Preached 1/17/10

Stewardship of Time

Preached by Dr. Paul R. Smith

West Side Presbyterian Church

Contact: office@wspc.org

24/7

Where Have All the Hours Gone?

[Ecclesiastes 3:1-13]

Prayer for Illumination - Father, I do ask that you would give me your words to say, that you would enlighten our minds, that you would quicken our spirits, and that you would strengthen us, body, mind, and spirit that we might be conformed to the image of your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ, and become the persons you have created us to be. We pray it in the name of Jesus, AMEN.

Message

I’m going to share my opinion with you. (I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you.) But it seems to me that any society which uses so frequently the term “24/7” is in serious trouble. When I was a kid (you’ve heard this before) I used to have to think up things to do! Boy, does that tell you how long it’s been since I was a kid! I had time to construct a miniature world of rivers and trees and bridges and dams and boats as I lay on my stomach, making sure the water from the garden hose meandered past every tomato plant in my mother’s garden. I had time to lie on my back in the prairie grass and watch my kite explore the lacy summer clouds. I did have to clean my room, and vacuum the carpet, and shake the rugs, and mow the lawn, and help with the dishes, and sweep the garage, and occasionally wash the car, as well as water the garden; but I also had time to do my homework, and play sports, and join the band, and go hiking or biking or fishing, and even learn how to bake cookies!

But golly, “the times, they are a-changing,” aren’t they? As Pete Seeger would probably write today: “Where Have All the Hours Gone?” . . . And it wouldn’t be “long time passing,” it would be “short time passing”! Wow, as Yogi Berra would probably say: kids are so busy today they don’t have time for anything! Do you ever feel like you are so busy you don’t have time for anything? We say it all the time, don’t we? “There just isn’t enough time in a day to do everything I need to do.” Of course, the last time I checked there were still 24 hours in each of my days, likely the same as yours and President Obama’s. There are 24 hours a day, . . . well, 23 hours when the government gets involved and moves us up to Daylight Saving Time, but we do get that one back in the fall. (They don’t give us any interest on the hour they’ve stolen, but we do get it back.)

We complain to each other that time just flies past these days, but of course nobody sped up the clock. Seconds, minutes, hours, and days are measured precisely the same today as they always have been. In fact, as I understand it, the earth has slowed it’s rotation slightly during the history of the human race, so if anything, our days must be a nanosecond longer than our ancestors’ days.

No, the problem is not time. We know that, really. The problem is we’re just too darn busy. Any society which uses that phrase “24/7” is too busy. We face a plague of busyness because we are trying to cram more and more things into the same 24 hour bucket, and of course it won’t hold everything – it’s the same size as it always was. Our problem is not time; our problem is too many options – as the futurist Alvin Toffler warned us several decades ago. Too many options and not enough discernment.

Do you remember when the Soviet bloc came apart back in the ‘90s and immigrants got their first exposure to American grocery stores? Remember that? Back in Russia they were happy if their local grocery had any bread or milk at all. Then they got here and there were 27 different kinds of bread and literally thousands of items lined up on the shelves, and they were paralyzed by what Toffler called “over choice.”

But you and I are not paralyzed in a grocery store. And the reason is that you know what you need and you know how much money you have, so you find the important and necessary things and you buy them. Now when you go to Costco, and I love Costco, you tend to go beyond what you need and what you can afford because there are so many choices, and there you are, getting into the problem we have with time, aren’t you? Trying to buy everything you desire. But you cannot buy everything in the store.

I would submit to you that we – all of us – are simply trying to do too much in the time available to us. Now that is not a profound insight, but if we take the time to consider it, it turns out to be one of the most important things we can consider today. Most of us who are parents are trying to make our children do too much as well. Christians may be particularly vulnerable because we are trying to be responsible. We take our work very seriously – we want to be a good witness by doing our job better and more thoroughly than anyone else. We also take our families seriously and try to do as many good things with our families as possible. And of course we take our faith seriously and put many hours a week into church activities which is not even on our neighbor’s radar! And frankly we feel a responsibility to the community as well, so we want to give time to the school and the public library and maybe serve on a community board or coach a community soccer team – all commendable and worthwhile things. But we just cannot do them all. Or at least not at the same time.

God’s Word offers us a perspective on this dilemma which, if we were to take it seriously, could enable us to escape what we call the tyranny of time, but what is really the tyranny of over-commitment. More importantly, it could seriously transform our lives for the better. It really could.

To understand it, we must first have a clearer understanding of just what time really is. Time is a unique resource. We often compare it to money and suggest that we must spend it wisely. But really it is quite unlike money in most ways. Time cannot be saved. It can’t be accumulated or stockpiled for future use. It must be spent as it is received. The moment we receive a moment, it is whisked away again. And it will be received at the same rate by every person in the world – one minute at a time. You cannot speed it up and you cannot slow it down. You cannot turn it off, and you cannot turn it on. You cannot call for a “time out.” You must spend that minute as it comes to you. The only question will be whether you have spent it well or poorly. No matter how hard you work, or how resourceful or how clever you are, you will never have more time to spend than the next person. Time is, for us, a limited resource. And it is irretrievable. Once it is spent, it is gone forever. It cannot be salvaged or reused.

And this is the first thing the Bible tells us about time. Psalm 90 was one of the earliest Psalms. It is attributed to Moses, a man who, you will remember, found himself so busy that he needed a comprehensive lesson in time-management from his father-in-law, Jethro. One of the most revealing organizational charts I’ve seen lists about fifty different activities for leading the children of Israel in the wilderness, and the person responsible each time is Moses. His father-in-law says, That won’t work; you have to improve the way you manage your time. What Moses reminds us here is that we will have a limited amount of time in our lives.

Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, [before all time] from ever-lasting to everlasting you are God ... a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by [there’s time speeding past, isn’t it?], or like a watch in the night. ... The length of our days is seventy years – or eighty, if we have the strength; yet ... they quickly pass away. ... So teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.[fr. Psalm 90]

We need to begin, Moses is saying, by recognizing that we have a limited amount of hours to spend. The average person will have 70 or 80 years. A few will have more, many will have less, but remember that it’s limited. That is what he’s telling us here, so you need to consider seriously how those days and years are being spent. You will eventually run out of time. How will you have been spending it? “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Now all of us instinctively know this. And that is our problem. “Don’t remind us,” we say. “Now I feel more guilty than ever. I have to use my limited time more efficiently, I know. I have to get as much done as possible in this very limited time.”

But listen carefully. That is not what the Bible is saying. The Bible never asks us to get busier or even necessarily to become super efficient. We are the ones so greatly concerned about efficiency. In fact, listen to these revealing verses from Psalm 39.

Show me, O LORD, my life’s end and the number of my days [Psalm 139, our Call to Worship, said God knew every one of them before the first one began]; let me know how fleeting is my life. 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. Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro: He bustles about, but only in vain; . . . . But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.

Did you hear that? “He bustles about, but only in vain.” He’s not asking us to bustle about. He’s not asking us to get busier. He is asking us to think more deeply about the purpose of our life. He’s asking us to look at Him. Remember Psalm 127?

Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat – for he grants sleep to those he loves.

You’ve got time to sleep.

It seems to me that, contrary to our inclination to get busier and busier and do more and more, God is asking us to slow down and do more reflecting, and make sure we are spending our capital (in this case time) on the things which He knows to be the priorities for our lives.

You know, I have a confession to make this morning. I may be one of the world’s worst offenders here. And I am not covertly asking for your sympathy – “oh, the poor guy, he’s so busy, working so hard!” I cringe when you say that. I’m saying that I, perhaps like you, may have bought into the world’s value system here and ignored God’s! In the world, our value seems to be calculated by how productive we are. And by golly, I have spent my life trying to be productive.

But measuring our lives by our productivity is a very utilitarian approach, and I don’t see God as a utilitarian God. Here is the dictionary definition of utilitarianism: “a doctrine that the useful is the good and that the determining consideration of right conduct should be the usefulness of its consequences.” I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like God’s value system. Have you ever heard God saying that things are only good if they are useful? The world says that. That’s why we have rampant abortion and growing euthanasia. We throw things away if they are not useful anymore. But God seems to think that life is good because it is life – not because it is useful or productive.

Now I’m not saying that God is asking us not to be productive if we are able. In fact the Bible says, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” That’s pretty clear incentive for productivity. I’m just saying what Jesus said in our text last week, “life is more than food” if you get down to it. The question is not, “how productive are you,” but rather “have you figured out what life is all about?”

You know, if you stop and think about it, most of us who strive so diligently to be productive are doing it for the wrong reasons. We are doing it to prove our value, aren’t we? We want to justify our existence with our productivity. We want people to consider us important. Or else we are doing it because of our greed – we want to make more money so we can have more stuff. Maybe we are busy because we want to please others. Or maybe we keep busy so we have an excuse for not getting down to the really important and valuable things which are going to demand so much more of us – things like building significant and healthy relationships with our loved ones. You know that takes a lot of time. Is it important? Or things like really becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ as opposed to becoming a successful businessman or professional, or a popular athlete or performer. What are we putting our time into and what is our reason for doing it?

So God is saying to us, it’s true, you have a limited amount of time in your life. But I’m not asking you to run around frantically trying to keep busy. I’m asking you to use this greatest gift of time I have given you to learn what life is really all about, and then to throw yourself into it wholeheartedly. In the New Testament letter to the Ephesians and again to the Colossians, we are asked to “make the most of the time.” So we think that means to run faster and be more efficient. But the newer translations say it as it is written in your bulletin this morning from Ephesians 5, “Be very careful, then, how you live – not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity.” Please notice that this does not say we need to keep busy. In fact, keeping busy may very well keep us from making the most of every opportunity, might it not? What he is saying here is: Make every opportunity count for something valuable.

What is interesting is that we find here the key we have been looking for with regard to the use of our time. There are two words for “time” in the Greek New Testament. One is the word “chronos” which is the measurement of days and hours and years. The second is the word “kairos” which means, as it is translated here, “opportunity.” It means the appropriate time for something.

Now with that knowledge, look back with me at our original text this morning, that well-known passage from Ecclesiastes 3 about time. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament which Jesus and his disciples used, both of those words, chronos and kairos, are used. They are distinguished in the first verse, but after that, it is simply translated “time” in each subsequent verse. But what it’s saying, first of all, is “There is a time [and the word is chronos – in other words enough days, minutes, hours, years] for everything [which is truly important].” But then it says there is “a season [and this is the second word for time, kairos, there is a season, an opportunity, an appropriate time] for every activity under heaven.” We don’t have to do everything, and we certainly don’t have to try to do everything at once. There are seasons in our lives which will give us the opportunity for all the truly significant things. And there will be enough hours in your life for you to seize the appropriate opportunities to become the person God created you to be. That is what he’s telling us here.

Then follows that familiar list, and with each activity, the word translated “time” is in fact our second word, our much richer word for time, kairos, an appropriate time, an opportunity for each of these things. You will all have had the opportunity to be born, and likewise you will experience an appropriate time to die. There will be times when you should be planting and times when you should be uprooting. There will be occasions when the appropriate thing to do will be to kill, and others when the appropriate thing to do will be to heal. Sometimes you need to be tearing things down and sometimes building them up. When it is time to weep, you need to take time to weep, and when it is time to laugh, you need to laugh uproariously. When you encounter a loss, you need to take grieving seriously, but when it is time to dance, you need to dance with abandon, certainly not worrying about the clock for one worthless minute.

It’s like that for everything, he says. If you don’t have time to love, or to invest in relationships, something is seriously wrong with your priorities. And at the climax of the passage, with stunning relevance for the 21^st century, he says: and don’t let me hear any excuses about how hard you are working. “What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time.” Yes, our work is beautiful in it’s time. So is creating beautiful things. So is building a fire and settling down to read a good book. So is listening to fine music. So is wrestling with your grandchildren on the living room floor. So is getting up at dawn to begin the day in God’s Word, and so is finding a quiet spot to watch the sun go down. So is enjoying a round of golf with your friends. So is dropping everything and going downtown to serve a hot supper to the guys at the Union Gospel Mission. So is baking your own bread, or going to a great performance at the theater, or taking a hike in the mountains, or taking that tremendously significant time to just reflect. And don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about doing those important and appropriate things.

He concludes, “I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live [that brief span Moses spoke of]. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil – this is the gift of God.”

We were talking a few minutes ago about time as a gift from God, but of course what we are really talking about is life as a gift from God, are we not? – a gift which God wants us to enjoy. Time is nothing but the landscape of experience, as Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress described it, the landscape within which we live our lives. So we are not really talking about time. We are talking about life and how we live that life.

To me, life is simply a canvas on which we paint our life’s pictures. Do you think about your life that way? It doesn’t matter how large or how small it is, we can still paint a beautiful picture, can’t we? And it certainly does not matter how much we cram on the page. In fact, that is likely to be counter-productive, and quite unlikely to produce anything of great beauty or worth. What matters is the quality, the power, the passion, the beauty, the message of our lives on that canvas of time.

What we have just been describing is the business of life, the final point on our outlines this morning. And I want you to notice the slight, but not too subtle difference between the word “busyness” in our first point, “the plague of busyness,” and the word “business” in our last point, “the business of life”. Busyness is simply activity, as opposed to idleness. It may have some redeeming value, or it may be pointless. It’s just busy, that’s all. Business, on the other hand, as the dictionary defines it, is purposeful activity. The distinction should not be lost on us. Are you just staying active, running about here and there, after this and that, or have you thought seriously about why you are here, and begun to organize your life around real priorities which will shape you in the image of God? Busyness is a plague. But remember this, Jesus’ life was lived perfectly because as a young boy he realized that he should be about his Father’s business – purposeful activity, what God wanted him to be and to do.

Let me let you in on a simple secret. God knew from the start that we were going to be busy. Even before the Fall, we had a world we had been commissioned to care for. After the Fall, He said the job would get a lot tougher. But the simple key to move us from the plague of busyness to the delight of life is the Sabbath. I’m serious about this. This was God’s earliest gift – a time to step back from the busyness of life, and bask in God’s pleasure, to rearrange our priorities and make sure we are moving away from busyness and toward the business of life. A time to take inventory of our lives to see if we are truly doing the important things. It is a time to rest and be renewed, a time to reflect on what is right and true, and to savor what is good and beautiful. A time to seek God’s face, and ask Him when we ought to say “yes” and when we ought to say “no.” It is a time to consider God’s priorities and be sure we are equipped for the truly important opportunities we will encounter in each of our days.

Approaching life without a regular Sabbath is like trying to cut down a large tree with a dull, rusty saw. The job is easy and enjoyable if you take time to sharpen your saw. It is exhausting and discouraging and perhaps even impossible if you fail to take the time to restore your equipment. And most of us are living our lives frantically without sharpening our saws. The Sabbath is about sharpening our spirits, about getting ourselves tuned up for the business of life.

I would like to leave you this morning with two challenges. The first is to make it the highest priority of your life to refresh your spirit and restore your heart with both a daily and a weekly Sabbath; we must take time to sharpen our spirits if we are going to be about the business of life. Take a regular Sabbath – a time when your attention is focused entirely upon nurturing your relationship with your Creator. Morning devotions? Don’t leave home without them. The second challenge grows out of the first one. It is a challenge to stop and rethink what it is that God requires of you. If you are doing what God requires of you, God’s Word assures us, you will have the necessary time to do it. That’s the message of Ecclesiastes 3. God never wanted us to have to rush breathlessly through life. He certainly wants us to be diligent about the important things. But He wants us to savor the life He’s given us as a gift. He wants us to savor our relationships, and our work. He wants us to make the best of it, and He wants us to enjoy it.

Do you remember our reason for being? What have we learned is “the chief end [or purpose] of man”? Is it not to glorify God by our lives and to enjoy Him forever. A proper stewardship of our time and our opportunities may not make us the richest or most productive members of our community. But it will give us the deep satisfaction and the joy for which we were made, and for which our hearts long.

Closing prayer – Father, you want to give us so much, and we are not paying attention, because we are rushing about, gathering up all kinds of things we don’t need. I pray that you would help us to refocus our lives. It is not going to happen overnight I’m afraid. We are creatures of habit. These things are deeply ingrained. But I pray that you would help us to refocus our lives, to commit ourselves to that first simple step, to be sure that we are enjoying a Sabbath, a time to step back and to listen to your voice, and to let your voice rearrange our lives. I pray as well that we would begin to evaluate our priorities, that we would recognize that there are all kinds of things we are spending our time and our money on that we don’t need at all, in fact that complicate our lives, and deplete our resources and smother our joy. Help us instead to trust you, to pursue your priorities, and to find in that the reason for our being and the joy of our living. We pray this in your name, and we pray it for your sake as well as ours, AMEN.