Dealing With the Pressure of Time - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Tuesday, December 5th. Today's podcast delivers a timely message to aid believers in concentrating on their connection with Christ and dealing with the pressure of time. What is it that you're living for?

That is, what is it that you're investing your time in? Because your life is your time and your time is your life. Well, I want to talk about this whole matter of time, and Paul gives us a very wise admonition in the fifth chapter of Ephesians, if you'll turn there for a moment. The fifth chapter of Ephesians, and beginning in the fifteenth verse, he reminds us of something that you and I need to be reminded of often, lest we allow our life, our time to drift. And the days go by, and the weeks go by, and the months and the years, and one of these days you ask yourself the question, where is my life?

And where has it all gone? He says in verse 15, therefore, be careful how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil. So then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

And Paul is saying among many things in this passage that all of us fall into one of two categories. Those who spend their time wisely, those who spend their time foolishly, those who spend their time wisely are wise men. Those who spend their time foolishly are foolish men or foolish women. He says, be careful how you walk, that is, be careful how you live.

He says, making the most of your time or of your life because our time is our life and our life is our time. Now, all of us like to think in terms of living a very, very long time, but that's not always the case. And so many people make plans years and years and years and they say, well, now, one of these days when I retire, here's what I'm going to be and never live to retire. And so they work and they save and they plan and they store it all up so that when they're able to quit their work, they'll be able just to live a life of ease and pleasure and relax.

And they never are able to do that because they don't live that long. What is it that you're living for? That is, what is it that you're investing your time in because your life is your time and your time is your life? Well, all of us are continuously being reminded of it. For example, most of us wake up with a time machine we call a clock. The thing goes off and makes a noise.

We wake up. We wear a timepiece on our wrist. When you listen to the radio, they continue to remind you of what time it is.

You're watching the television. They remind you of what time it is. We're always conscious and being reminded of time.

You drive down the expressway in some digital form over on the on the billboard. There's something to remind us of the temperature and the time. And you check your clock or your watch. You have to be at work on time.

Many people are paid by time. It's time, time, time, time, time. And we all seem to be caught in this pressure of time. How do we spend it?

How do we invest it? And we say, how do we squeeze the most out of every minute? And some people are trying to squeeze more out of it than there is in it. And so we're always constantly being reminded of it. But if somebody were to ask you, well, now, how do you define time?

And probably nobody can do it very adequately. But somebody said that time is a dimension in which things change. That time is the stuff of which life is made. And that time is a space in eternity. And most people are only thinking in segments of this hour, the next hour, today, tomorrow. There are not many people who are thinking about time the way God thinks about it. He thinks in time as all against the background of eternity.

And you see, those of us who are walking wise, as the apostle Paul said, said that you and I would walk with eternity in our mind. Listen to what he said. He says in this fifteenth verse, therefore be careful.

Look at this. Be careful how you walk. What is he saying? Be careful how you live. And if our time is our life, what he's saying is be careful how you spend your time. Not as unwise men who think nothing of eternal things but only the temporal things. He says, making the most of your time, which is to make the most of your life. And then he says, so then don't be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is, which all goes together. Time.

And you see, even in this pressure of time, what have we done? We not only sit in these other aspects of life, but we'd like to crowd God into our time box. And somewhere back yonder, in a few generations past, somebody got the idea that you go to church at eleven o'clock. And at twelve o'clock, church is over. The whole idea that time to worship God is one hour during the week from eleven to twelve. And after that, God shuts it all down. That's not what worship is all about. Worship is our focus upon God, upon his word, upon what he's saying, what he's doing in our life.

Not a time slot. And so what happens is many people cheat themselves out of the blessings of God because if he doesn't fit in a certain box and a certain schedule, then he doesn't fit. And so what do we have in our society?

We have a society that has said, God, you write about a lot of things, but you're wrong about some things. You can't make a living only working six days a week. So what do we do? We opened it all up on Sunday. And some of us can remember when on Sunday the only thing open was the local drugstore where you could buy medicine if you needed and the hospitals and about everything else was shut down. But we decided somebody can't make enough money in six days, so he worked seven days. And we've decided that God's schedule won't work.

When he says, six days shalt thou labor and the seventh is a day of rest, we said, well, you write about most of those commandments, but not that one. And so what do we have? We're probably one of the most unhealthy nations in the world. And we have the most progressive of everything, it appears. But we've got more heart trouble and more ulcers and more strokes and more this and more that because we live under this pressure, this time schedule, that's not always all the reason for the stress and the tension in life, but it's a great part of it. Now, being sensitive to time isn't something new with us.

Turn back, if you will, to Job. He says in the seventh chapter and the sixth verse, he uses a term here when he says, my days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and come to an end without hope. Now, if you've ever seen a weave machine, that shuttle just flies back and forth so quickly. That's what he's referring to here when he talks about the swiftness of time. The ninth chapter, the twenty-fifth verse, he uses another kind of comparison. He says, now, my days are swifter than a runner. And then look, if you will, in Psalm thirty-nine, the thirty-ninth Psalm and the fifth verse, listen to what he says.

Another way of saying it. He says, behold, thou hast made my days as handbreaths and my lifetime as nothing in thy sight. That is, he said, my life appears to be only just about as long as a handbreath. When you hold your hand up against the sky, that's not very long. That's not very wide. Time is short.

Even at the longest, it's short. And the issue is, what am I doing with my time, which means what am I doing with my life? Spending it, investing it, foolishly letting it drift by, or wisely making my life count.

And this is what he is thinking of here when he says, use it wisely. Now, we've come a long ways in our time. We've come from Pony Express to Federal Express. We put jets in the sky to hurry across the nation. We have robots in our factories to make things work faster.

We have computers and fax machines in our offices. That is, everything possible as we say, quote, save time. Now, you can't save time, but we understand what we mean by that. We want to save time in this area to have more time over here.

And the question is, what are we going to do with it? I can understand a man drinking away his time. I can understand a person frying their brain with drugs and wasting away their life. I can understand men and women who spend all of their life day and night working seven days a week to accomplish and to achieve more and more money, more and more acclaim, more and more praise, more and more prestige, more and more honors, more and more awards. And one of these days end up leaving every single copper penny of it to their family to fuss and to fight. I can understand that for people who don't know Christ.

Because they are people of time, not of eternity. But every single one of us who is a believer, we have been given the gift of life so that every single second you and I have is a gift of life. That's what time's all about, and that's what life is all about. My life is my time, and my time is my life. The question is, what am I going to do with it?

You say, well, you do what you please with it. The unbeliever, that's the way he thinks. What does the believer do? Listen to what he says in this passage. Therefore, be careful.

What? Be careful about what? How you walk, that is how you live.

Not as unwise, but as wise men. Make the most of your time. Make it count. Let your life bear an impact. Not just spend time, react to situations and circumstances, but make your life count. And I wonder how many of us see ourselves as persons of eternity, not as simply of time.

Now, what we have to remember is this. No matter how we choose to deal with our time, what we're doing is we are spending or investing our life. Now, from our viewpoint, we see the pressure of it, and we have to fight these schedules and the clock and all of this.

But from God's viewpoint, how does He look at it? Well, He sees that all the time pressures you and I experience come from one of two areas. One of them, time pressures we place on ourselves. Secondly, those are placed upon us by someone else. Sometime we can't do anything about it. We have to live according to some other people's time requirements because that's what our vocation requires of us.

But I want you to think about three or four very, very important things, and the first one is this. God has given you and me adequate time to do His will. He's always given us adequate time to do His will. That is, God never requires of us more than He knows we can do. He never requires of us more in any given day than He knows we're capable of doing. So sometimes we put requirements on ourself, and haven't you ended up today saying, I didn't get a thing done.

Not a thing. When the truth is you lived 12 or 16 or 18 hours, however many hours you were up, you lived all of that time. You did something. You made some choices to invest your time somehow, in some way, so you did do something. You may not have accomplished what you chose to accomplish. You may not have achieved what you set out to achieve that day. You said, I had so many interruptions.

Now listen to me. God has made time for us to do His will. That is, He does that every day. Every day when you and I get up, God has already so provided enough time for us to accomplish His will in that day. I didn't say that we'd be able to accomplish everything we want to do, the way we want to do it, the things other people always expect, but God has always provided for us in every single day, everything God has willed that we do.

Because you see, He guides and governs our time in ways that are best for us, that will glorify Him, and that will be good for others. And so when we have pressures with time and we think, I just don't have time, I just, you know, I just don't have time. No, there's not a single person who's ever lived who has any more time in any given day than you do. My hours have the same as yours, 60 minutes.

Your days and mine are the same, 24 hours in every day. So none of us have any more time than the other. All of us are making choices. And the warning of Ephesians is that some people are making very unwise choices. Listen now, when he says about your time, your time is your life, so we're making unwise choices about our life. And some other people are making very wise choices about their life. So when he says, be careful, be careful how you spend it.

Now, there are two things I want to talk about here. Why is it we get ourselves in all kinds of pressure with time and why is it that people live their lives, they're just reacting, they're just reacting to whatever happens. They don't choose life. They don't choose to make decisions. They don't choose which way to go. They let somebody else do the choosing for them. Listen, if you don't plan, if you don't plan your days and your life, somebody else is going to plan them.

And more than likely, someone else is not going to ask God how you ought to live today. And so what happens? The days go by and the weeks go by and the years go by and we look back and we think, what's been going on in my life? Where has the time gone?

What has happened? And the problem is we leave God out of it. Now, it's amazing to me how many Christians operate on this fashion. They get up in a given day and they do whatever they're going to do and they may have a little talk with the Lord, maybe on their way to work or when they get up in the morning shaving or dressing or whatever you're doing or, and then you're on your way and many Christians don't even do that. And they sort of live the day and then at the end of the day they get in and they either thank God for what's happened or complain about what's happened or bring something to His attention. Listen, the child of God is a person of eternity.

You know what that means? Every 24 hours of my earthly life is a part of my eternal life. The idea that we begin eternal life out yonder somewhere is not even scriptural.

The moment you receive Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, your eternal life began right then and there. And the Bible says that when you and I get to heaven, we're going to serve Him forever. Most Christians are waiting until they get to heaven where they don't have anything else to do but serve God. What a distorted view of the use of our time. The problem is we leave God out. We have a fragmented idea of what belongs to God and what belongs to us. Now, Sunday, that's God's time.

Monday through Saturday, that's my time. Says who? If time is a gift from God, which it is, life is a gift from God all seven days of the week, 24 hours of every day, 60 minutes in every single hour and 60 seconds in every single minute belong to God and they have been given to me and to you to live in this allotted time on earth until He takes us out of this life and carries us to a different life. It's all His. It isn't some His and some ours. That's a very distorted view, a non-biblical view of our time and one of the reasons that so many people's lives are so unproductive even though they've trusted Jesus as their Savior is the idea that we only think in terms of earthly things rather than heavenly. We are persons, agents of eternity. We are already in it.

We're just down here in it and we'll be out there in it one of these days, but right now, we're down here in it. It's already begun. You can't wait till you get to heaven to be faithful to God. Wait till you get to heaven to start serving God. Wait till you get to heaven to start obeying God. Wait till you get to heaven till you get interested in spiritual things.

The moment you trusted Jesus as your Savior, your eternity began right then and there. We forget Him. We do our planning and our living without Him except when an emergency comes and we get in trouble and we have a need. Then we involve God.

Don't you know that breaks His heart? Let me ask you a question. This may be a little tough on you, but that's all right. Have you ever sat down in your life and said, having trusted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and now that I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, now that I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, there are going to be certain priorities in my life that I'm going to settle once and for all. I'm not going to have to settle them every week and every month and every day. As a follower of Jesus Christ, having decided to follow Christ, there are certain priorities I'm going to have in my life. Have you ever done that? Well, my friend, you certainly should have because when you chose to follow Jesus Christ, there are certain things that became first. Have you ever sat down with the Lord and said, Lord, because You said in Your Word, six days shalt thou labor and the seventh is a day of rest. Lord, one of the priorities in my life is that on the Lord's day, I'm going to be in the house of God somewhere, worshiping You, praising You, serving You, adoring You, opening the Word of God, listening to the Scriptures, being edified and reproved and rebuked and strengthened and encouraged.

God, that is a priority in my life. Thank you for listening to Dealing with the Pressure of Time. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by intouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.