The Paradox of Time

Good afternoon, everyone. Good to be here with everyone. Hope you had an enjoyable week. We had a pretty eventful and momentous week, of course. And very excited about the birth of our grandchild. Many of you have already been in that position and know what that's like. And as you've probably experienced, or as anyone probably has experienced as they look at children growing up, one of the things I've always commented on is, if you ever want to know about the passage of time and have it hit home, look at other people's children. Because it seems like, you know, with your own family, your own children, you're seeing things happening from day to day, and you miss some of those big changes that happen almost imperceptibly over a day-to-day period of time.

But if you're removed a little bit from a family and then you see them again after a year, after two years, you see these incredibly stark changes that happen. It's kind of one of those paradoxes of time, how we kind of get lulled by the things that happen day-to-day. And as I reflect, I guess, as a new grandfather, that's what I want to talk about today, is the paradox of time. There's an old saying, the days are long and the years are short. You might have heard that before. I remember hearing that just a few years ago, and I think that's probably one of the truest sayings I've heard as I look at any element of life.

You know, we get in these situations that we think will never end. Maybe it's a difficult day at work. Maybe it's an illness we're trying to get over. I know we've got people at home right now who are still struggling with some of the sinus stuff that's going on, people who have just recovered from surgery, things like this. We go day by day by day, and these things seem like they're going to last forever, and the days just seem like forever.

And then we look back, and we wonder where the years have gone by. Another way to think of this in terms of the paradox of time is, is a week a long time? Well, I guess it kind of depends, right? It depends on what you're in the middle of. If you've got a deadline for work that you've got to get done, if you've got a term paper due at school that's due in one week, that week seems like a really short time, doesn't it, as you're working on that deadline? On the other hand, if you're waiting for that special package to arrive from Amazon, and it's been delayed several times over, and it's due to come in a week, that week seems to really drag, doesn't it?

Time's a strange thing that way. And as those of us who qualify these days as older people, we probably say to one another and to others, time just seems to go by faster than it used to, right?

There's lots of theories about that. The most convincing one that I've heard, just as an aside, is that the older you get, the smaller proportion of your life is made up by any period of time, right? A year, at the point that you're 60 years old, a year is 1 60th of your life, and so it makes up a much smaller portion, whereas if you're 10 years old, a year is 10% of your life.

And that guardstick that you have to measure by, the experiences that you have to measure by, is really different. So if you're looking for something to daydream about, if you're not interested in the sermon, think about that for a while. Even the Bible talks about the paradox of time. We read, for example, in James, their lives are like a vapor. They go away. They just blow away quickly, or like the grass. They dry up. And we're supposed to consider our lives very carefully because of that.

At the same time, we read in Matthew 6, where Jesus says, don't be anxious for tomorrow. So we're supposed to both take life seriously, but we're not supposed to get too anxious about it because what's coming today is enough to deal with at one time, as Jesus Christ put it.

So how is it that we're supposed to approach this paradox of time? What is it that we're supposed to do about it as Christians? I want to walk through a few thoughts on this during the time we have today, and then leave you with a few things to maybe think about if you're interested in taking the time to do it over the course of the coming week.

First of all, and I think it's important to ground in this, the Bible does tell us to be focused and to be productive in how we use our time. We can't get away from the fact that that's a key element in the Bible. It's interesting, a lot of people will talk about this phrase, the Protestant work ethic, because anyone heard about that?

This idea that Christian Protestant view of being diligent and being productive and really putting ourselves to time. When we think about, for example, the German Protestant tradition, there are cultures that are built around this whole idea that the greatest thing that we can do as human beings, the highest achievement we can have is to really throw ourselves into something and produce and use our time, produce. There's an element of that that's very truly biblical, and as we'll see, there are elements of that that we also have to watch out for that go beyond really what the Bible tells us to do.

But as a starting point, it is borne out right from the start in the creation narrative that man was put on earth to be productive, to use our time in a productive way. Genesis 2, verse 15, if you want to turn there, talks about Adam right after Genesis 1, where God creates the heavens and the earth and everything that we see around us. We see in Genesis 2.15, when man is created, that God took the man, put him in the Garden of Eden, and for a purpose, and that is to tend and to keep it.

So Adam and Eve were told in the beginning that they were there, and they were to do something. They were given instructions by God, they were taught, they named the animals, they were taught about all the different things that were going on, and they were given a job to do, and they were expected to be productive, to tend that garden, to keep it, to maintain it, and to turn it into something even more beautiful than what was delivered to them. Moving on, we can see when God talked to the children of Israel, and he took the mind that he had expressed through all of the years before that to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, to Enoch, to all the others that he worked with, and he took those things, he put them in writing, he distilled down his mind, his approach, and the Ten Commandments.

If you turn with me to Exodus 20, we don't necessarily always think of it in this context, but even as we sit here and keep the Sabbath day, it's connected to the idea of us working. It's a pause from working, but if we read the commandment in Exodus 20, verse 8 and verse 9, it does also make reference to the fact that we should work.

Exodus 20, verse 8, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and immediately followed by the statement that six days you shall labor and do all your work. And so the idea here is not only that we take a day off from work, which we do on the Sabbath, but there's an expectation that we're being productive. It doesn't mean everybody's got a punch of time clock and work, a 40-hour workweek at the factory or wherever it is, but God wants us to be productive, to use our hands, to use our minds, to put our energies to the Word.

And so we're not doing our daily labors, but we're also reminded that the rest of the week we are doing those labors. And that probably looked a little different in the time period when these commandments were given, when really everything that you had to do in order to eat involved labor of some sort. Back before the days, you could punch the button on the microwave oven, just wait for things to heat up after you pulled them out of your refrigerator.

And so just the pace of every day in terms of what you had to do to live, to eat, to sustain yourself was different, and certainly something that had to be done every single day, just to continue to put food on the table and continue to survive. The wisdom literature in the Bible also tells us a lot about this. We can probably all think of proverbs that have to do with diligence, with work, and how we approach those things. I'll read one of those as we're considering this at a foundational level, and that's in Proverbs 6.

We'll read verses 6 through 11 of Proverbs 6. One of the fun things I always remember doing as a kid that I absolutely loved was pulling up a flat rock and finding an ant colony under it. Have any of you done that as kids? I always thought that was the most fascinating thing. I can vividly remember the neighbor that lived across the street from us. There was this big stone. It was probably 18 inches or so square. It was flat.

My neighbor and I grabbed it. We wedged our fingers under the edge of it. We pried it up and flipped it over. There were all of these tunnels, these ants. You could see some larvae. I think we even saw a queen there, which looks kind of like this whitish blob just sitting there.

As a kid, I loved watching these ants. You'd see them grabbing these things and taking them back and forth. When you lift the stone off, they're all code red and moving in different directions to scramble and do whatever they have to do to protect the queen and the colony. It was fascinating for me to see all of those tunnels and everything they built. I grew up in the days of comic books, still.

You might remember those of you who are old like me going to the back two, three, four pages of a comic book. They would just have all these crazy things for sale. You know, ventriloquism kits. What were those? Sea monkeys. I actually ordered sea monkeys when my kids were small because I was always fascinated by them.

One of the things I always wanted to have as a kid was an ant farm. My parents would never let me have them. When Stephen was smaller, in Madeline, we bought an ant farm. It was the same fascinating thing. Watching these ants, they came in the mail. You'd drop this little vial of ants into the ant farm, and you'd watch them build their tunnels, and they were working.

That's what this proverb is about. Proverbs 6, starting in verse 6. Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider its ways and be wise. It doesn't have a commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in the summer, and it gathers its food at harvest. Just watching nature, seeing what God built in in these animals, is supposed to have a lesson for us.

A lesson that we're also supposed to be productive, we're supposed to accomplish, we're supposed to care for ourselves, the things that we've been blessed with, as we also read in the Bible, to multiply those things and use them for the benefit of others.

So again, lessons about the fact that we're to be productive, we're to do things, and whether that's working at a job or if we're retired, doing other things that are producing, that are creating, that are doing something with the talents, the gifts, the abilities that we have. This is reiterated again by Paul to the New Testament church. Let's turn to 2 Thessalonians. This will be the last passage we read on this part of the topic, 2 Thessalonians 3. And we'll start in verse 10. Paul's talking a bit here about how he conducted himself when he was among the people at this time and the fact that he worked. Even though he was a minister, he said at one point, you know, he had the right to ask tithes of them and ask that they support him, but he didn't. He felt it was important as an example that he should work. And then in 2 Thessalonians 3, verse 10, he says, Now, of course, we're not talking here about people who are disabled. We're not talking about people who are elderly and no longer physically capable of working. We're not talking about those things at all. But Paul was dealing with a specific situation here where there were people who were able-bodied who could work and were instead imposing on others and getting in the way instead of using their time again productively, putting their hands to something that would benefit their families and others if they were able to do so. And so we see foundationally, in looking through these scriptures, walking all the way from the creation narrative all the way through to what the Apostle Paul wrote, that it is important for us to work, to be diligent, to support ourselves, and to use our time wisely. That's one part of time. It's not all of it. Like I said, there is a paradox of time. This is brought out in the Bible, as we'll see as we walk further through this. So on the one hand, those things are important. But on the other hand, we also see that God views time very differently than we do. It's multifaceted, and it is paradoxical. Let's turn to Psalm 90. Psalm 90 broadly across the whole psalm talks about time in both an illuminating way and perhaps also in a bit of a dark way. Kind of like Mark Graham's hymns that we heard about in the sermonette.

Psalm 90 verses 4 through 6. Here we'll read just one short passage from within this psalm. Here the psalmist writes, And we see this theme picked up in a few different places. You probably recognize this idea of a thousand days. A thousand years are like yesterday. I think it's Peter who says, In the morning there like grass which grows up. In the morning it flourishes and grows up. In the evening it's cut down and it withers. And we see this theme picked up in a few different places. You probably recognize this idea of a thousand days. A thousand years are like yesterday. I think it's Peter who says, A thousand days to God are like a year. A year is like a thousand days. We see James, I think it is, who talks about life being a vapor and like the grass, like the flower that withers. Jesus Christ spoke in those same terms. And God is pointing out the fact here through the psalmist that from where he sits above time, time is something that was created. Time is part of a physical universe. And God sits above it and outside of it. And the way that he sees time, the way that he measures events, the way that he looks at things happening, is so different from the way that we measure. You know, we think from the perspective of our very small span of life about a thousand years, it's hard to really even fathom what a thousand years means. You know, I could think back and probably through, you know, all of us through grandparents, maybe great-grandparents, we can hear stories, perhaps of what it was like maybe a hundred years ago, maybe a little bit more than that. We're connected, I don't know, maybe through to World War I. I'm trying to remember stories my dad told. He would have certainly seen, you know, he was born in 1926. He would have seen World War I veterans marching in parades. So I'm connected directly through stories that he told me to people who were in World War I. It doesn't really go too far back farther than that. My grandfather was born in 1902. I can remember stories that he told me about what it was like living in Germany when there was a Kaiser before World War I. But, you know, chances are a few of you who are a little bit older, who might have known a great-grandparent, might go back a little bit further. But a thousand years, there's no way we can have any personal idea or concept of what things were like back then. But for God, sitting above time, it's like it was yesterday. It's like waking up from sleep and thinking about the dream that happened yesterday. And it's completely different in terms of how he relates to time compared to how we do. So how are we supposed to adopt these types of viewpoints if we think about this paradox of time and put it into action in our life? I'd like to focus for a moment on two stories that we see in the Gospels that point this out to us in ways we might not have thought about before. The first is a story of an actual event, which is the story of Mary and Martha. If you'll turn with me to Luke 10, you might have heard this account before. It's really an account about the use of time.

Luke 10 will start in verse 38.

Luke, writing here, says, Luke, writing here, says, But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached him and said, And Jesus answered and said to her, And Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her. So what do we take away from that story? I know if I put myself in that story, I'm Martha. I'm an accountant. I make a living selling my time. In the world of professional services, the person is the machine. People buy the time of individuals, whether you're an attorney, you're an accountant, perhaps a professional engineer that's selling time to clients. Time matters in that sense, and it means money. Distractions from using that time and charging that time takes away. So I can readily admit that if I was in the middle of this situation, I'd be feeling the same way. Many of us are probably wired the same way. We think often about personality differences, for those of you who've taken personality tests. Really interesting differences between analytical personalities and amiable personalities. You take it into a group situation, like church, like a club, or anything else. You think, for example, refreshments. You have somebody who's got a duty, and they get caught up talking with someone. Perhaps they have a very people-oriented personality. They're having a very important conversation. Then you get somebody like me, who says, It's ten minutes after. I need to be here, and I need to be doing this, and everybody else needs to be doing it, too. Those clashes can come about, can't they? We tend to categorize things the way that we see them. In my mind, nothing is more important than being on time. I physically get stressed out if I feel like I'm going to be late for something. I definitely know that not everybody is wired that way. I readily accept that as I get older. What's being pointed out here was Mary, I'm sorry, Martha, doing anything that was wrong.

She was preparing food. She was serving. She was using her time in a very productive manner. She was throwing herself into the task. Was she sinning? No. What was it she was doing? She just didn't recognize the relative importance of things that were happening in that time. Her sister, on the other hand, did. Do you think her sister didn't know that she should be a good hostess? That the people would want to eat?

But as she reflected on that, as she saw what was happening in that moment, Mary understood, in a way that Martha didn't, that we've got Jesus Christ here. At a minimum, she understood that he was a great teacher. Very likely, she understood that he was the Son of God. And that was a moment to be captured. Time to be spent listening to him, talking with him, understanding what was on his mind, learning from him.

Much more important than tending to the dishes or getting the next bit of an appetizer out on the table. A different view of time. Not something that was wrong and something that was right, but understanding the moment and the importance of what was happening within it. Let's look at the next example.

This one's a parable. And it tells us something very similar, but in a slightly different way. Also in the book of Luke, Luke 14. I was just scrolling here to make sure I didn't write down the wrong scripture. I think I've got the right one here. Luke 14, verses 16 through 24. Luke 14, starting verse 16. There are two parables. The other one is, I forget if it's in Matthew or Mark, it's of a wedding banquet. This one is a parable of just a great banquet, not a wedding feast itself. Luke 14, verse 16. Then Jesus said, the person he was speaking with, a certain man gave a great supper, and he invited many.

And he sent his servant at supper time to say to those who were invited, Come, for all things are now ready. Now, a banquet, a great supper at that point in time, would have been somewhat of a different affair than what we think of today. People didn't necessarily have houses that were enclosed, where they could have tons of people inside, so you'd have to have good weather outside.

You'd have to think ahead, you'd have to get the animal, you'd have to slaughter the animal within some time period before this banquet. If you were having a lot of people, probably several animals, whether it was cows, whether it was sheep, goats. And they would have spent significant time getting everything ready. And without refrigeration to keep food, you're counting on people being there to consume it, or it's going to go to waste.

And at that point in time, people didn't eat tons. People lived more of a subsistence living in terms of what they ate. So this banquet would have been a much bigger deal than somebody, your neighbor, saying, Hey, come on over for dinner tomorrow. We're going to order some pizza and sit around and watch the football game. This is a big deal. So verse 17, sent a servant to say those who were invited come, and they all with one accord began to make excuses.

The first said to him, I bought a piece of ground and I have to go to see it. Please excuse me. Another said, I bought five yoke of oxen and I'm going to test them. I ask you to have me excused. And still another said, I've married a wife and therefore I cannot come. So that servant came and reported these things to his master, and the master of his house, being angry, said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring here the poor and the maimed and the lame and the blind.

And the servant said, Master, it's done as you commanded, and still there is room. And the master said to the servant, Go out to the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say to you that none of those men who were invited shall taste my supper. So again, similar to the parable of Mary and Martha, what I find interesting here is, none of these excuses were wrong things, bad things, sinful things. We look here, we've got somebody who bought a plot of land, invested money in an asset, wanted to get out there, survey it, see what could be done with it.

We had somebody who bought five yolk of oxen. Maybe he had a big farm, he's going to be able to plow now, he's got to test them out, he's got to figure out which of these oxen to pair together in the same yolk, so that tomorrow he can go out and he can start really doing something more with his fields. Maybe it was planting time. Got somebody else who was newly married.

What better excuse is there than that? Just gotten married. All of these things were normal, productive, good things to do in life with time. But they weren't appropriate for the event. They weren't appropriate for what was going on at the time that this invitation came. And it showed disrespect, as we see by the person who planned the banquet, who had invited the people and they'd accepted. It showed a disrespect for that invitation and a lack of understanding for the importance of it.

They got caught up in the tasks that they had to do and what was immediately in front of them and made excuses for something that was arguably more important in this parable. It's a likeness to the kingdom of God. People running around, having things that they have to do, and not taking the calling of God seriously. So that God goes out instead and calls people like us, instead of others who, if you look from pure human characteristics, might have a whole lot more to offer than any of us do.

So the commonalities between these two accounts is that they show that there are priorities, things that go above and beyond being productive, just in the tasks that we have at hand. Sure, it's important. We should work. We should use the abilities that God has given us. But that's not all there is to how we use our time. There's a need to recognize what's important and not to be so myopic about the tasks that are right in front of our eyes that we miss the bigger picture, the more important things that are out there.

You know, if you go out, even search a little bit, or read a few articles in popular Christian press, for example, you'll see there's a lot written about being busy. And there's even this thing kind of talked about as a cult of busyness among Christians. And it's something that we need to think about as well in our lives, because I think within churches, within our culture, there's this idea that being busy is good.

The busier we are, the more productive we are, the more we have going on, the better we are. And the more we're fulfilling what we've been told to do. But that's this focus on just cramming more and more and more and everything that we can into a day is not actually what it is that we're supposed to accomplish. And we can easily find ourselves using busyness as a way to stop thinking about things that we don't really want to focus on and think about.

Like our own spiritual condition. Like things going on within our families, within our neighborhoods, within our communities that we could or should be contributing to in a different way. It's much easier, at least for me as a personality, to focus on the next thing that I have to do. Solving a little problem, checking something off on the to-do list. Than to think about those bigger items that are maybe painful, maybe more complicated, maybe require more introspection and hard thought and being honest with myself about things. So the paradox we're left with here is, how do we use our time profitably and productively and also remain focused on what is most important in our Christian lives?

And that's where I'd like to spend the rest of our time today. So there's a central concept that I'd like to talk about, and it's found in Ephesians 5, verses 15 and 16. Chances are, when you read this, most of you will immediately nod your heads and say, Sure, I've heard this. I've read this scripture and I know what it means. Ephesians 5, verses 15 and 16.

Here Paul, writing to the Ephesians, says, See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Now, I won't ask for a show of hands, but chances are all of us have heard this, and we've probably heard lots of interpretations of it. And they probably all somewhat revolve around the idea that we're only given so much time, we've got to get out there, we've got to use it, we've got to build our priority list, we've got to do things, we've got to be productive as Christians, and those things are all true.

But as we saw in these couple stories that we read, that's not the entirety of the story. I'd like to take this verse apart a bit and understand a little more and talk a little bit more about what it is that's being said, maybe a little bit below the surface in the scripture, because there is more here than what immediately meets the eye. And it connects directly back to the story of Mary and Martha. It connects back to the parable of the Great Banquet and the Paradox of Time.

So, let's talk briefly about the word that's used here for time. Now, you're probably aware of a Greek word for time, kronos, often write it as C-H-R-O-N-O-S, right? We might wear a chronograph to see what time it is. We talk about things in the passage of time happening in chronological order. Chronos refers to time, time that we can measure on a clock, time that we can check off as we cross off the days on a calendar as we see the years go by.

That's not the word that's used here for time. And in fact, if we look in the New Testament, it's in many cases not the word that's used for time. In many cases, it's this other word, which is kairos. It's transliterated in English as K-A-I-R-O-S, kairos. And it's translated for time, seasons, or opportunities, often in the New Testament. And it does not refer to time that could be measured on a clock, on a calendar, or through the passage of days and weeks. It talks instead about a less concrete meaning.

It's focused on the idea of a measure or a span of time, a period, a time period, a season, or a moment or opportunity. And we often talk figuratively about time that way, right? We've got to make the most of a moment when it comes. We've got to make the most of this period of time that we have when we have a visit from our family, for example, or when we're going to visit a family member, or some that we've not seen for a long time. We refer to it that way.

And chairos has that broader meaning. Let's look a few places in the Bible. We'll just look at three passages within the New Testament where the word chairos is used and how it's talking about time. Again, not being the measurable time of an hour or a day. The first one we'll look at, and there are lots of these in the Bible you could look at, is John 7, verse 8. John 7, verse 8. Here is a passage where Jesus' brothers are asking Him to reveal Himself. They're not really completely believing that He is the Son of God. If your big brother starts to tell you He's the Son of God, little brothers typically are not going to believe that for a while.

So they're challenging Him, and they're saying, reveal yourself. This is true. Reveal yourself. In John 7, verse 8, Jesus said to them, Now, He's not saying, it's not 1130 yet. I can't get on the road. When He's saying, my time is not yet come, what He's talking about is the fact that there were things that were supposed to happen within His ministry.

There were other things that were supposed to happen around Him before He would be fully revealed to the people as the Son of God. And that moment in time, that confluence of all the events that were going to have to happen, had not taken place yet. So that time had not yet come. Let's turn to Romans 8. We'll see another use of this word and how it's presented here in Romans 8. We'll read in verse 18.

Romans 8, verse 18. Paul here talking about the Christian life and the way that we approach our Christian lives in Romans 8, verse 18. He says, Now, He's not talking about the sufferings of July 15th in 72 A.D. He's not talking precisely and specifically about a day or even a year here. He's talking about a time period. He's talking about the age in which they're living. He's talking broadly to Christians, to all of us, about the period of human life. And He's talking in that more figurative and general sense about the fact that the sufferings that we go through as humans are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us. So, time again here is referring to the human lifespan, a period of whatever we want to say, 60 to 80 years, depending on whether you were living back then or living now. So again, talking figuratively about a period of time. Let's turn one more in Galatians 6.10. This is another usage by Paul. One of the ways we can understand how some of this language is used is to see how that same biblical writer uses that word in different places. In Galatians 6.10, this is Paul just in his next epistle, or the previous epistle as it is in our Bibles, using this same word again. Galatians 6.10, here Paul says, therefore, as we have opportunity, here the word kairos is translated as opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith. So here he's saying, when an opportunity presents itself, when we see an opportunity, let's take advantage of it. And again, this word that's translated time in Ephesians, kairos is translated here as opportunity, not passing up that opportunity to do good, especially to those within the household of faith. So bearing all these things in mind, let's go back to Ephesians 5, and I'd like to read how it's translated in a couple other translations. In this case, the God's Word translation and the New Living translation, which is a little more true to this broader meaning of the word kairos beyond just measurable time or a specific day or hour. From God's Word translation, it's translated, so then be very careful how you live. Don't live like foolish people, but like wise people. Make the most of your opportunities, because these are evil days. Likewise, the New Living translation translates this passage, so be careful how you live. Don't live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. So when talking about redeeming the time, it's talking about in the concept of opportunities that present themselves, taking advantage of those opportunities. And when we go back, we look, for example, at Mary and Martha, and we look at it in this context of time. Mary, in that parable, understood, or in that story, understood the opportunity that was there in a moment of time as Jesus Christ was there at her house in a way that Martha didn't. And she took advantage of that opportunity, putting other priorities, other things that were good, things to do, and setting them aside because she saw a unique opportunity that could be grasped at that time, during that evening, that would probably not present itself many more times in her lifespan. As far as we know in the Bible, it only presented itself maybe one or two more times around the death of her brother Lazarus.

So looking at this word, kairos, as opportunities, or moments in time, let's look at one other piece, which these translations don't focus on as much, and that is the idea of the word redeem. Again, the New King James we saw in this passage that we should redeem the opportunities or the moments. And what is it that that means? This is another word. This one is exa garazo, and it's only used four times, interestingly, in the New Testament, and each time it's translated as the word redeemed. And we don't have to overcomplicate the word redeemed because essentially it means to pay, to buy something, to buy it back. In Galatians, Paul uses it twice, and he refers specifically to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the fact that we've been redeemed by the sacrifice of the blood of Jesus Christ. And so we understand that as the fact that God bought us back, essentially, out of a life of sin through Jesus Christ and His sacrifice.

And so that's really what's being talked about when it talks about redeeming the opportunities, the moments that present themselves, the seasons that we have, is we need to buy them. We need to purchase them, and that's an exchange of value that has to be there.

So we come to the point that we have to recognize that there's an opportunity or the importance of a moment or a season in time, and we have to give something of value in order to capture it. That's really what's being said by redeeming the time. And we have to sift through what it is that's valuable, and we have to give it up in order to buy that moment in time.

Now, what does that look like? That sounds a little bit ethereal. I think fundamentally just to the idea of buying and selling, which is as old as time itself. In fact, when I read this description, I was thinking about this further this morning. A guy named Sam Bankman-Fried came to mind. Anyone heard of Sam Bankman-Fried? He's the latest scam artist that's come along. He started FTX, which was a cryptocurrency exchange. I think he's even testifying to Congress this coming week, allegedly, as has made off with billions of dollars of people's money.

How did Sam Bankman-Fried get his start? He got his start with something that's called the Kimchi Premium. Now, Kimchi is a cabbage-based dish made by Koreans. Has anyone had Kimchi before? It's kind of an acquired taste. What this guy found out in the early days that Bitcoin was out there was that Bitcoin was in higher demand in Asia than it was in the U.S. When you compared the cost of Bitcoin in Korean won to the cost of Bitcoin in U.S.

dollars, there was a disparity, such that if you bought Bitcoin in U.S. dollars and you sold it in Korean won, you could make money. It's called arbitrage in the financial business. You buy something and you make money off the difference or the spread in price. People spend lives and careers writing computer programs to find these disparities in price and take advantage of them and often make millions, sometimes lose millions in the process of doing it.

So that's how he first made that's how he made his money before he ever got into cryptocurrency and ripping people off, allegedly. But this is not unusual. This goes all the way back in time. Has anyone heard of the Silk Road? Marco Polo goes to Asia, discovers pasta, among other things, brings it back to Italy.

Trade. Why did trade happen on the Silk Road? There were things that were rare. There were everyday products in China, spices, for example, that you could buy in China and even when you took the risk of getting robbed along the way, even when you took the time to make the journey, all the cost of going back and forth and feeding yourself and staying places along the way, you could make money by taking everyday goods from China and bringing them to Europe where nobody had them and they were willing to pay 10, 15, 20 times as much for it.

And so people risked life and limb to travel the Silk Road in both directions and bring goods that were routine on one place and sell them in the other place for a premium and make money. It's written about in the Bible, too. You heard of the Pearl of Great Price. What's that describing? Somebody finds a pearl and they're ready to give away everything that they have. They're ready to sell everything they have because they've discovered something of value that is undervalued by everybody else and they can buy it and they can sell it at a premium. People have known how to do this for ages, for millennia. That's why Jesus Christ used it as a parable with the Pearl of Great Price.

And that's what's happening here. We talk about redeeming time. We're exchanging something of inferior value in order to buy something of greater value. And the challenge is to recognize it. And you know, it's interesting. Somehow it's easier to assess the value of physical things than it is to assess the value of time.

We have people here in our congregation, people who love collectible toys and can assess the value of them. We have people in the congregation who aren't here today who love motorcycles. They understand the value of a motorcycle and how much money can be made off of it if you buy it and you fix it up and you sell it all fixed up.

There's something innate in us. You know, we gravitate towards different things, but we can assess the value of things. But when we come down to time, it gets a lot more challenging, doesn't it? And we have to sift through on a moment-by-moment basis in our lives about what's most important? What am I buying and what am I selling? What do I need to do? And it changes in the season of life that we're in, the priorities that we have as single people who aren't married, how we spend our time getting our education, getting established in a career.

When we're young and married, we don't have children. We spend our time in certain ways to cement that relationship. If we have children, we build a family. That shifts again how time is used. Children are out of the house and we're older. We get focused on different things, building a legacy, using those last years to accomplish things that we want to make sure we leave as a mark in the world.

Those are seasons in life. We buy and we sell different things at those seasons of life in terms of how we use our time. That's what I want to encourage everyone to think about today as we consider redeeming the time. Let me offer a few concrete examples, but then I'm going to try not to give too many answers because what I'm hoping to do is inspire people to give us some thought over the course of the upcoming week and figure out what are you buying and selling?

What are you redeeming? What do you need to take advantage of in terms of moments and opportunities? We think about personal and family life, how we organize our day. I'll give you one example from my own life. My children were small and I had a demanding job. I felt like a very important thing for me to do, which I did not by any means do perfectly, but was to be home in the evenings with my family.

I made a decision that I was going to be home every day for dinner. I was going to spend dinner with the family, spend time reading, read through all kinds of great classics, read through all the Gospels, and read through significant parts of the Bible. In order to do that, I started work at 6 am and 6 am. I worked a demanding job. When most of my coworkers would come in around 8 am or 8 am, I'd leave by 5 am or 5 am in the evening so I could be home. Everyone else would still be home at work.

Those are decisions I made in terms of what I was going to buy and what I was going to sell, how I was going to use my time in a way that I thought was going to have the best impact on my family. We've probably all seen young people get married and make the comments on the side when they get married, and say, he's going to have to give up that hobby, or he's going to get divorced in a year, or she's going to have to stop spending her time with this, or going out with her friends all the time, or it's not going to last.

We recognize, somehow innately in those things, that as we reach different milestones and different points in our lives, how we orient our priorities, how we use our time, how we allocate our time, what we focus it on, naturally changes. And if it doesn't change, we start hitting the rocks, don't we? Sometimes in very painful ways. We act this out every week as we come to services. I can think of specific conversations over the course of the last year or two, as we've talked, and people have said, I've said to people, people have said to me, yeah, you know, just about stayed home and sat on my couch today, because I could Zoom services, but, you know, I wasn't really sick, didn't really have a good reason not to show up, and now I'm glad I showed up.

I think most of us probably can remember having said that at some point in the last couple of years during COVID, where the easy way to use that time would have been, you know, stay in the jammies, maybe put on a nice shirt so you can turn on the camera and say hi to people after services. Hypothetically speaking, of course. First, it's showing up here, and then we acted out again, right?

After services, when we sit here, and instead of going home, we spend our time over the table, right? Or talking on the side of the room and sharing things that have gone on during the week, supporting each other when difficult things are happening, giving one another encouragement. We're buying and selling time. We're redeeming time. We might not even realize we're doing it, because we built those good habits, right? That time that we spend with one another as brethren to do exactly what God wants us to do, to encourage and exhort one another.

Those are examples of how we make this work from day to day. We can think about it in relationships with other people. There are a couple of doctors, Drs. John and Julie Gottman, of a group called the Gottman Institute, and they coined a phrase that they call bids for connection. Bids for connection.

Their theory is that people want attention, not surprising, and that they ask for attention in ways that are not overt. So what we do is we make bids for attention through things that we verbalize or things that we do. It might be sharing a story about a day. We want to draw people into a conversation and start relating with them. It might be pointing something out the window. This happens all the time at home. We have a deer crossing the backyard. My wife says, hey, come look, there's a deer!

A bid for attention. There's a choice to be made at that point, buying and selling time. It's either, I've seen a million deer, leave me alone. Hypothetically speaking. Or it's, wow, you're right, it's a deer! And if we're honest about it, these things happen back and forth. There have even been studies, I've read studies about marriages that survive and marriages that are difficult.

And how people respond to the bid of a spouse for attention is a predictive element of how happy their marriage is. Because at its heart, when you don't respond, you're saying, I don't care about what you care about. Or, I recognize that you're making a bid for attention and I've got better things to do right now. Back to the story of Mary and Martha, the parable of the Great Supper. What are we buying? What are we selling? How are we redeeming that time? One last story I'll give you. I fly on airplanes a fair amount of time.

I was sitting and exchanging stories with some of my colleagues a couple weeks ago. This is one. My wife always gets mad at me when we're on planes. I've got a thing about airplanes. I don't talk to people sitting next to me on airplanes. I just don't. And maybe it's an accountant thing because I was talking to my colleagues at work and we probably got into a 20-minute conversation of every different way that you could say, Oh, I hate it when people just start talking to me. It's a bid for attention sometimes. As a Christian, I do sit back and think about it.

Should I just be tuning somebody out when they're sitting next to me? This is another human being who might need attention for certain reasons. It does cause me to reflect. That's one example. Others are things that happen at work as people bring things up. Somebody asks how their day is going. They're like, Oh, yeah, great. Bid for attention? Is that a moment that we should be taking advantage of to have Christian concern for another person? Things we need to think about in the way that we interact day to day. That's as far as I'm going to go with those examples. My goal here is that we all think about how does it apply in our lives.

I gave you a few examples of what I encounter. We need to think about what we need to redeem in our lives. What are the moments? What are the opportunities that are coming our way that we need to take advantage of? Where we're prioritizing, perhaps, things that are a little too close to us, a little too much in front of our face, and not thinking about the big picture that we need to. Of course, this comes to my mind when I think about being a grandparent, thinking about early childhood development, seeing a baby, and thinking about how my son and daughter-in-law will relate with that child, how I will relate with that child.

It brings back all of these thoughts of what it is that you have to change in terms of priorities, in terms of how you use time, how you capture those moments, and how you make the most of them. For those who want to think a little bit more about this topic, I'll just leave two suggestions for the course of this coming week. The first one is, go back to Ephesians 5 and read verses 15-21. I didn't read verses 17-21. There's a big word there, therefore, that comes after the injunction to redeem your time. There are several things that are mentioned in the second part of that passage that we're encouraged to do by the Apostle Paul in order to accomplish that.

I would encourage everyone to read those and give those some thought. Then consider how it should look, each one of us, in our lives. What is our season or situation in life? What are the opportunities or the moments or the seasons that need to be bought up? What is it that we need to spend? What are we selling? What is it that we don't really need quite so much in terms of our use of time, because it's not as important as those other things that we need to put our time and attention to?

So, in conclusion, time is a paradox. God does very much want us to be productive with our time. We were created to work, and diligence in our lives is, without doubt, a Christian virtue. At the same time, though, it's clear that God views time differently than we do, and we have to avoid the pitfall of considering just busyness to be next to godliness. We're called for something more than just making sure we're not idle. We need to make an ongoing, real-time evaluation of how it is that we spend our time in order to recognize and buy back the opportunities and moments that have real weight as they go by in our lives. May we all effectively redeem our time.