about how we are to number our days that we may present to God a heart of wisdom.

But the whole psalm is a prayer to God. It’s a song and it’s a prayer to God. And among that verse 12 is teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom. That math of numbering our days. James Boice, the preacher James Boice years ago said that that’s the hardest math there is, the math of numbering our days. And you know, the point of that isn’t that we figure how many how many days we have left, counting each day that we might have left. The point is is that of the days we have left, we make each day count for something worthwhile. And that’s not an easy thing to do in this world. It’s not easy at all. It is probably as Boice said the most difficult math in the world. And it’s not something that we naturally know how to do. That’s why in the prayer that Moses prayed, he asked God to teach us this math, to teach us how to number our days, that we may present to God a heart of wisdom.

The Context of Ephesians

Well, today, this morning, our purpose is to think more deeply about this difficult math of numbering our days. And to do that, I want us to consider a passage in the New Testament from Ephesians. And we’re going to focus on verse 16 this morning. And particularly the word redeem. It’s the word redeem in the King James. But I want to read this passage in context and we’ll consider it within the context of the book of Ephesians and help us to think a little more deeply about what it is, how we’re to be living our life and what it means to number our days to to make our time count. So, I’m going to I’m going to jump in and read beginning in verse 11, and I’ll read through read into the context of verse 16. Ephesians chapter 5:11. This is God’s holy inerrant word.

“Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them, for it’s disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. But all things become visible when they’re exposed by the light. For everything that becomes visible is light. For this reason, it says, ‘Awake sleeper and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’ Therefore, be careful how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil. So then, don’t be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is…”

and I’ll stop reading there. It comes within the context of the whole book, but our focus this morning is on verse 16. Redeem the time because the days are evil. Let me ask God to bless his holy word to us.

Opening Prayer

Father, we thank you again for your kindness and grace and allowing us to gather, to worship, to read from your word, to hear it read, to meditate on the pages of your scripture. And Lord, again, we miss all those who are not here this morning, who are away because of sicknesses and illnesses. We ask, Father, for your grace again for them that their day, though they are not well, Father, strengthen their bodies and bless them. And may even this time of testing be a time where they are a means of grace and sanctification for them. Thank you, Lord, for your kindness and giving us this word this morning. Help us, Lord, to understand what it means to redeem the time because the days are evil. I pray, Father, that every one of us will understand what those phrases mean as we leave this morning. We ask your kind grace and blessing in Jesus name. Amen.

The Meaning of “Redeem”

Well, the single verse that I want to focus our attention on is verse 16. Redeem the time because the days are evil. And if there’s a single word I would like for us to think about, it’s that word redeem. It’s the word redeem. It’s a word that you I like it better than in my in the translation that I normally use. It explains the meaning and it’s absolutely accurate. But it’s not as good in my opinion. Verse 16 in my my translation is “make the most of your time because the days are evil.” Well, that’s exactly what it means. It means make the most of your time. But the King James translates it more literally by using the word redeem. And that word redeem causes us to think about it a little more deeply and come to an understanding of it a little better when we think of it in that way.

Because the word redeem, you know what the word redeem means? Every every every one of us probably certainly most of you ladies when you go shopping, don’t you sometimes occasionally clip coupons and when you get there, don’t you redeem those coupons for something? Or you might remember the old green stamps and the things and going to the redemption center and redeeming all those things that you collected. Well, you you redeem a dollar when you spend it and it’s not worth much in itself but it’s a symbol of something and it’s something that you can use to purchase something. That’s the idea. It’s a the term comes right out of the marketplace. And it’s describing making transactions in a marketplace. It’s a very important word biblically and it’s the word that Paul chose to use when he’s the idea when when he when he used when he wrote these words. The Greek word is the word of redemption, the idea of redeeming time. And so that’s a that’s an interesting thing.

The Flea Market of Life

So what I want to do now is something that I’ve done before. I’ve preached on this topic probably three or four times in the past 10 years. And at least two of those times I’ve used an illustration. I don’t like repeating illustrations as a rule. But this one’s important and I think it’s worth repeating. So if you’ve heard this before, well, I think we’ll all benefit from hearing it again. So I’m I’m just going to go ahead and do it. It’s kind of a fanciful story in a way, but imagine that it’s a Saturday and you’ve just drove out of town. You had an errand that just took you just out of town and Saturday afternoon and your on your way back and you’ve got some time on your hands. So as you drive along, you notice a sign that says Flea Market and you’ve seen the sign before. You’ve seen that sign. And so you turn in there this time because you know you have some time. You curious about it. You didn’t know what it was about. So you’re going to pull up there and see what’s what’s what’s for sale at this flea market.

And so you as you you walk up to this place, you know, it’s a little different. There’s a lot of people there. It’s a very popular place and it’s a pretty big market. They have all kinds of things. And there’s a large sign there as you walk up and the sign says, “Every item $1, cash only, all sales final.” You think, “Well, that’s interesting.” And you assume, “Well, a dollar. That’s not much. And you think, well, that must be the junk tables, of course. And so you you ask the as you go in, you’re greeted by the the proprietors running the place, and you say, “So so that’s just for these tables, the dollar.” He says, “No. Oh, no. Everything everything that’s here, the price is a dollar. It doesn’t matter what it is. Cost you a dollar.”

So, okay, you don’t you’re kind of skeptical. You don’t know, but you start looking around and you look at the first table and it’s the usual things that you would expect to see there. You know, the plastic yard gnomes and the pink flamingos and the chipped coffee cups and a stack of those fuzzy velvet Elvis paintings and all all of these kinds of things there. And you notice a lot of people around that table. They’re very interested in the stuff and you’re, you know, you’ve always kind of admired those velvet Elvis paintings and so you’re looking at one of them, but then your eye catches something off on another table and you you walk over there and behind a stack of old magazines is a violin case. And so you open it up and you look at that violin. It’s beautiful aged wood, obviously handmade. And you look inside it and it says Cremona 1720 and you think, could that be could could that actually be a Stradivarius?

And so you look at the violin case box and you say, “What what’s the price of this?” It’s a dollar. It’s a dollar.

And so, you know, you you keep looking around. And so, next to a a pile of fidget spinners, you notice a little book. And you pull out that book and you open it up and it’s a first edition C.S. Lewis signed by the author and again price is a dollar and next to a broken toaster there’s a diamond ring there’s all sorts of things and suddenly you begin to think wonder if I have any money and you open your pocketbook up and you you have a few dollars you don’t keep cash with you normally So then you have a problem. What what are you going to spend your money on? You have all these choices. So many things. You look around and you notice that that stack of velvet Elvises are beginning to disappear. Lots of people are grabbing those. Maybe you should take one of those. And so you have to make some choices. Yeah. The costs are identical. And yet the values are so different.

You know, if you were if you were there, let’s say you’re there at that marketplace and you have $24 to spend, what would you spend your money on? Would you buy the pink flamingo or the Stradivarius that will sing for centuries? You know, would you buy the fidget spinner or the diamond ring? The velvet Elvis or an original Vermeer, what would you spend your money on? It’s an interesting problem, isn’t it? It’s interesting and it’s fanciful, isn’t it? That’s that’s a scene from the Twilight Zone. We don’t live in that world, do we? And yet we do. Every day of our life, we shop at that marketplace. Every day of our life, we make those kinds of choices with the resources we have and the resource isn’t $24, it’s 24 hours. The most precious thing that you have in your life is the time that God has given you. And you can spend it.

You can spend it on something that is incredibly worthwhile or you can spend it on something that is not worth anything. We come to this passage in Ephesians 5:16. And when we look at this, Paul says we are to redeem. We’re to purchase, make the right choices with our time because the days are evil.

Why the Days are Evil

I want to just take a minute to talk about the reason that we are to be so careful with the time we spend is because the days are described as evil. In the book of Ephesians, there’s several verses in Ephesians that talk about the evilness of our times. Uh it tells us for example in chapter 2 and verse two that that the Christ the the Christian life is not walking according to the course of this world. That’s the way you lived before. Living according to the course of this world. And it says according to the prince of the power of the air. There’s a spiritual dominion that controls the culture, the world around us. There’s spiritual entities that influence things. We, you know, I’m I’m I’m not much for conspiracy theories. There’s all sorts of people who look at conspiracies and talk about the world order and who’s controlling everything. I I know though who’s controlling everything in this world. It is Satan has his world system and everything in this world works against the the tide is flowing against pleasing God, pulling us away from him. That’s the world we live in. That’s why the marketplace is broad and there’s so many things to purchase. We need to be careful in how we spend.

Paul pulls the curtain back in chapter 6 and 6:12 and he says that the struggle is against world forces of this darkness, spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places. The days are evil because the prince of the power of the air makes that spiritual air that for breathing toxic. So we need to be careful. We need to be careful in what we choose in with the time we spend. Um and there’s lots of other points that he makes in chapter 4 17 to 19. He warns that we’re not to live our life. That is it’s the walk. The word walk means the way we live our life. Paul says don’t walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their mind. That’s really key passage in this regard. Being darkened in their understanding. You see in this world, everyone in our culture and in this so many people in our culture, the average person in our culture has no real purpose. They have very little purpose in this life. They live pretty much for themselves and for the pleasures that they seek. Maybe some of them live for someone else, you know, their family or the person that they love, but they have very little purpose and not much hope beyond this life. And so the things that they do are futile. They’re pointless. They live in the futility of their mind. We’re not to live that way. We’re not to live our lives that way because we are children of light. We have purpose in this world. And as we live our lives, we’re to live according to the God-given purposes that God has given us. We’re to live with purpose. What a difference purpose makes or it should make in the choices we make in a day.

And prior to verse 16, he talks about that darkness. Paul talks about what makes the days evil, you know, immorality, impurity, greed, filthiness, and talk. And then verse 12, he says it’s disgraceful even to to talk about the things that people do in secret. We live in a dark world in so many ways and the act and it’s actually hostility to Christianity. That’s why in chapter six he says the days are evil and it’s found in Ephesians 6:13 and he tells us for that reason we’re to put on spiritual armor in that section. So I thought I would just mention those things. That’s that’s the reason why that’s what it means that phrase in the second part of this the purpose of make of redeeming a time is because these days are evil. We live in difficult times and a time Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. And he came for the purpose of redeeming us, purchasing us out of this sinful time that we’re living in, this evil day. The purpose of Christ’s coming is because we live in such dark times and to save us out of that.

Insights from Jonathan Edwards

So, we have we have all of that. So, here’s some reasons. And I’m gonna in the next just few minutes I want to talk about I’m going to go back and I’m going to share with you some ideas about this verse that came from another preacher. He lived in the 17 the I guess he lived in the 18th century in the 1700s and his name was Jonathan Edwards and he wrote a really interesting sermon on that text and he has several thoughts that are so important that I couldn’t do better than to share some of them with you. And one of the things that he talked about was the reason why time is so precious. We need to we need to recognize that when we spend the our time, we’re spending the most precious thing that we have. And he says the first reason that you know that time is precious is because the time you spend right now affects your eternal destiny as a Christian. You’re saved. You’re going to heaven. But the time, the way you invest your time will influence your eternal outcome. You will have blessings because of time spent well that glorifies God and blesses his people. Or you will have eternal emptiness, eternal lack. You won’t have the blessing. If if that time is not invested well, your time is so precious because it has eternal consequences. Our eternal welfare and for people in general, well, the eternal consequences are extreme. It means heaven or hell and simply how we and the choices that we make. How we spend our time and the choices that we make as we spend our time. Let me put it that way.

Another reason that time is precious is because it’s limited. It’s very brief. Job said, “When a few years are passed, I shall go the way of no return.” That was true for Job and it’s true for every one of us. A few years, not too long, and we go the way we’re where we’re not coming back. In chapter nine of Job and verses 25 and 26, he said, “Now my days are swifter than a runner. They flee away. They see no good. They slip away like a reedboat. Like an eagle that swoops on its prey.” Now, that’s quick. If you’ve ever seen an eagle come down for a fish or for some prey, you know how swiftly it drops. He says that’s what your life is like. It passes so quickly. Tells us the same thing in the New Testament. James 4:14. You don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow. Life is uncertain. It’s brief and it’s uncertain. He says, “You’re just a vapor that pierce for a little while and then it vanishes away.” We can’t presume upon the time. Young people very often think that their time is unlimited. They think that I’ve got all this time and I can live for myself right now and I’m I’ll I’ll choose to serve the Lord later on my life, but right now I’m living for me. Well, life is uncertain. James says, “You don’t know what tomorrow will bring. You don’t know what you’ll be capable of tomorrow. None of us do. You don’t know if you’ll have a tomorrow in this world. It’s uncertain. Life is precious and it’s valuable because you can’t count on it. You don’t know how much you have.

And it’s incontrovertible. It’s like that sign at the market that says, “All sales final.” You make your purchase with your time and it’s done forever. That that’s that time spent is gone and you’re never getting it back again. Whatever you purchased with it, whatever you spent it on, that’s all there is. We need to reflect on this. It’s good to examine ourselves and see how we’re spending our time to consider whether we’re wasting our lives or whether we’re making spiritual improvements with our day, whether we’re glorifying God with our time or whether we’re just using it for our own empty pleasures.

Wasting vs. Improving Time

One of the things that Edwards did in his sermon was he talked about the ways time is wasted. I thought that was interesting. He says you can waste time by being idle. He all he reinforced everything that he said with lots of scripture. And when he talked about the idle, those who spend time doing nothing particularly beneficial for their soul or their family or society, he quoted Proverbs 19:15, “An idle soul shall suffer hunger.” In Proverbs 23:21, “Drowsiness shall clothe the man with rags.” In Proverbs 14:23, “All labor There’s profit, but the talk of the lips tends only to poverty.” A lot of us talk a pretty good talk about all the things we’re going to do and we make our plans. I love to plan things and sometimes I actually carry out some of them. The talk is nothing. The planning is worthless if that’s all it is. It’s in the carrying out in the expenditure of the time to secure the thing that there there can be value. So there’s the idle who waste their time. There’s the wicked who not only waste their time, they actually use time to work ill purpose. They they increase their eternal misery by the wicked things that they do. And then there’s the worldly people who do work who who labor but they labor in such a way as to gain for themselves and their focus is completely on themselves. They want they want the stuff of this world that the temporal things of this world and they’re spending their whole life to get more and more of this world than the stuff in this world.

When he was talking about that he mentioned Ephesians 4:28 that tell it’s it’s that it’s the instruction to the thief the person who steals. Let the person who steals steal no more but rather that he should labor working with his hands the thing that is good so that we may have to give to him that has need. And he makes that application to all of us because the second part of that verse tells us what work is to be about. When you work, of course, you mo, we all work. When we work, we want to work in order to gain the necessities of life for ourselves and our family. That’s that’s certainly true. But in the work we do, we bless other people. Work produces something that is if if you’re going to, you know, that has value and it meets a need that somebody has. A baker who makes his living baking , you know, answers people’s prayer when they pray for their daily bread. God uses that person and the work is a blessing. It’s a benefit. Work should be done. When you’re thinking about your work, you should be thinking about who is going to be blessed by the thing that I’m doing. And your focus really should be on the service to the other people even more than of the means of provision for your own self or family. we’re to we’re to be improving our time.

Accountable to God

And before I run out of time this morning, let me let me just look at a couple a few of those. You know, we’re accountable to God and we should keep that in mind. Everything that we do in this life, every deed we do, we’ll give an account for. Uh tells Jesus the Lord heard Jesus said in Matthew 12, “Every idle word which men speak, they shall give account in the day of judgment.” That’s an interesting thing to think about. So, we ought to give great consideration in what we’re doing with our day and with our minutes and with our time. We need to be diligent. We need to be have a perspective that that we need to make delivery most of each day that we have because we because so much of our time we’ve already wasted. We need to make careful use of what we have before us.

And then there’s some advice for improving time. Psalm 119 verse 60 said, “I made haste and I delayed not to keep thy commandment.” We need to make sure that we’re not procrastinating our time away. We need to not push it away to seek the Lord. Isaiah 55:6, while he may be found, call upon him while while he’s near. And 2 Corinthians 6:2, at the acceptable time I listen to you, and on the day of salvation I helped you, God says, “Behold, now’s the acceptable time. Behold, now is the day of salvation.” For many who put off their salvation or their saving work that they do, sanctification, the ministry to God. Today is the is the day when we act on it for ourselves and for others.

He um he called attention to certain certain times that we should value. We should value our times that we can worship God. That should holy times together. Times when we spend time devoted to the Lord in private, such as our Bible reading time, which is a good thing to be doing with part of our time, and times that we spend in prayer. Those are times that we should would take special care with. And he said youth in particular should value their time. He called attention to the youth because they are so apt to throw so much of it away. Hey, they think they have going to live forever.

The Value of Leisure

And then then also he talked about leisure time being so important. He didn’t say don’t spend any time and leisure time. He said give good thought to your leisure time and make it worthwhile. Now that’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. What do we do when our leisure moments. Well, we can so easily waste hours, can’t we? Or we could spend that time doing something that could be constructive. You know, if you have any gifts at all, I mean, whatever your gifts are, and I don’t know whe they’re all varied, God gives varied gifts to people, and that it’s what makes up the beauty of the church. But your giftedness is something that you usually enjoy. If you’re gifted with music and you spend leisure time cultivating that gift, that’s a very productive means of using of your time and it’s something that you could it could be enjoyable and restful for you. It might be work for you, but it could be enjoyable and restful to you. Almost anything that you do, I I like to, you know, one of my hobbies is to do woodworking.

Now I like to do woodworking and you how does something like that have any value? Well, it can have value in a couple of ways. One way it can have value is that if I if I study deeply for instance in the morning and I need a break, I can go do some woodworking and as I do that my mind thinks about those things that I was studying in a different way and it’s a restful thing to me. So I get the rest of that and Also, I like to make things for people. Sometimes often grandkids, the little things, toys, and various things. And when when you do that, you’re thinking about them real often. As you’re making this thing, you think about them, you pray for them. Uh you spend time, you know, the time is worthwhile. It’s it’s something that could be it’s purely it’s purely recreational for me, but it’s something that could be worthwhile. If you get older, like I’m older, Then doing things to keeps your mind working can be productive. Just doing things to keep your skills up and being able to be productive with your time. Or you could waste that time. You could you can sit down and you can absolutely wall that time away and it be absolutely worthless.

We need to be careful how we redeem our time. So that’s the that’s the market of life. Everything costs the same. Spending spending an hour scrolling, you know, on X or Instagram and worrying about all the bad news that you’re looking at. Spending an hour there cost you 60 minutes. Spending an hour reading God’s word or in deep prayer cost you 60 minutes. Everything costs the same. The values are different. The velvet Elvis activities of life, the mindless entertainment, the worry, the trivial arguments that we get into. It costs the same as the Stradivarius moments. Building a legacy, loving your family, seeking God, leaving something worthwhile for someone else. cost the same. We need to redeem the time because the cost is fixed and the values are very different. We need to sp quit spending our limited currency on those plastic gnomes of the world and begin to consider the eternal glory that we can be investing in. 1 John 2:17 says, “The world is passing away and also its lust, but the one who does the will of God lives forever.”

I’m going to close with that and pray for us. We do have communion this morning. I know I went a little late. I’m sorry. I didn’t plan for that very well, did I? But maybe I can improve on my use of time next time. Let me pray for us and then we’ll share the Lord’s table.

Closing Prayer

Father, we are so grateful that you give us time. You give us time in this world and yet we recognize that the time is coming when we will all face judgment with before you. We thank you, Lord, that you’ve made provision for that through our Savior, the Lord Jesus, who came for a purpose, for redemption, not just his time, but his very life. Father, he his he experienced and gave up glory in order to give his life for us on a cross to purchase us for himself. And father, we Thank you that faith in him and his work brings us into a perfect relationship with you. We ask Lord for your grace this morning as we reflect on what he has done for us. Bless the elements as they’re passed this morning as we receive them. The bread that symbolizes Jesus’ body broken, the payment for our sin, his blood which washes away our sin. Father, we thank you for his sacrifice and we ask Lord that as we worship with by participating in this service that you would receive our worship and that we would be edified and built up in faith. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen.