The Well-Timed Life (Luke)

Last Sunday after worship, we had some friends over who had a four month old baby boy. Since I am almost freakishly hungry to be a grandfather, I enjoyed the opportunity to hold and entertain the little guy. I sang him my “Get a Long, Little Doggie” song and bounced him on my knee in exactly the same way my girls used to enjoy until about a year ago. I am way good at that song! He loved it immensely – I was rewarded with several little boy smiles and warm snuggles. I thought back to what my father once mentioned to me about my little ones – “Enjoy your kids as long as you can, son. These days come and go quicker than you think.”

They certainly do, dad; they certainly do. We’ve enjoyed our girls so very much that, as many of you know, Monica and I have repeatedly toyed with the idea of adopting another child. But sadly, God has made clear to us that isn’t His plan for us. As the great Ecclesiastes teacher famously said, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” There is a time for everything and, for whatever reason, now is not the time for more kids.


Those days came and went much quicker than we thought. Time marched on.

This is Neil Peart. For thirty years or so, Neil has been drummer for the Canadian rock band Rush. He is a very successful man. Yet, in 1997, within a ten-month period, this man “suffered family losses so devastating they left him a ghost -- physically a man but with nothing.” His seventeen year old daughter was killed in a car accident and, shortly after that, his wife succumbed to cancer and grief. Time stopped. Life stopped. “No hope, meaning, faith, or desire to keep living. One year after the first tragedy, Neil Peart was choosing between life and his own death. Finally, all he could decide upon was motion. He got on his BMW R1100GS motorcycle, and over the next 14 months, rode 55,000 miles, in search of a reason to live.” Out of this experience was born a book called “Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road.” I haven’t finished the book yet, but I am already profoundly struck by the story. I am moved by yet another painful reminder that time and life are not ours to control.

Last week I turned 49 years old. Joking around with Monica, trying to get her to take me to Murray’s for my birthday dinner instead of Olive Garden, I announced to her that I was entering my 50th year. For a fiftieth celebration, certainly a more significant restaurant is called for; am I right? Fifty is an age with true gravitas and significance – much more meaningful than boring old forty-nine. I feel like I’m fifty. I like fifty. And I can be any age I want, right? Unfortunately, Monica says I can’t. We went to Olive Garden for lunch. She had a coupon.

We can play games with time. We can set our clocks backward in the fall and forward in the spring, but at the end of the day, we aren’t changing anything. Time doesn’t care about our sunlight opinions. Time doesn’t care if our clock battery dies. Time doesn’t care if our daughter was only seventeen or what we think of our birthday. We can play silly time games; we can pretend we will always have tomorrow, but we might not. Eventually all of us will not.

So what are we doing with whatever time Almighty God has allotted us?

For the next few weeks, here in the early part of our year together, I thought it would be good to think about Almighty God’s enormous three-fold call on our lives to be generous – generous with our time, generous with our talents and generous with our treasure.

But before we even begin our conversation, please allow me to clarify something at the outset. Our time, our talents and our treasure are not actually ours. We do understand that, right? Throughout this conversation, for simplicity sake, I’m going to refer to them as ours, but they really aren’t. Our time, talents and treasure are only on loan to us from God. Try as we might to hoard and control all these things for ourselves, we cannot. We all know that. Time, talent and treasure are trusts God calls us to manage. We will all give an accounting for what we have done with what has been entrusted to us. This is so very biblical and obvious; I’m not really interested in spending much time on it. I’m just going to assume we all understand this – at least on some level. I’m trusting God to reveal this foundational assumption to all of us.

Methodist Bishop Edwin Hughes once delivered a rousing sermon on "God's Ownership" that upset a rich man in his congregation. The wealthy man took the Bishop out for lunch, and walked him through his elaborate gardens, woodlands, and farm. “Now are you going to tell me,” he demanded when the tour was completed, “that all this land does not belong to me?” Bishop Hughes smiled and suggested, “Ask me that question in a hundred years.”

We all understand this, don’t we? I don’t need to talk about that…

I want to jump right into the heart of things. What are we doing with our time? How should we worship God with our time? What does it mean to be generous with time?

I had a hard time settling on a Scripture passage this week. I was pulled in a bunch of different directions. There is that Mary/Martha argument in Luke 10, where Mary is praised for spending her time at Jesus feet and “choosing the better way.” That’s good stuff! But then I thought I should wander around in Ecclesiastes 3 with its famous, beautiful “there is a time for everything” conversation. There is certainly no more balanced view of time than that passage. But in the end, I found myself simply and slowly reading through the entire Gospel of Luke on Tuesday afternoon, asking one simple, pregnant question – how did our LORD Jesus manage his time? I hope you’ll agree Jesus was perfectly generous with His time on earth. But what did that time generosity look like? Beyond platitude and vague generalities, what can we learn about properly and generously managing our time simply by studying how Jesus managed His?

As I read, I made three interesting observations about the time management of Jesus.

Time For Wilderness

My first observation is a strange one. Have you ever considered how much time Jesus set aside in his life for wilderness? How much of Jesus’ time on earth was spent in relative obscurity? How much of Jesus’ time on earth was spent more or less in the wilderness, waiting for all God’s prophesied plans and preparations to properly converge? Jesus was about 33 years old when He died on the cross, rose again and ascended into heaven. But only the final three years of that lifespan was spent in public ministry – less than 10 percent of His total time on earth. Jesus spent far more time as a carpenter than as a teacher.

No disrespect, LORD, but isn’t that just a terribly inefficient use of our Savior’s earthly time? How many more people could Jesus have healed or taught if He’d skipped some of His wilderness time and gotten an earlier start on ministry? How much more prepared would the disciples have been if Jesus would have spent ten years with them instead of three? Why all this time in wilderness and obscurity? And then, when the right time finally did come for Jesus to step forward into ministry, how utterly ironic is it that the very first place the Spirit led him was into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. I don’t understand why God chose to do things this way, but Jesus generously made time for wilderness, for obscurity and waiting.

Do you suppose it might be possible God is calling us to generously, selflessly and very faithfully lavish most of our time away in ways the world may well never see? Is it possible that our wilderness time is not wasted time? Is it possible that waiting time is not worthless time? Based on the life of Jesus, I can draw no other conclusion. Jesus made time for the wilderness.

I’m going to be thinking about Jesus’ wilderness use of time for quite a while…

Time For God

The second observation I made as I walked through Luke’s gospel was that Jesus made regular time for God. Jesus generously made time for God, especially when things got most hectic in His life and ministry. Near the end of His life, as went up on the Mount of Olives to pray, it is very revealing that Luke says in Luke 22:39: “Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives.” And what makes this generous, regular time with God most interesting is that Jesus was God. This was the very second person of the Trinity here; obviously refusing to content Himself with quickly muttered sentence prayers crammed between important stuff. If our LORD Jesus felt the need to generously make time for God in this way, how much more should we?

How generously do we make time in our lives for God? How generously do we make time available for Almighty God to speak to us through His Word? How hungrily do we listen for the still small voice of His Spirit as we move through our day, as we join together with other believers in worship or serve God in our own unique ways? How generous are we with God?

This is not about paying God back, earning our way into God’s favor or legalistically satisfying empty religious requirements. We can’t pay God back. We don’t need to earn our way into His favor because, first of all, we couldn’t anyway and, secondly and more importantly, we are already in His favor! God isn’t interested in our legalistic lists of religious requirements.

Your Father loves you. Your Father longs to spend time with you – talking about the myriad details of your life or talking about nothing at all. Your Father just misses you. Jesus generously made time for His Father because He loved His Father. He loved being with Him.

How generous are we with our Father? How much time do we make for God?

Time For People

And then we come to the third and most blindingly obvious observation about the generous time management behavior of Jesus. He made time for wilderness, time for His Father and then, perhaps most gorgeously of all, He generously made time for people.

He made time for a demon-possessed man hanging around outside the synagogue in Capernaum, screaming at the top of his miserable, terrified voice. He made time for Simon’s mother and her fever. And when news got around about that healing, he made time for all the other people that came after. He made time for people even when he wanted to be alone.

He made time for a fisherman named Simon, calling him to catch people instead of fish. He made time for a man covered in nasty leprosy, healing him and sending him quietly away. He made time for some fellas who busted through a roof to lower a paralyzed friend to Jesus.

Jesus made time for a hated Roman centurion and his sickly servant – even praising and singling out this outcast soldier for his outstanding faith. A little while later, as he walked along the road to the town of Nain, Jesus even made time for a dead man being carried out for burial – mercifully raising this only child from the dead and giving him back to his grieving mother.

Jesus generously made time for a tearful, sinful woman who lovingly anointed his feet – protecting her from all those who considered themselves better than her.

Jesus made time for a synagogue ruler, whose little girl lay dying. And on his way to care for that little girl, Jesus made time for a woman with a bleeding problem who reached out to touch him along the way, risking a beating for making the Teacher ceremonially unclean.

Jesus constantly made time for his disciples, teaching them and sending them out into the world to powerfully and dramatically minister in his name. Jesus made time for five thousand plus hungry people on a hillside, feeding them when no one else thought doing so was possible. Jesus made time for a simple woman named Mary who longed to learn from him, even though no good Rabbi of Jesus’ day was in the habit of taking women as disciples.

And perhaps most amazingly of all, Jesus even made time for his enemies. Jesus had many enemies – one of the most astounding characteristics of Luke’s gospel is the bluntness and abrasiveness of Jesus. He had many enemies. Yet how many times in the Gospel of Luke do we see Jesus eating a meal in the home of these same problematic people? Jesus made time for people who could do nothing for Him and many who were actively working against him. Jesus made time for tax collectors, Samaritans and sinners of all stripes with whom his association would taint his own ministry – even a greedy thief among his inner circle who would eventually betray him. Our LORD Jesus even made time, as he hung horribly brutalized and dying on a Roman cross, struggling for every breath, for a nasty thief desperate for escape.

Jesus made time for all people. Jesus even made time for me.

How generously do we make time for people? And what sorts of people do we make time for – people we enjoy, who might benefit us in some way or people tainted in the eyes of the world. Do we make time for people no one else is willing to make time for? 

We don’t own our time. Twelve noon is coming today whether we want it to come or not. Our Heavenly Father is chuckling at the wrist watches we all just looked at! The great Day of the LORD is fast approaching whether we are ready or not. How is God speaking to all of us today about the time He has given us to manage? Are we valuing time spent in the wilderness? Are we generous in our time with God? Are we generous in the time we give to others?

May we generously learn to give back the time we ourselves have been generously given by God! May our lives truly be time very well spent!

Amen.