LibertyChurch

Sermons

October 18, 2015

Redeeming Your Time

Dr. David J. Vaughan

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

Dedicated to Cindy Wilson

On rare occasions, I dedicate sermons to people, and I’ve only done it a few times, but today I did want to dedicate this sermon to my sister in the Lord, Cindy Wilson, who went to be with the Lord recently. [audio unclear] You may also have heard in the broader community that we kind of flow in to other people that passed away, both unexpectedly, both in their 50s. And of course, whenever someone passes away that you know, it causes you to be reflective on your own life, or or at least I certainly hope that it does. The great Elizabethan preacher and poet John Donne wrote a poem called “No Man Is an Island.” In that poem is a well-known line where he says, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” The point being, the bell is the funeral bell, and the point being that when someone passes away, it’s a loss to all of us. But I think also there’s a secondary meaning that is the bell tolls for us too, because all of us eventually will pass away. And so it is appropriate for us at times like this to reflect on our own lives and the value of the time that God has given us.

Redeeming Your Time

So this morning I wanted to speak briefly about redeeming your time. Notice I did not say redeeming the time. I said redeeming your time. And I’m just going to make a series of observations about life.

Life Is Uncertain

The first is this, that our lives here on earth are uncertain. They are uncertain. Look at Luke chapter 12, and we’ll be jumping around looking at different passages today. In Luke chapter 12, this is a well-known parable. And in many Bibles, the heading in this section is called the parable of the rich fool. Not the rich man or the rich farmer, but the rich fool. In this passage Jesus actually called the man a fool. Why? Well, let’s read it. Verse 16 of Luke 12. Then he spoke a parable to them saying, the ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself saying, what shall I do since I have no room to store my crops? Then he said, I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build greater. And there I will store all my crops and my goods, and I will say to my soul, soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, fool, this night your soul will be required of you. Then whose will those things be which you have provided? So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. The man was a fool because he thought he had many years ahead of him. And the fact of the matter was that at the very time that he was saying, I have many goods and I have many years ahead of me, God said, today is your day. And God took his soul. So he is a fool who can presume to know how many years he has ahead of him.

No one knows how long they’re going to live because our life is uncertain. We do not know how many days, months, or years the Lord is going to give us. The lesson of the parable here, of course, is that we should not presume that we have time because we don’t know that we have time. And there, there are many people who have heard the gospel and they’ve heard it many times and they say to themselves, yes, I’ll accept Jesus someday. Young people especially tend to do this. They say, well, when I, after I sow my wild oats, then I’ll settle down and I’ll accept Jesus someday when I’m older, like my old fogey parents, then I will settle down and accept Jesus, and yet they are cut down in their youth, because there’s no guarantee on the length of our life. Our life is uncertain. So he is a fool who presumes, that he will live a long life.

We Keep Death at Arm’s Length

I was having a conversation with Pastor Mike earlier, about how in our culture we are so uncomfortable talking about death, and how we keep death at an arm’s length. whereas years ago people couldn’t do that. Many, many women died of childbirth, many children died of childbirth, many children died from things today that would be cured by literally a couple of Tylenol. They died of fevers. Also, death was a common phenomenon. And people were exposed to it on a very personal level. I was reading about John Brown of Haddington, who’s a well-known Bible teacher and preacher. He got married, had eight kids, his wife died before he did, and six of his children died before he did. [audio unclear] When you read the biographies of people that lived before, say, 1900, that type of thing was very common. You’d read about people who lost half their family on a regular basis, very common phenomena. So people are exposed to death. We avoid it. We don’t like to talk about it. And so it takes on a very unrealistic characteristic. And yet it’s very common in Scripture to talk about death. Why? Because Jesus came to conquer death. death is real. So when you preach to a congregation today, you preach to unsaved people today, and you talk to them about being saved from death, they’re like, what? What are you talking about? My life’s going good. I have a good job. I got a good marriage. Everything’s well. They don’t need Jesus in the sense that they don’t need a new life coach. They don’t need five tips on how to be successful. They’re already successful. But when they’re standing on the brink of eternity, they most certainly do need Jesus. And it’s because we think, we do not think in light of eternity that people, many people are indifferent to the gospel. Now, where does the gospel thrive? Now where is the gospel thriving? Usually in cultures where death is common. See, look at the 1040 window. Still today, in our day, we have high maternal death rates, high infant death rates. We have high rates of death from diseases and things that are easily taken care of in our society because of modern medicine and modern sanitation. Death is very common there. So people understand they live in light of eternity, if you will, because of the reality of death. We must learn to remind ourselves, and I think this is an appropriate time to do so, of the uncertainty of our life. We have no guarantee. So the rich fool was preparing a barn when he should have been preparing his soul. So some of us are preparing, you know, the addition to our home and we’re preparing to buy the new car and we’re preparing all of these things, but are we preparing our souls? That’s the question. Because we do not know when God will call us to account.

Life Is Short

Second point, life is short. Life is short. Look at Psalm 102. We’ll look at a number of scriptures on this point, Psalm 102. Now when I say life is short, we have to understand that when you say something is long or something is short, or something is tall and something is short, you have some kind of comparison. There’s a ruler, if you will. There’s a rod of comparison. Well, okay. his life was long, but my life isn’t the measuring rod. It’s not the ruler, right? So what is the standard of comparison? When we say life is short, we’re saying it’s short because the standard of comparison is eternity. So whether you live to be 40 years, or you could live to be 400 years, God forbid. I mean, do you really want to be here for 400 years? So, either way, we would say life is short in light of eternity. That’s the standard of comparison. In Psalm 102, it says in verse 11, my days are like a shadow that lengthens and I wither away like grass, but You, O Lord, shall endure forever, and Your remembrance to all generations. So he compares his life to a shadow or to like grass that withers in a day because of the heat of the sun. James uses similar terminology. If you go to the book of James in chapter four, James says this, in James four he says, he’s talking, really James four is like a really good commentary on the parable, The Rich Fool, because he’s talking about those who are making all their business plans, all the big plans they have in the future. Verse 13, he says of chapter 4, “’Come now, you who say today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and buy and sell and make a profit. Whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow.’” There’s the uncertainty, right? For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. There is the shortness or the brevity of life. When we say life is short, we mean that it is short in light of eternity. These should bring us really much consolation because in this life as Christians, we’re called to discipline, we’re called to sacrifice, we’re called to endure shame for the name of Jesus. And yet, Paul calls our sufferings in this life a light affliction. And it’s light only in light of eternity. And he says, in light of the resurrection of Christ, he says, if in this life only we have hoped, then we are of all men most miserable, if in this life only. We have converted Christianity into a message of prosperity and happiness in this life only.

And we’ve forgotten about eternity. In this life we are called to sacrifice. In this life we’re called to take up the cross. In this life we may be called to poverty if that’s God’s calling for your life. anything we may endure in this life is light affliction in light of eternity, which lasts forever. So every one of our lives is uncertain, and every one of our lives is short in light of eternity.

Our Days Are Numbered

Third point, our days are numbered. Our days are numbered. Look at Psalm 39. Psalm 39 and verse 4. David says, Lord, make me to know my end and what is the measure of my days, that I may know how frail I am. Indeed, You have made my days as handbreadths and my age is as nothing before you. Certainly every man at his best state is but a vapor. Surely every man walks about like a shadow. Surely they busy themselves in vain. He heaps up riches, and he does not know who will gather them. Again this theme of life is short, life is uncertain, but there is an application here that the psalmist makes. In light of that, Lord teach me to measure or to number my days. Because God has numbered our days. We have only so many days on this life and we don’t know how many days God has given us. But He’s numbered them. And only so much time is allotted to each of us. For some it is longer than for others. But there is a number. There is a day that’s allotted to us. This also ought to give us consolation. As a matter of fact, it is the confidence that God has numbered our days which inspired many a martyr and many a missionary, because they know that no one can take their life until it is their time, because God has numbered their days, and their lives are in God’s hands. And so when God says it is our time, then and only then is it our time. So God has numbered our days, therefore we should learn to measure our days and realize that we have only so many. I was watching one of those TV shows where, you know, the opening scenes, obviously they find somebody dead and I’ve got to figure out who did it, you know. [audio unclear] He went crazy and he spent money on expensive cars and then planes and boats and all of this stuff. Because he had so much money he just, hey why not? $117 million, that’s a lot of money, right? Well, it’s because he had so much that he was frivolous with how he spent it. But when you have a little, well then you have to be frugal, right? Well the same thing applies to time that applies to money. See, we tend to think we have all this time because death is foreign to us. I don’t know if you’ve ever really tried to think about your own passing, but it’s very difficult to do in a way that motivates us to action. It’s very hard to do because death is unnatural, meaning it wasn’t part of God’s original design, not part of his original order. It will always, whether somebody lives to be old or not, it’s always unnatural. It’s the result of sin. And so, it’s very hard for us to grasp the reality, but the reality is our days are numbered. We’ve not won the lottery, folks. Now, we’re going to heaven, and we’re going to live forever there, but when it comes to this life, there is a number. You understand what I’m saying? and because we tend to think that we’ve won the lottery, meaning we’re just going to live here forever—what do we do? We waste our time. We spend it in unwise ways because we think we have an abundance of this thing this precious thing called time and so unfortunately we waste a lot of time so we must learn to measure our days in the light of the fact that God has numbered our days. Some of us have more than others. God knows, we don’t know, but we need to remind ourselves that no matter how many days the Lord has given us, at some point those days will be over. Those days will be over for each one of us.

Time Must Be Spent

So that leads to my fourth point. That is this, time must be spent. Time must be spent. We talk about time saving devices, but that’s really a misnomer. If there’s one thing you cannot save, it’s time. Now money you can save. If you make some money and you have extra, you can put it in the bank and it sits there and it’s not being spent. But tell me, how do you save time? Where do you put it? Where do you put time to where later you can go get that time and it’s going to make you live longer? You can’t save time. Time moves on. Time moves on. And so the question is, if we can’t save it, it must be spent. It has to be spent. Well if it has to be spent, well then we must understand the question then becomes, how are we spending our lives? How are we spending the time that God has given to each one of us?

Redeeming the Time

In Ephesians 5, if you want to turn there, Paul says this, he says in verse 8, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” That is, if you know the Lord Jesus, if you’re truly saved. Walk as children of light. For the fruit of the light is in all goodness, in righteousness, and truth, finding out or discerning what is acceptable to the Lord. And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of them, which are done by them in secret. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light. Therefore, he says, Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light. See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.“

So this phrase, redeem the time, as you probably know, can be translated, buy up the opportunities because the word redeem literally means some kind of exchange, often used in a purchase. So you redeem a coupon, if you will, and an exchange. So you have time, and how you use that time is a form of redemption. making an exchange for something in how you use your time. How you use your time is an activity in which you purchase something, and you can purchase something good, or you can purchase something bad, or you can purchase something relatively indifferent if you will. But the fact of the matter is, because time cannot be saved, it’s always being spent, always. And so we’re always making these exchanges. And so Paul is telling us, spend your time or redeem your time in such a way that it’s being used for good.

That it’s being used for good. That’s why he says in this text twice, basically discern what the Lord’s will is.

Know God’s will. Redeem the time. Know God’s will. Well, what’s the connection? Obviously, know God’s will so that you can redeem your time by doing the will of God.

Doing the will of God. You’ve heard the old line, you know, when someone’s on their deathbed, no one’s going to say, I wish I spent more time at the office, right? But there’s a lot of things that people are not going to say on their deathbed, like, I wish I had watched more football. Seriously. No one’s going to say, I wish I had spent more time in the garage tinkering with my hobbies. People don’t say those things because what happens in the face of eternity is we get a clarity of mind in which we understand that some things are really more valuable than others. Now I say this, but I don’t want you to think that it’s never appropriate to relax, never appropriate to watch a ball game or to just have fun. Recreation is a gift of God. God even commands us in his word to take a seventh of our time for worship and relaxation. And most of us don’t do that. Most of us give Him a couple of hours. So God understands the need for rest and recreation and things of that nature. I’m not arguing against that, or I’m not saying you should feel guilty. You want to relax later and watch a ballgame. That’s not the point. The point is that we engage in many activities in which our time is not really being appropriately exchanged. It’s really being wasted. We’re wasting a lot of time. And time, what is time but our life? If you waste your time, then you’re wasting your life. And someone came up to me at the luncheon for Cindy the other day and said, you know, after hearing everything that was said about Cindy and about her passion for the lost and the spiritual legacy she left because of the people she led to Christ, this person said to me, I realize I need to change some things in my life because that couldn’t be said about me. And they were right, but they were honest enough at that moment to admit it. So how about you? What determines our legacy is what we do with our time now, how we live our lives now.

Live Well, Not Merely Long

The goal of life is not to live long, it is to live well. It is to live well. And well as defined by the word of God, not by our culture. Because in our culture, the good life is the life of luxury, the life of prosperity, the life of self-indulgence. That’s the good life. But that’s not the godly life. God is calling us to live a life according to His will, according to his will. When we live well, then we leave a legacy. When we live well. I was thinking the other day, I was meditating on sin, and I was thinking, what’s the greatest sin? I didn’t really answer that question in my mind. Theologians debated it, but it made me think what’s the greatest virtue? I would assume the opposite of the greatest virtue would be the greatest sin. You know, you follow that logic? So what’s the greatest virtue? Well, I think the greatest virtue, according to Jesus, is to love God. Because he says the entire law, all the law and all the prophets, which means I’m summarizing all of God’s teaching in the Old Testament, can be summarized in two things. He says, to love God with all of our heart, mind, and soul, and then to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the sum of all the Law and the Prophets. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God first. That’s the greatest commandment. I believe Cindy did that. Now, you know, Cindy had her foibles and her sins like we all do. But I believe she loved the Lord Jesus. And I believe she demonstrated that in many ways in her life, one of those being her passion that other people would know the Christ that she knew. They would know the Christ that she knew. What loving God looks like may be different for each of us, but it certainly entails some things for all of us. You know, if we love the Lord, I think that means we’re going to be people that love His Word, people that love prayer, people that love worship. These are elementary things and yet many Christians who are supposed to be mature people drift away from these things and do not even practice the spiritual disciplines very well in their lives. That’s the foundation of our relationship with the Lord. We’re not going to love the Lord if we don’t know the Lord. And I mean know Him in a real way. But when we know the Lord and we love the Lord then that works its way out into other areas of our life. One of those being our desire to see other people come to Jesus Christ. I’m just going to say this and maybe offend you, but to me it’s shameful. I don’t have any other word that there are Christians that have known Christ for many years and have never ever really attempted to bring anybody to Jesus in a serious way. And I think the excuse in their heart is, well, I’m not an evangelist, that’s not my gift. That is just an excuse. It’s just an excuse. You don’t have to have the gift of evangelism to care about people. And if you know the Lord, if you love the Lord and you love your neighbor, you’ll care about your neighbor’s soul—people in your life, your siblings, your parents, maybe your own children aren’t saved, people at work, people you see on a regular basis. I mean, to live amongst people and never share the gospel with them, never pray for them to be saved, something is fundamentally flawed. I’m sorry, there’s no other way to say it. Something is wrong with someone who doesn’t care about someone’s eternal state.

A Heart for the Lost

You know, people write books about the church. I’ve got stacks of them. I don’t even hardly read any of that stuff anymore because I feel like they miss the point on so many things. [audio unclear] And people write things about the church in America. We need this thing and that thing and we need to do this and we need to be more culturally relevant and all of this stuff.

Some of it is good, but you know what? You don’t need another research team to figure out why the church in America isn’t growing. All you’ve got to do is look at the people and ask them, when’s the last time you witnessed to anybody about Jesus? And most people go, they couldn’t tell you, because they never opened their mouth for Christ. It’s true. Well, you know what? What did Paul say? “They can’t hear without a preacher.” Now God, you know, in His sovereign mercy, somehow reaches some people without anybody ever preaching to them. But you know, I’ve noticed a connection: the more people witness, the more people get saved. Why? Because God has designed it that way. And so, you know, to me that’s a hard problem. It’s a spiritual problem. And there are people that, a lot of Christians I know, mature Christians, never share their faith with anybody. They don’t even pray for unsaved people. And to me, that’s a fundamental problem. It’s not a good sign. It’s not a good sign of spiritual vitality when people don’t really care about the salvation of other people. And part of what it shows is a problem in terms of living in light of eternity. We’re not doing that very well, if you know what I’m saying. We’re thinking about this life, and we’re not living in light of the fact that our siblings and our neighbors and other people we know who aren’t saved, that they’re heading for a Christless eternity. And so if that’s true and if I know that, then what does that mean for how I live? You know, I think I shared this the other day, one of the services about Cindy, but when my last conversation with her, she only said she was concerned about a couple things. One, she said, the first thing she said before I could even ask her, she said, I’m not afraid to die. And she wasn’t afraid because she knew Jesus. And she said, I said, well, how can I pray for you? She said, I want you to pray that when people come to visit me, that I will be a good witness. And all the stories, many stories we heard about Cindy at the various services. So many people talked about her heart for the lost. And there were people, all of her siblings came to Christ because of her. And then they’ve led people to Christ. And then, so we see this spiritual legacy of someone’s life, who leads others to Christ, then they lead others to Christ, and then it multiplies. And so they’re not only a spiritual mother or father, they become a spiritual grandparent, a spiritual great-grandparent because of that. [audio unclear] He knew how to [audio unclear] close for each one of us. And we need to start living in light of that. That means we need to get our priorities straightened out, you know what I’m saying? And we need to start living in light of eternity, not in light of our personal wants and our personal comforts right here and now.

What Is God’s Will for You?

What is God’s will? What is God’s will for you? God has numbered your days and God has appointed for you, each one of you, good works to do on the earth. He has a calling for each one of you. And the question that each one of us has to ask in light of eternity is, am I fulfilling that calling? Am I doing what God wants me to be doing? For each of us that will be unique. But then as I said earlier, for each of us some things we must all do. And I believe that part of the great commandment, part of loving our neighbor, is a concern for their eternal welfare. And I think if we cared, I’m just going to say it straight up, and if you don’t like it, you can call me or send me a hateful email. I think if we cared, this church would be full. And it’s not. I said it. So we need to ask God to deal with our hearts, because we’re not living in light of eternity.

Closing Prayer

Father, I ask that You would help us be what we’re supposed to be. I pray, Lord—I know, Lord, that You have already used Cindy in her passing.

You’re still using her. Lord, You used her memorial and her funeral to convict Christians. Use her testimony to motivate others. Lord, You used those services to have your gospel preached to many people that didn’t know Jesus. And I believe, Lord, that some of them came to you. You are so good that you use what we call the tragedies of life to work good for people.

I pray Lord that we, your people, would take to heart for whom the bell is tolling.

And it’s tolling for each one of us. Each one of us is going to give an account to you. And I pray Lord that we would live in light of eternity, that we get our priorities right, that we put You first, and that, Lord, we would have a heart for those that don’t know You. Overcome our selfishness, overcome our apathy, overcome our fear of man, whatever may be hindering us, Lord.

I know you are able to do this through the power of your Spirit. And I just ask, Lord, that we would all yield to your Spirit’s work. I ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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