Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Well, we’re plowing on in the study of Solomon and his 1,000 wives—or 700 of them and 300 concubines. It’s quite a houseful he had. I was talking about sexual discretion, and today we’re going to be thinking about discretionary time.

Just to summarize a little bit and get into the study, I’d like to remind you that Solomon was visited by God in a dream and was given a chance to choose one thing—just one wish that could be fulfilled, if you remember. He chose wisdom.

He didn’t ask for health, and he didn’t ask for wealth, and he didn’t ask for long life. He didn’t ask for the death of his enemies. He asked for wisdom to know what to do. It was very evident as he began his kingdom reign that God was giving him wisdom beyond his 16 years.

He was just a young boy, a teenager, with this incredible load of responsibility on his shoulders. And yet the responsibility was on God’s shoulder. It talks about Jesus coming to the Earth in the book of Isaiah; it says the government shall be on His shoulders.

Solomon had wisdom, which is insight into the purposes and plans of God. That’s part of wisdom. He was given this wisdom, and part of that wisdom was to rely on God and roll his burden off on those great big eternal shoulders so that the government was on His shoulders, not his own.

With this mindset that God enabled him to reach for and to decide to have, he began his reign. All through his life, he did very well, except he gave the devil a foothold. Right at the beginning of his life, he gave him a foothold.

You give Satan a foothold, and he’ll be running all over your heart and life before long. The foothold that Solomon gave we found in 1 Kings, Chapter 3, if you remember. He married the daughter of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.

He did this for political reasons. In fact, most of the 700 wives that he married were for political reasons because they were all queens of kings or clans, daughters of chiefs, or whatever.

Every time he made one of those marriages, he was buying favor and making sure that he didn’t get attacked. Israel was living at peace because politically astute Solomon was hedging his bets and making sure that the kings that lived all around him would never attack him, seeing he had married their daughter.

However, at the end of his life, it says in 1 Kings, Chapter 11, those women stole his heart away. It’s a very sad story, a very, very sad story. And yet it all began back in 1 Kings, Chapter 3.

Solomon’s downfall at the end of his life happened when he was old; his wives stole his heart away. He did very well until the end. There’s no point in starting well or running well unless you end well. Up to the end, there’s a lot in the Bible about enduring to the end, pushing on, making it, and finishing strong.

Solomon didn’t finish strong. But it all began with one little girl. He was 16. The woman he married from Egypt was probably 13 or 14. They say that the Egyptians’ lifespan was 20 years of age at that point.

20 years of age. Now, that might sound incredible, except there are countries like that today in the fourth world. We now have a fourth world that is part of our globe. In some of those countries, that indeed is the life span or expectancy.

Just look at what’s happening in Somalia, for example, and other places—Mozambique, Sudan. The life expectancy is incredibly low. It’s easy to see in a country without any sense of what to eat or how to look after yourself, no disease control, or anything like that—overcrowded places, dirty water. All the things that go to making life expectancy almost nil. Egypt was in that case.

So the little girl and here she is, married off to Solomon. It’s one queen who ended up being one of 700. What Satan wants is that one chance. I remember talking to kids in a Sunday school class years and years ago and trying to demonstrate this thing that you mustn't give the devil a foothold.

You mustn’t let him get in once, and if he does, then you confess it and you start again clean and ask God for power not to do whatever it is again. I brought a child out to the front and I used a piece of very easy-to-break cotton, and I asked her to put her two fingers together.

I put the cotton round once and I said, “Break it,” and she broke it. Then I did it again and I put it round twice and I said, “Break it,” and she did. Three or four times. But when it got round four times, I think it was, she couldn’t break it.

That’s what happens with sin, or when you let the devil have a foothold in your life. He takes a dirty great step right into the heart chamber, and you’re lost. It was David that told Solomon to guard his heart, for out of it were the issues of life.

And yet he guarded his heart up to a point, but at the end of his life, he began to worship the gods of the queens. They stole his heart away from God, and he loved their gods. And that’s what happened. It was very sad.

Now, it wasn’t a question of knowing what he should do. He knew what he should do. Remember when God came to him, he said, “Give me a discerning heart to govern your people to distinguish between right and wrong.”

There was no question about it. Solomon knew that he was not, according to the statutes of his father David—not David’s statutes, but the statutes his father lived by, which were the Ten Commandments and the law that explained and amplified the Ten Commandments—that he was not to multiply wives.

For Genesis says you leave your father and mother and you cleave to your wife, singular—one man, one wife, God’s creation ordinance. And yet in the countries around Solomon, polygamy was absolutely rampant.

No infertility clinics, so the concubines, the slaves that became the baby machines, were brought in for sexual activity and for producing the children. The wives sometimes never did sleep with the king. But the concubines were there for that reason.

They had their own system. But God had said you don’t borrow the system of the people that live around you. You’re going to be different. You’re going to be a called-out people. I’ll be your king. You won’t have a king.

And Israel began to get further and further away from the Lord and say, “We want a king, and we want their systems. And we want concubines. That’s a great idea.” And Solomon bought into it.

So his problem wasn’t knowing what was right and knowing what was wrong. His problem was doing what he knew or, as we said in our very first message, behaving his belief.

Satan uses our sexuality, unfortunately. He knows it’s an easy way to go, especially if, like Solomon, you have a weakness. And I would say he had a weakness, wouldn’t you? 700 wives and 300 concubines—I think in this day and age, he would have had a sexual addiction.

He would have been dysfunctional. He would have been in a clinic or a hospital or an asylum probably, I don’t know. But here he is, King. You can’t really put the King in an asylum. He has a problem. He was a lover.

He was a lover by nature, and some of us are that way. You see, the things that God gives us in the possibility of enjoying our sexuality can be used for good within the confines of God’s rules of marriage, or Satan can use our good things and pervert them.

Instead of love, we find lust reigning. Lust is, "What can I get out of this relationship sexually?" Love is, "What can I give," using my body to bless, not using her body to get, but using my body to bless. That’s the difference between love and lust.

Satan turns it around. He had done it with David, hadn’t he? And now he did it with Solomon. He surrounded him with a thousand gorgeous women and he was a goner. He used Solomon’s hormones to win his heart. His strategy hasn’t changed even today.

So bit by bit, he gets his start. He gets his foot in the door. Pharaoh’s daughter was the beginning. He went for the Achilles heel. If we have a weakness, whether it be a sexual weakness, or a buying weakness, or a hoarding weakness, or a worry weakness, Satan is not a fool.

He’s going to go for the easy entrance, not for the hard one. If he knows you’re strong somewhere, he probably won’t tempt you in that area. So you have to know yourself. Knowing what to do and doing what you know is all wrapped up with knowing who you are.

I’m quite sure as David told the story of Goliath probably many times to his little boy, “When your daddy was young, he went out and fought a giant.” “Oh, but Daddy, did you? How wonderful! What happened?”

I can see David telling the story of Goliath. “I took five small stones.” Solomon, I’m sure, was thrilled. Little knowing all his life he would have a giant within to fight himself. And lust, the giant lust, would reign in his heart.

And yet like his father, he was given provision. He was given five smooth stones. One of them was faith—faith in a God who is bigger than Goliath. Goliath is bigger than me, but he’s not bigger than God. Faith in one bigger than the Goliath that lives within me.

For when David had gone out to fight the giant, he went in the name of the Lord, and he said, “The battle is the Lord’s.” When we are fighting whatever it is that would have us in addiction, whether it be drink, whether it be sex, whether it be whatever, we have to know that the battle is the Lord’s.

That means He intends to win it. In fact, He has won it potentially. Now we have to go out and finish that giant off. So faith in the Lord. But there’s another element to faith that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately—faith in yourself to know that God has made you with the capacity to be obedient and to exercise your will Godward.

A lot of women say to me, “I can’t fight the giant,” whatever the giant is. “I can’t do it.” But what you need to hear is God has made you as a human being with the full ability to kill the giant.

Now, you have to play by the rules. You have to do it God’s way. You have to use His power. You have to know God. You have to be linked to Him. You have to know how to release the power of the Holy Spirit in the area of your defeat. But God has given you the power.

You have to have that belief in yourself. Not in yourself apart from God, but in yourself linked to God. David fought the giant. He had this faith, this arrogant faith, this little pipsqueak without armor.

He looked at the giant and said, “I can do it!” Not “I can do it,” but “I can do it because I do it in the name of the Lord and in His power.” You know what’s so neat? When you went out to fight in those days, the armor bearer went in front of you.

When Goliath, this huge nine-foot-tall giant, came out, his armor bearer went in front of him, and he probably was nearly as big as the giant. It was a nation of giants, the Philistines. He carried his armor in front of him.

I think that’s a fabulous picture. For when we go out to fight our giant, as Solomon should have gone out to fight his giant, the armor bearer carries our armor before us. That’s a beautiful picture of the Holy Spirit.

He points out to us the provisions that God has made to get this thing under control. He might offer us this piece of armor, or that piece of armor, or the other piece of armor. We put it on and we fight the giant. Faith in the Lord, but faith in the capacity put within us as He has created us to respond, to fight, to have the power to do it.

I have started saying to women, “You can do it!” We say this to our children, don’t we? Affirmation, affirmation. “You can do it! God will help you to do it! Yes, you can! You can do it! You can beat this thing! You can stand up and be a Christian! You can take the ridicule! You can do this! You can do better! You can work on this part of your life! Yes, you can! I believe in you!”

Then listen to God say that to you. You can do it. I believe in you. God says to you, “I believe in you.” Certainly not apart from Him, but yoked to Him, indwelt by Him, living with Him, in touch with Him. You can do it.

Another piece of armor God gives us—or if you want to change the picture, another little stone—is fellowship. Absolutely essential; the company you keep. Where did Solomon spend his time? In the harem with women instead of worshiping.

We’re going to be talking about worship, how Solomon built the temple and how we can build a temple inside of us. I won’t spend too much time on that. But it’s where you spend your time that you get your strength from in the end and you gather your values and you get your affirmation again.

If you walk flat into temptation, don’t expect the Lord to deliver you from evil. I talked to a young woman who was in a business not too long ago, a pretty young woman. She’d just gone back to work and was having a lot of attention from her boss.

She came to talk to me about it. She said, “I’ve been out of the workplace so long.” She said, “Suddenly, I’m met with this particular situation.” She said at first she found herself responding a little bit. It just made her feel good to think she was still attractive and men noticed her. But suddenly, she found herself responding a little bit too much to it.

Then she stopped telling her husband what was happening. She said she had to talk to somebody about this. She was bouncing it off me. I talked to her a little bit more and figured out that it was even going further than she had realized it was going.

She said, “What do you think I ought to do?” I said, “How important is the job?” She said, “Well, it’s pretty important. We’ve got to get our kids on the way to college and all the rest of it. My husband and I have decided this is what we’re going to do.” She was only working part-time.

I said, “Is it worth your marriage?” She said, “Well, no, obviously.” So I said, “Then change the job.” She said, “Well, that’s not so easy to do in the recession.” I said, “Get out of that. Just get out of that.”

If you can’t stop him—and she had told me she had tried to stop his attention—and you’re beginning to deceive your husband by not telling him everything that’s happening, you’re almost married. That little Egyptian queen was there. The devil was getting a toehold, if not a foothold. She needed to remove herself from the situation.

As we talked, she said, “Well, I knew that’s what I should do. I just had to have somebody else tell me, I suppose.” She said, “You know, when you told me to do that, I found myself saying I don’t want to do it. I want to stay. I want to be near that man.” So she said, “I know now I’ve got to get out.”

And she did. She changed the job. She had a lot of trouble finding another job, but she did the right thing. Solomon said remove your foot from evil. Solomon said don’t even look in the direction.

The Lord said, “I’ll deliver you from evil,” but not if you walk flat into temptation and you put yourself continually out of choice in a situation like that. Well, he was the wisest man that ever lived, but not wise enough to get his sex life in order. This was because of what he did with his time basically. He chose to do these things.

But we’re going to have a quick look at what he did do with his time because I want to talk about our discretionary time. For Solomon, it was all discretionary. He was king. He could have sat on his throne and never done a thing.

So he had the choice of what to do with his time. Some of us don’t have that much choice about some of the things we do with our time. If you have children, then you really don’t have too much of a choice unless you’re going to be arrested and put into jail for neglecting your duty and your responsibility and the job that you have chosen originally.

However, Solomon was in a different situation. Everything he did with his life, he had a choice. So it’s interesting to look at his life and try and figure out what did he choose to do with his time. Now, he was a very busy man.

First of all, politically—his job vocationally—that took time. It takes time to be a mom. It takes all our time to be a mom. That is a full-time job. And yet some of us, out of choice or necessity, add to being a mom a part-time job. Some of us have a full-time job.

It is a vocational choice. He was governor, he was president, he was king, he was prime minister. He was a hands-on king. He got involved. That was the problem; he had his hands on too many women. But he was a hands-on king in other ways. He was an absolute monarch. That took up a lot of his time. Our job takes up a lot of our discretionary time.

Secondly, he was accessible. Remember when the two prostitutes came to him? He was accessible at all sorts of levels. That takes time, and that should take time. I think we all ought to have a job, whether it be a full-time job at home being a mom, or a full-time job at home and outside.

We all ought to have a vocational spell of our time taken up with a job, a vocational calling. I’m including mothering in there as certainly a full-time job, whether you get paid for it or not.

Accessibility is part of life as well. Solomon was accessible. It always amazed me that he would try this case between two prostitutes. But he was the judge of Israel. He was not only king of Israel; he was not only governor of other countries round about; he was also accessible to little people.

That takes time. It always takes time to be accessible. I know how much time that takes because that’s my life. I’m accessible to other people. We get on a plane, and we go where we’re going, and somebody meets us at the airport, and we put ourselves in their hands. We usually say, “How can we serve you? We’re here to serve you.” And that’s what we do.

We have no choice of where we eat. We have no choice sometimes of even the sort of things we wear; it’s chosen for you by the amount of what you’re doing. We have no choice of how much sleep we get. We have no choice of where we stay. We have no choice of any remuneration that we might be given as an honorarium or not. We have no choice of the vehicle that we ride in. We give ourselves to be accessible to the people.

As they put us in the car at the end of seven or eight, sometimes nine meetings a day, and drive us to the airport and me, I’m like this, they give you a lecture: “You shouldn’t work so hard!” I can’t tell you the times they tell me that.

And they scold you because, “Just look at you,” they say. Now you’re going on to the next people who are about to do the same thing to you because you’re accessible. Stuart has a rule: never take the phone off the hook. “I will be accessible to the congregation.” They know that.

So we never do take the phone off the hook, whether it be for mealtimes or whatever, because he wants to be accessible. That takes time; it’s very important. Solomon was also poetical. He was a poet. It says here that he spoke 3,000 proverbs and wrote 1,005 songs.

He was a poet—read Ecclesiastes, Proverbs—his type of poetry. And he was a songwriter. That takes time, let me tell you in a very little way, about writing. In fact, in Ecclesiastes, Solomon said, “Of making many books there is no end.” It's a very depressing verse for me.

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the flesh.” Somebody said to me the other day about the poem I wrote for Christmas that was “Winter without Christmas,” Christmas Eve services that everybody had. One of them said, “That was a wonderful poem.”

Then the lady standing next to the gentleman said, “Oh, it just comes to her. It’s easy for her.” And I didn’t say anything. But I want you to know, it doesn’t just come. It doesn’t just come. You work for it, and we’ll talk about that when we talk about the tongue and how words come to us and how hard it is to work for the right word.

Solomon worked for it. He tells us that in Ecclesiastes, Chapter 12. You read it sometime. Many times people meet me and say, “I read your book while I was feeding the baby,” or “I read your book in half an hour.” I think, “Oh! It took me a year to write that book! How depressing!”

But I want you to know it doesn’t just come. It does not just come. You work for it. When you have a gift, that takes time, and we must use time for our gifts and our talents. Our talents come to us like a diamond that needs to be polished and worked on.

I remember being in Kimberley in South Africa where all the diamonds come from. There's a great big hole, a mile deep. Somebody found a hill, and two little boys were playing on the hill, and they found a great big chunk of something that looked like nothing, and they played ball with it.

They rolled it to one another, and somebody walked by and picked it up and realized it was the biggest diamond in the world. Those poor little boys got their diamond taken off them. They could have been the richest people in the world.

And that hill became a hole. It’s amazing what motivation does, or greed. A mile deep. That’s Kimberley, South Africa, and we went to see the hole that was a hill. In their museum, we saw some diamonds they still find in that hole.

They just look like pieces of earth, muck, dust, dull, nothing. And that’s what gifts and talents that God gives us are like. It takes time to work a diamond—a lot of time. We should spend time doing that. Solomon did.

Then there’s your spiritual gifts. He was a preacher. Ecclesiastes was written, we believe, by Solomon. The words of the preacher, the words of the teacher. He was a preacher. He was a priest. He offered thousands of burnt offerings, especially when he dedicated the Temple.

He went to Gibeon, built an altar for the name of the Lord before the Temple was built. He offered sacrifices and burnt offerings. So he was mystical. He was spiritual. It takes time to be spiritual, and we should take time to be spiritual.

It takes time to be busy in the Temple like he was doing all that. It takes time to pray prayers. Read his prayers. Solomon’s prayers are probably the highlight of the prayers of the Bible. They’re incredible, and I hope we have time to look into those before we finish the series.

He was also practical. He was a builder. He built a house for God, Solomon’s Temple, a wonder of the world. He built a house for himself. In Chapter 7, it says it took 13 years to build his house. Those of you that have built a house say, “Yeah, it took me that long, too, to build our house.”

Well, it might have done, but it certainly didn’t take you—you didn’t have the house that Solomon had by the time you were finished. Read about it; it’s incredible, the description of it there. Sometimes in a Bible dictionary, look it up. Go to the resource center and find out what the house that Solomon built for himself and for the Egyptian queen was like.

I wonder if he built one for all his queens. Can you imagine how big a subdivision that would be? He was a builder. He built temples, he built palaces—13 years building his own. He built towns. He built terraces, gardens. He was also an expert.

The Bible says he was an expert in plantology, in trees, in animals, in reptiles, and in fish. He wasn’t only an expert; he was a teacher. People came from all over the world to hear his lectures—not just in the wisdom area, the spiritual area, the proverbs area, to hear him sing a song or two, but also to hear his lectures on plants and trees and birds.

He was a brilliant man. He was a busy man. When on earth did he find time to be sensual? Well, he did. And when on earth he found time for his 1,000 women—don’t ask me. But one thing I know, next time you think you’re busy, read 1 Kings 1 through 11. You’ll realize that you have just as much time as Solomon had, and so do I. It’s a choice to fill it.

Now then, in Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, Solomon writes a very famous little piece of Scripture. He says there is a time for everything, a season for every activity under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

So what does the worker gain from all this time and toil? I’ve seen the burden God has laid on man. He’s made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.

Now, that’s a wonderful little piece on time. As far as I can see it, Solomon enjoyed life to the full. He was interested in everything. He piled learning on learning. He used the brains that God had given him, his bright mind, and he filled his time.

But this passage basically is pre-introduced just before this passage with the whole concept in Chapter 2 of Ecclesiastes that we cannot enjoy anything God gives us to do, to choose in time, apart from God.

He talks in Chapter 2 of trying pleasure and trying building. Read Chapter 2 when you go home. “I built all this and I did all that, and I acquired slaves and women and honor and fame and money and wealth and crown and gold and silver, etc., etc.” And it was meaningless apart from God. That’s the theme of Ecclesiastes.

You cannot enjoy anything that comes to you in the seasons of the time that God allots us apart from connection with God. Are you connected with God? We all know people that are like Solomon; they choose with their discretionary time what to do—what job to do, where to go, what to do with their spare time, when to serve, what to do. And yet they’re not connected with God, and so it’s meaningless. It’s empty.

Then you come to grips with the fact that the seasons bring you events that you have no control over whatsoever. There are some things you can choose in the time that God allots you on this earth—and He does allot you time.

But there are things you cannot choose, and this passage of Scripture explains that. There is a rhythm to life. Half the things that happen to you are good; half the things that happen to you are bad. If you read that list again, half are sunshine, half a shadow. But there is an Arab saying: “All sunshine makes a desert.”

Life is made up of sunshine and shadow. That is how it is. What we need is a perspective on time—we need a perspective on time, God’s perspective. For even though God allows events to come into our lives, in line after line, this wise man is reviewing life’s most basic experience and deepest emotions, and he’s concluding that each has its set time.

But he is all the time sensing, because God has set eternity in his heart, that there is something beyond it all. God understands what all these events are happening for, and God has the big picture. God has set eternity in man’s hearts.

Men are always looking forward to what’s happening in the future. In fact, Gallup took a poll not too long ago and asked Americans what they would ask God if they had a chance. 31 percent said, “What does the future hold for me and my family?” 16 percent, “When will the world end?” 37 percent, “Will there ever be lasting world peace in the future?”

Nearly every single answer had to do with the eternity that God has set in man’s heart, with this sense there is somewhere we are going, there is destiny. Time is for a reason, and at the end of time, there is the biggest reason of all—when we get out of time, when we wake up after the dream. I think of life as the dream, and I think of death as waking up into reality.

So the perspective that Solomon encourages us to have—and he had for most of his life—was his times were in God’s hands. As the psalm says, “Teach me to number my days that I may apply my heart to wisdom.”

He realized that there is a time for this and a time for that. God has a heavenly calendar for each of us. Each day He writes what He has in mind on a clean white page. The art of life is getting to the end of each day and matching up what you’ve been doing with that day.

For you only have this day. You and I only have today. We do not have tomorrow, and we do not have yesterday. We only have today. And if God has numbered our days, I don’t know what number this is. It will be a different number for every single one of us sitting here.

For some of us, it might be the number before the end. But God knows what number. He has numbered our days. Therefore, we had better apply our heart to wisdom to know what to do with that piece of information.

That’s what wisdom is, remember—not accumulating facts, but knowing what to do with them and applying your heart to wisdom to use your days wisely. I always remember a little chorus I used to sing: “All my days and all my hours, all my will and all my powers, shall be Thine, dear Lord, shall be Thine, dear Lord.”

I used to sing that little chorus day after day. Even though life is fleeting—sometimes people describe it as a sigh, others a shadow, others a sprinter—the Bible is replete with pictures of how swift time is.

Even though time is swift, there is a time that God has allotted for events to happen to us. There’s a time to be born, there’s a time to die. There’s a time to kill and a time to heal. This word isn’t murder; it is to do with war.

We look at our television at the moment and we’re saying to ourselves, “Is this a time to use the weapons of war, or is it a time when we should be healingly, compromisingly, working diplomatically?” There is a time for war. I know that.

I remember being a little girl, hearing about what Hitler was doing. There was no question in Winston Churchill’s mind or the people in England, which I was a part, it was a time for war. It was a time for somebody to say, “Stop. You can’t run all over Poland like that.”

And so we signed a declaration of war. We went—England went to war with Poland. We declared war on Germany; Germany did not declare war on England because we decided this was a time for war. Sometimes in the history of Israel, there was a time for war and a time for peace.

There are times relationally: times for tears, times for laughter. There is a time for sexual involvement and a time for refraining. The King James says, “A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.” Love and hate are both needed—when to protest, when to be in happy agreement.

But the perspective is there is a proper time for every event, and we want to see it all. What he says is what we’ve got to do is stand back and see the whole picture. I remember being in Taiwan airport and getting on an escalator that went a long, long way. On the wall was a picture, a very famous picture that has been set up in Taiwan airport.

I can’t remember how many feet long it is, but it stretches the entire length—probably the length of this auditorium at least—hand-painted. It has been taken out to the museum and framed and put along this walkway. I used my video camera and went along that painting.

It was a very narrow corridor. You couldn’t see the whole picture. I said to Stuart, “The frustrating thing about this is I want to stand back and see the picture.” So I am in the process of getting someone to take that off my video camera and put it on one piece of paper. Then I will be able to see the picture.

Life is like getting on that escalator, and you can only see little bits because it’s narrow. What you want to do is stand back and see the whole picture. One day we will, and we’ll say, “It’s beautiful in His time.”

Maybe it’s not beautiful now. Maybe this little piece of the picture you’re seeing isn’t very beautiful at all. But in light of the whole, one day in eternity, in the future, it will be beautiful.

So the priorities of discretionary time are ordering the so much that I do, so the so much I do doesn’t order me. Numbering my days, applying my heart to wisdom. What we’ve got to do simply is to realize that the most important thing we can do is to live our lives in the light of eternity every single day.

Solomon was a very busy man. Most of his life, he was busy doing what he should have been doing. That wasn’t all spiritual. The things that we do will not be all spiritual. But the practical things we do have to be done in the light and perspective of Ecclesiastes.

For there’s a time for this and a time for that. But whatever I’m filling my time doing, do it knowing that it is part of the picture—the picture of your life. Every single one of us is going to have a canvas that long made up of the events of our life and what we did with them, how we reacted to them, and how we used them to know God and to testify to Him.

So discretionary time is every bit of time you have in the whole of your life. You have a choice what to do with it. You cannot have a meaningful, fulfilled life apart from connection with the God who gives you your days and counts out your moments.

I love that picture of Him counting out my moments and my days. He knows what number we’re on. We have no idea whatsoever. I am living in the light of eternity, for God has set eternity in my heart, and I have to know what to do.

Even decisions like what sort of quality stuff you buy—that is in the light of eternity, in the light of the whole picture, in the light of my stewardship of what God has given me to spend and to use. That’s how it is.

When I thought about how brief life was and how I need to live my life in the light of eternity, I thought of a poem I wrote:

My life is like a shadow, my God, reality,

The substance of my soul and only hope eternally.

My life is like a shuttle, swift to weave the strands

Of trivial moments spent in filling all the world’s demands.

My life is like a sprinter, too soon the line is reached,

And God asks me for my response to all that I’ve heard preached.

So brief and fleeting are my days, they pass just like a sigh,

Yet God says they’re important, and I’m not to question why.

He doesn’t give me more than these few days to worship Him,

Perhaps He knows I’d use them for my selfishness and sin.

And so my minutes, counted by the angels up above,

I’ve chosen to be filled with songs of joy for Him I love.

He’s the substance to my shadow, the hand that weaves my story,

And the one who gives me breath to reach the finish line in glory.

The minutes of the Master are precious worldly time,

That shall be filled with Jesus, who’s my reason and my rhyme,

My rhythm of sweet music and the hope of all that’s real.

So help me watch the moments that the devil loves to steal.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we think of the warning of the life of Solomon and how he used so much of his time in the light of eternity, and yet he allowed the devil to get a foothold in his life. He allowed his weakness to control him. He didn’t believe that he had the power anymore to say no.

Lord, we are very conscious that all of us have a weak point. All of us can allow the evil one to steal our moments, our precious moments that we should be using in the light of eternity, away. Don’t let us give him a foothold. Don’t let us let him put one strand around our life so that we’re fastened into our weakness, fastened into our addiction.

God help us to believe that You are bigger than the giant, that You can snap the strands, that You can break the cycle. That You can be for us what You were for David, and You can be for us what You could have been for Solomon if he would have only looked upwards, if he would have only repented, if he would have only come back to You.

And Lord, I pray that every single person here—young people who are remembering their Creator in the days of their youth as Solomon exhorted us quite rightly to do—these young women, I pray that they may finish well. I pray, looking down the line in the light of eternity, that they may finish strong—stronger than now, stronger than ever—and that they may not be ashamed to face You.

For our life is like a sigh, our life is like a sprinter, our life is like a shadow. And You are the reality. You are the substance. Help us to make sure we’re connected with You.

And so have the wisdom to use the time for this and the time for that, the discretionary time that You give us to choose the events that will fill it. Lord, help us to do our part and then as the events we cannot choose come along, help us to meet them with the eye of God in the light of eternity. We ask it for Your glory. Amen.