It’s been two thousand years; the time is always short.  Our time is short.  We have less than we had; we don’t get more.  Instead of that being a source of sorrow, frustration, or paralysis, I’d like for you to receive this truth as something good: each day closer to being completely with Jesus.  Live with good will, good conscience, and a good heart.  Let us improve the time.

          Make the most of the time.  Well, that can be anxiety-inducing too, can’t it?  I’m often battling the sense that I should be doing more, using time better, more efficiently, perhaps, or getting more quality out of the time I have, as though I were being cheated out of something.  How about you?

          How are we to make the most of the time?  I’d like to pose a prior question: for whom are we to make the most of the time?  Now we know the correct answer is God: make the most of your time for God.  God gives the time.  If you’re at all like me, time feels like it’s mostly occupied with our own concerns, concerns of everyday living.  Paul tells the Corinthians that he would like them “to be free from concern” (7:32).  Christ did not come for us to live bogged down in our daily concerns, not to mention those of others: we can have their concerns on our hearts, also, heavily.  What about the concerns of God?  Paul urges the faithful in Corinth to “use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them” (7:31).  This is not new advice.  Jesus reminds us that, in him, we are no longer “of the world” (Jn 17:16).  We are in the world, but we are no longer of the world.  Yes, we know.  Only we don’t quite know how to live that way.

          Our lives get preoccupied with the pressure of deadlines, productivity, accomplishment, increase.  We’d like to be preoccupied with the pursuit of happiness, fulfillment, and love—maybe even Jesus.  We can get stuck in our disappointment when our lives don’t work out according to our hopes and vision.  I suppose there are ways and times when God even uses such disappointment to redirect our thinking and desiring towards Him, if we will listen, if we will hear.  Our society encourages the pursuit of fame, prestige, power, beauty, desirability, and, more and more it seems, conformity: rigorous, undeviating conformity.  The biggest pressures those of us still working typically feel in a day have to do with finding time for everything we feel we need to do, let alone those few things we’d like to do.  On some days, the biggest pressure can be as deviously simple as what to make for dinner. 

          Our relationship with Jesus Christ determines our relationship with life and with others.  The danger is always there, however—the pressure that the concerns of the world put upon us—that our relationship with others will determine our relationship with Jesus.  Jesus?  Sure I love him, and I fit him in when I can, or when I feel like it.  Nebulous.  Nominal.  If your circle of friends is made up mostly of people who could care less about religion and/or Jesus, that will have an effect upon your relationship with Jesus.  Getting into a group of close friends who are passionate about Jesus, zealous for God’s Word, will also have an effect on your relationship with Jesus.

          In Christ we are free.  Our daily living can leave us feeling constrained, so that we despair of making the most of the time: always coming up short, always behind.  Paul is urging us to cultivate a spirit of freedom under the demands of daily life.  We talk a lot about freedom, so did the Corinthians.  They didn’t quite understand what their freedom was, what it meant and required: Christian freedom has requirements.  Cultivating the spirit of Christian freedom is a spiritual practice; this freedom under the demands of daily life conscientiously makes relationship with Jesus Christ first, so that all our other relations and all the demands placed upon our time are being continually kept in proper perspective.  That is ongoing work.

          Some of you make intentional time for prayer and Bible, perhaps early in the morning.  Early morning might not work for all of us, but the advantage of making God the first focus of the new day is centering and can very much set the tone for the day as well as provide much needed help for pressures and challenges that come in a day.  We’re making the most of the time when we’re continually refocusing on Jesus.  He is with us all the time, even when we don’t notice it.

          The events of the past year have done a spectacular job leaving us feeling sort of bogged down.  The bipolar news is no help.  We’re looking ahead to the future, to when the new normal settles into place.  We’re not quite there yet.  Our glance ahead is limited, understandably.  Let’s keep in clear view, however, that, in Jesus Christ, we have a glance at eternity: that’s our fundamental reality.  Through that lens, through that relationship, is how we bring into clearer focus our response to daily demands.

          God provides daily grace for our daily needs: His grace our daily bread.  It does no good, seeking that sustenance elsewhere, as those who lack faith.  Speaking of those who have no meaningful relationship with God or God’s Word, Jesus says that they “run after” (Mt 6:32) the minor details of daily living as if those were the main thing.  For some people, unspiritual people, those minor details are the main thing.  Perhaps they have nothing else to focus on, nothing else they want to focus upon.  Jesus assures us, however, that our Father in heaven knows our needs, and meets them.  I’ve never had to go without food.  I’ve never had to go without clothing, or shelter.  I’m saved: a thought that never ceases to stagger me.  God takes care of us.  Why?  Because He loves us, is compassionate and merciful, and because He wants us to get the focal point of our lives off the minor details of daily living.  We have an entrenched habit of making what are, from the perspective of faith, minor details into major, primary details.  God wants us to get our lives refocused upon Him, living for Him, living according to His living Word.  “[S]eek first His kingdom and His righteousness” (Mt 6:33).

          A week ago or so, Cheri Geserick shared a meme on facebook: The world crowns success; God crowns faithfulness.  Please never make the mistake of believing that success and faithfulness are the same.  Scripture speaks of the prosperity of the faithful; it would be easy to conclude that financial, material prosperity is meant, as though material success were a sign of God’s favor.  There are those who live that way.  Beloved, failure, as defined by the world, can easily result from faithfulness to God and His living Word.  The world is dead set upon getting your focus off God and His Word of life.  The world crowns submission to the ways of the world; God crowns faithfulness to His Word.  I’m concerned that, more and more, those with power will demand, and not so softly as before, conformity, rigorous, undeviating conformity.  They will insist and teach that they only may define freedom.  They only may define faith.  Despite all the pretty colors in which it decks itself, their demand is not the way of justice because it is not the way of God.  Quite the opposite.  This is not a condemnation of any political party but of an ideology, a mentality.

          Paul was expecting the return of Jesus any day.  I hope he does, though I’m not expecting the second coming quite as soon as Paul or some on facebook.  Paul was certain of this—and he’s right: the time is short.  Our time is always short.  We may feel as if we’ve wasted enough time, enough years.  How to stop?  How to go a different direction?  How to make the most of the time?  We’ve got to make our way in this world as long as it pleases God to cause us to be in this world.  We’ve got to, and God does.  God makes the way, beloved.  Just when we least expect Him, there’s God, applying His hand to the wheel of our life, applying His grace to our frustration and sorrow, offering us peace and joy, if we’ll take them, take them from Him.

          We make the most of the time when, with Jesus in focus, we do what is to be done.  We get Jesus in focus through familiar ways: prayer, time in God’s Word, service, gathered worship.  These gifts, blessings, are meant to work together and support one another, just like life together as church.  Without time in God’s Word, prayer can go awry; without prayer, time in God’s Word can become a chore, and we neither need nor want additional chores!  Without service, we risk paying lip service to God’s Word, and without God’s Word we don’t understand why we serve or what true service is.  When we dispense with gathered worship, by choice rather than temporary necessity, we atrophy in prayer, time in God’s Word, and service.  Without these, worship becomes a feel-good placebo—we’ve done our bit for God, this week, thank God!  There’s no depth.

          Alongside your daily concerns, make time for God’s Word, daily.  Hearing one bit of it from me once a week won’t do.  Join time in God’s Word with prayer, letting God’s Word instruct you for prayer.  Cultivate regularity and depth of prayer.  Make your praying deep, and God will make your praying fertile.  We are a compassionate bunch, especially for one another; cultivate that compassion for neighbors and brothers and sisters in Christ, near and far.  Alongside concern for the welfare of their bodies, cultivate concern for the salvation of their souls.  In these blessed practices, God gives you the way to make the most of the time.  We grow into it, by slow, halting, and steady steps: the Spirit, showing concern for us and compassion.  Faithful, humble discipleship, thriving relationship with Christ, is the way.  Our relationship with the Lord determines our relationship with life and with others.  If you’re feeling dissatisfied in those relations, feeling dissatisfied with your own life, it could just be a sign that it’s time to do some work on that first relationship.

          And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.