Redeem the Time (Part 2)

Redeem the Time because Life is Short…

Somebody once said, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what should be done today because procrastination is the thief of time.”  What he meant by that I think is that we usually procrastinate when we have the time to do what’s needed but we’d rather not, thus we put off to another time which may never come what we had the time to do today and in this way procrastination robs us of time.

In the Ephesian letter Paul calls the days that they were living in evil; he said, “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”  What’s Paul saying?  Well, without denying God’s sovereignty over all of His creation I think that Paul is drawing our attention to the fact that we live in a delicate world.

Men still choose to do evil instead of good. Sometimes their choices just affect themselves, and sometimes they affect others, sometimes many others. On 9/11 several men boarded planes which crashed into the Trade towers, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, killing thousands out of hate. And on any given night someone carelessly chooses to drink and drive, wrecks and kills someone; or another gets angry and takes another man’s life, etc.; wars and rumors of war, famines, pestilence’s, earthquakes in various places (Matthew 24:6-8), hurricanes, typhoons, tornado’s, blistering heat, freezing cold, ‘global warming’, hate, greed, injustice, etc. – we live in a delicate world.

We are obviously not in full control of our time here on earth. You could avoid people, traffic, cities and still be a victim of someone else’s careless or violent act. You may live a morally pure life and still contract AIDS from a blood transfusion during surgery (all though that is less likely today than in recent years). You could drive carefully and cautiously and still be a party in a fatality wreck because of ‘the other guy’ – and so on.

It should alarm us that life isn’t nearly as predictable as we would like it to be. Likewise, it should be just as alarming to understand that the threads that moor each of our lives in time can be easily broken by any one of a number of things. It should alarm us that life can end at any moment, ours or someone else’s, and that their eternal destiny hangs in the hope that someone tells them about Jesus, and that they believe.  These alarms should move us to act, to listen, to care, and to get involved in the lives of others; they should stir us to urgency regarding the sharing of the gospel.