Running To Win

Dave McAllister: Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. There’s one thing they don’t make more of: time. Each of us has a fixed amount to work with. We have to be good stewards of that time, making right choices along the way.

Today, we begin the last message in a series on managing God’s gifts, and time is the gift we’re focusing on. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, time slips through our fingers so easily. Getting control of our clocks and calendars can be a major issue for many of us.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Dave, I find it very interesting that your intro today had to do with time. Time for us is very special, and today is the end of our fiscal year here at Running to Win. And of course, we would like to be able to end our fiscal year in a strong position. That’s why today, any contribution that you make will be doubled. What an opportunity to double your investment for the Kingdom of God.

And as our thank you, we’ll be sending you a copy of a book entitled *Christ Among Other Gods*. You’ve probably heard me say this before, but I determined that I wanted to write a book to help people to understand why Jesus Christ is unique. He’s the only one qualified to take us all the way to heaven.

So be sure to pray today about the possibility of a very special contribution. As a matter of fact, what I’m going to do is to give you some contact info right now and then I’m going to repeat it at the end of this message. Go to rtwoffer.com. That’s rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Yes, time is of the essence. Thanks in advance for praying for us, and thank you for helping us even as we listen to this message.

Let’s visualize for a moment that each day your bank account was filled with $1,440. And then at the end of the day, it vanishes. If you don’t use it, it’s gone. The next day, it’s filled again with $1,440. How would you respond to that? You’d have several options, wouldn’t you? One would be to say, well, I’ll just let the money accumulate. And since it doesn’t accumulate, I’ll just let it vanish and day by day go on and waste it.

Well, few of us would do that. The other temptation would be to spend it frivolously. To say, well, it’s there, I might as well spend it. It’s going to be gone. It doesn’t much matter how I spend it just as long as it gets spent. That’s all that matters. Others, perhaps wiser, would say, let me budget this money and let me figure out how I can best use it, not only for this life, but also for the life to come.

Now, you realize of course, that God gives to you and to me, he gives us 1,440 minutes of every day. Once those minutes are gone, we cannot recapture them. We cannot have them back. They are gone forever. And not even God can give them back to us. The question is, how do we use those moments?

This is the conclusion of a series of messages on the topic of managing God’s gifts. And today, we talk about that miraculous, wonderful gift that we call time. Now, there are some people who are what we could say lazy and disorganized. We’ve all met people who do not return their phone calls unless of course their own livelihood is dependent upon them. People whose lives accomplish little because they have few goals except possibly to earn a living.

Now, imagine standing before God someday and he says, what did you do for me? And all that you can say is, I earned a living. I hope you can say more than that. I hope that I can say more than that. There are other people who are what we could call frantically disorganized. I read a story about a farmer who was telling his wife that he was going to do some plowing.

But the tractor needed oil, so he went to the shop. On the way, he noticed the pigs weren’t fed, so he went to the corn crib. The sacks of corn reminded him that the potatoes were sprouting. On the way to the potato pit, he passed the woodpile and remembered that his wife wanted wood. By the time he picked up a few sticks, an ailing chicken walked by, so he went to check on the chickens.

Well, you know, this could go on for a while. At the end of the day, you know what happened: he had not plowed a field. Frantically disorganized. Not lazy, just disorganized. People like this sometimes don’t really have priorities because everything to them is on an equal priority. If you’ve ever worked with people like that, you know how interesting it can get.

And then there’s a third kind of person, and that is the frantically—catch this now—the frantically organized. Those are the kinds of people who cannot do C until they have done B, and they cannot do B until they have done A. Everything is mapped out. Their whole life is basically planned. They miss one turn in a revolving door and they need some Alka-Seltzer.

As far as they are concerned, one little thing and it can disorganize their whole structure. They are frantically, frantically organized. Well, there may be other categories as well. But I want you to know today that all of us, and I speak now to myself, and primarily this message is for me, all of us have wasted an awful lot of time for which we are going to have to give an account to God.

Now, maybe you think that I haven’t wasted my time, but I want you to know that I have, and I know that I’ve wasted a lot of time. And possibly you would admit in the depths of your soul that you’ve wasted a lot of time as well. Now, sometimes of course, we waste time and it’s our fault. Sometimes it may be the fault of someone else.

I read this week that the average person who lives to the age of 70 spends three years waiting for somebody else. Now, you think about that a bit. Even during those times of waiting, there are things you can do. You can always talk to God. But how easy it is to let time pass through our fingers. I want to make you a promise today.

We’re going to look into God’s word, and after we have looked into the text of scripture and we have seen what God has to say about time, I believe that if we follow the principles that I’m going to give you at the end of this message, that you and I will find we will be different people a year from now, two years from now, and especially five years from now. We can be changed if we use our time wisely.

Well, the text is Ephesians chapter five. Ephesians five, and you might be surprised at where I’m beginning. We might not expect that a message on time management would begin at verse eight. But I think that unless we understand the context, we will not feel the full force of what the apostle Paul is trying to say about our time. And so I begin in verse eight and say, first, that we must understand our time.

We must understand how desperate our times are. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light. For the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth. And find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.

But everything exposed by the light becomes visible. For it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said: Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon you. We must understand our times. Paul uses the rich imagery of light and darkness to help us see what’s going on in the world.

And I want you to notice he doesn’t just say, there was a time when you lived in darkness, but now you live in light. That would be fine to say, but this is much more powerful. He says, you were darkness, but now you are light. Paul is saying, and he speaks to believers as I am this morning, at least in this part of the message, he’s saying that if you are a Christian, you were darkness, but God changed you into light.

It’s more than just your environment changing; you have changed. And then he says, notice what happens in darkness. For the fruit of light consists in goodness, righteousness, and truth. And this is where the contrast now comes in. And find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.

Paul is saying that we are children of light, and therefore we should show up the darkness. We must be candles in that cave. And that’s what some of you are at work, aren’t you? Living in an environment that is sinful, that is filled with the fruitless deeds of darkness, and you are trying to represent Christ there. And that’s exactly what God has called you to do because you are light.

If you want to know what’s happening in today’s world, all that you need to do is to channel surf on your television set. What you will discover is immorality, violence, impurity of all kinds, occultism. That’s where our world is and there’s a whole underbelly, if I can use that word, to the world with all of its debauchery and all of its sin and all of its hopelessness.

And we are called to be a part of that society, most assuredly, but Paul says, have nothing to do with these fruitless deeds of darkness. Could I ask you, do you have something to do with those fruitless deeds of darkness? Is that a part of your experience? Is it a part of your life? Have you become involved in it? And how easy it is to do today.

It used to be that people used to have to go looking for temptation. Today, temptation comes and seeks us out. It pursues us. We find it at every turn, every opportunity, whether it is the internet or movies or that television set. Somehow, the world has just crashed in upon us, and there we are. Paul says, have nothing to do with those deeds.

This past week, someone asked me a question. He was actually from a country, a huge country, a country that is larger than the United States land-wise, that is north of us. And he asked me, well, it’s a good country, too. He asked me a question. He said, would you give me an evaluation of the church in America? I’m really not qualified to do that, quite frankly, because my vision is somewhat narrow here in Chicago, Moody Church, and so forth.

But I said, I want to say two things to you. First, there are some positive things happening. There’s no question that the prayer movement, for example, happens all over the country. People are getting together for prayer. You find that there is unity among pastors that I know that we never had in the city of Chicago here 20 years ago. There is a coming together, there is a sense of oneness that is taking place.

And people are being saved, and the gospel is being preached, and opportunities are being given, and for that we are grateful. But the negative part is this: we have not been able to stem the moral and the spiritual slide of our country. We simply have not been able to put on the brakes. And I don’t know all the reasons why.

But maybe one reason is because we as believers, being in the world, have become so much a part of the world that the unfruitful deeds of darkness that are bombarding us, we have become a part of, and therefore our light has been dimmed and we are not what we should be in society. We’ve rationalized and become a part of the world.

You’ll notice Paul says that we should live with goodness and righteousness and truth, and find out what pleases the Lord. I was thinking to myself, in Bible classes in seminary, we have many different courses on theology and church history and church administration. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a course entitled "Finding out what pleases the Lord," and then doing it? That’s what Paul says we should do.

He says it is shameful to mention these secret things that are done. And then he says, wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Some people say he’s talking about the unsaved because we are not dead, we are alive if we are believers. But maybe the apostle Paul is using this language to speak to us as believers and saying to us in the clearest possible language: you are asleep.

You are no longer light in the Lord the way you should be and therefore, wake up. Wake up. You see the times in which we live. We see society with its debauchery and with its betrayal and with its rampant sexuality and with its seductiveness and all of the things that are pushing upon us. And Paul would say to us as a church today, to me and to you: wake up. Understand your times.

Well, let me give you now the second principle, and now we’ll finally be able to understand it, I think, with greater force. He says, redeem the time. Well, let’s read the text, verse 15. Be careful then how you live. And here I like the King James Version of the Bible. I know that it is cumbersome at some points and that’s why we use a different translation, but the King James, which I memorized many years ago, says: walk circumspectly.

Here it says: very carefully. Circumspectly means that you walk in such a way that your eyes are really all about you. If you could possibly have eyes at the back of your head, you would, because you know that your enemy, Satan, and the flesh within is trying to destroy you. It’s trying to ruin your fellowship with Christ. It is trying to come between you and the sensitivity of the Holy Spirit.

When we were in Mexico, I remember seeing these large walls that were built in order to keep in various compounds or various homes and houses because of theft. They were well-guarded. And some of those walls were perhaps 10 feet high, made around a house, and then on top, as the concrete was being poured, they put many bits and pieces of broken bottles and glass to discourage people from going over the wall.

But you know that cats walk on the top of those walls. But they walk circumspectly: one foot there, one foot there, one foot there. They don’t want to be cut. Listen to me carefully. It is possible for you and for me to make one decision in a moment of time that will bring a lifetime of heartache because we’ve not been circumspect.

Walk carefully. There’s a devil out there who hates you and wants to destroy you. And he says then: walk wisely, not as the unwise. They’re the ones that just go across the broken glass. They’re the ones who kick the traces. They’re the ones who say, well, it doesn’t matter how I live, no matter what God says, I’m doing my thing. Don’t be unwise like that.

And then he says, and this is our word now: redeem the time. My translation says: making most of every opportunity. I want to use the word redeem. Tell you why. Because it’s in the Greek text. In Greek, the word *agorazo* means to redeem, that is you go to the marketplace and you purchase something. But what Paul uses here is not just *agorazo*, he uses the preposition *ek* or *ex*.

And we see that, for example, when we have an exit, which means out of. *Exagorazo* means to redeem the time, to buy it out of the marketplace. What are we to buy it out of? To buy it out of the bondage of evil. Time must be carved out of the bondage of evil that he has just been talking about. What do we carve time out of?

My dear friend, many people somehow know that you’ll never become a professional baseball player unless you practice. You’ll never become a vocalist unless you practice. You’ll never be a pianist unless you practice. But many people think that they are just going to be godly without any disciplines of life, without any time management, that somehow it will just happen.

They want to be holy in a hurry. But it does take time to be holy. And it will never happen unless you carve time out of such things as individual pleasures. And here we can refer again to things that sap our time so much, like television, like the internet with all of its absorption and all of its fascination where people sit hour after hour after hour.

It can even be good things like sports or the news. I could very easily be a news junkie. But it dawned on me the other day, particularly because I’ve been home in recent weeks, it dawned on me that I am just getting absolutely sick of news. Sick of the news. For one thing, I’ve discovered that it’s not news at all. All that it is is the same old thing happening to different people. That’s what the news is.

What are we supposed to do? We carve the time. We shut off the TV. We shut off the internet. We shut off all of these things and we say to ourselves that we must buy the time out of all of the bondages and the distractions and the things of this world. Not only out of personal pleasures, but also out of such things as personal responsibilities where we say, there are some things I have to do, but some things I don’t have to do, and God is going to come first.

Because it won’t happen if we don’t seize the time. The time will get away from us and it will be gone. Why? Because Paul says the days are evil. Do you believe that these days are evil? If they are, redeem the time.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Well, my friend, this is Pastor Lutzer. I don’t know about you, but I need to hear that message again and again. Our lives are so cluttered. We are distracted. What we have to do is to take out time for God. And you know, even as you pray to the Lord today, would you consider making a very special gift to the ministry of Running to Win?

I mention that because today is the end of our fiscal year. Furthermore, any contribution that you make today is going to be doubled. So I want to thank you in advance for remembering us. Now, of course, what you need is some contact info, and I’ll give that to you right now. Here’s what you do: you go to rtwoffer.com, rtwoffer.com, or you can pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Now, as I have been emphasizing, as our thank you, we’ll be sending you a copy of a book I’ve written entitled *Christ Among Other Gods: A Defense of Christ in an Age of Tolerance*. It’ll be a great blessing to you and will fortify you for the days ahead. Right now, go to rtwoffer.com. Thank you so much for your prayers. Thank you so much for the way in which you support this ministry so that we can continue to expand.

Or you can pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now, because this is the last day of our fiscal year and it is the last day we will double any gift that you give, right now, go to rtwoffer.com.

Dave McAllister: It’s time once again for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. Christian students face an uphill battle in today’s secular universities. Connie has written asking this: I have a professor who told us that the Bible was not written for today. I know he’s wrong, but I don’t know how to talk with him about this. What do I do?

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Well, Connie, I want to thank you so much for the question because I’m glad that God has put the desire in your heart to speak with your professor about this. But for him to say that the Bible was not written for today is very confusing to me because, after all, the Bible reveals God. It reveals salvation. It has a universal message.

It is not just a message for the Westerners, and the Easterners have a different message. No, the gospel of grace and salvation is for the whole world. So obviously, because Jesus speaks about heaven, hell, how we can prepare for eternity, obviously the Bible is very relevant for today. And what we must understand is it was written, of course, in ancient times, but its relevance is up to date.

So Connie, I hope that God gives you the courage to speak with your professor and to simply go through the Gospel of John and point out that the things that Jesus said are relevant to us, no matter where we may be, no matter what time frame we have.

Dave McAllister: Thank you, Dr. Lutzer, and thank you, Connie, for your question. If you’d like to hear your question answered, go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on "Ask Pastor Lutzer." Or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That’s 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614.

That was Erwin Lutzer, introducing Managing Our Time, the last in a six-part series on managing God’s gifts. Next time on Running to Win, more on how to buy back time from the evil one, who wants us to waste as much of this precious gift as possible. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.