Redeeming the Time

Flipping through a lovely Swiss calendar to enjoy the new collection of views—snow-covered roofs, spring blossoms along tree-bordered lakes, cows grazing in high Alpine fields, yellow and orange autumn leaves among the dark evergreens—one is apt to skip the evidence of clearly marked weeks and days, to forget the harsh fact that there are only twelve months in a year. The first page of 1977 is already half over, and if you make notes on the days that are already promised or scheduled, the weeks ahead may already be well marked up. The calendar hanging in your kitchen, or by your desk, or beside your bed, or by the telephone, wherever you keep your reminder of filled up time, is a vivid demonstration to you of finiteness.

What are we talking about when we sing, or say, or pray, “I’ll go where you want me to go, dear Lord; I’ll do what you want me to do”? Knowing we can do only one thing at a time, and be in one place at a time, do we feel trapped by our finiteness? Do we look at the calendar with a feeling of despair? Or is there something different for those who have come into me family of the living God, with real access to the unlimited, infinite God who also is personal?

With a new year’s calendar still fresh in our possession, it is a good time to be practical rather than theoretical in checking up on ourselves. God, who is infinite, made us to be finite, limited. We who are made in God’s image to think and act and feel, to have ideas and choice, to produce creative works, to be able to communicate in words as well as in music and other expressive forms, to love our fellow human beings as well as to love God, were not made to be able to do everything. The fall of man has added hindrances that result in physical, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional weaknesses, but the fall did not make us finite. Sin brought about the changes that are outlined to us in Genesis, but sin did not bring about finiteness. One day when Jesus comes back, and we are changed to have bodies like his resurrected body, we will be released from the struggles that are our added hindrances today, but we will still be finite.

However, finite creatures, back in fellowship with the infinite God, are given access to ways of expanding their usefulness. It is as if a fence were removed, opening up fields and woods for exploration to one who had been stopped at the edge.

Recall what a seed of corn looks like, all dried up, and realize that this is what we look like to our loving Heavenly Father. Think of what will happen if that seed is placed in prepared soil, lovingly patted down, and watered. Follow along in your imagination the bursting of the shell, the coming forth of a green shoot, the fruitful appearance of the ears of corn. But if that seed is left on your desk, or in a bottle in the kitchen, then it is worth nothing. “A famine? Starving people? But there are seeds, there is dried corn ready to be planted.” “Yes but spring is over, and winter is here.”

“Verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). One certain way of expanding the usefulness of a life is to bury that life, to lose it in order to find it. This cannot be merely theoretical, something that is sung about and prayed about for a lifetime without a practical outworking. There must be some points when we deliberately “die” to the thing that would be the logical pattern of success, or ease and quietness, or humbleness, or power. God has not given us an easy formula of this “death” to self, of what it means to “fall into the ground and die”; but he means us to have practical moments of bowing before him and letting the soil be patted over our heads. It must take place for each of us during the months of 1977.

What would happen in our own countries, or the countries where we have been sent by the Lord, if all Christians honestly “died” in this fashion, over and over again? What a bringing forth of fruit there would be! Someone would break a hairdresser’s appointment to say, “Why, yes, do come this morning and we’ll talk over your problem.” Another person would put aside the treasured private family day to include another family for that time. Some couple would recognize that their marriage was about to crack and would put aside everything else to go off alone and spend time in prayer, asking for the Lord’s will even if it meant a new start in new surroundings. Some family would move from a city situation, where the children were under terrible temptations, to the country, and another family would move from a quiet country spot into the heart of the city because the Lord had clearly led them there. For some it would mean putting aside the evening newspaper to spend time answering a three-year-old’s questions. For others it would mean being willing to endanger a job by inviting business associates to an evening of discussion of serious realities. For one it might mean a willingness to be a dentist instead of a missionary, for another the determination to live by prayer in a very difficult family situation.

Moment by moment there are opportunities to “fall into the ground and die” rather than to push ahead in our own strength. But hour after hour, these opportunities to be “doers of the Word” rather than simply “hearers of the Word” are pushed aside. So often it is more comfortable to go to a weekly Bible class and enjoy good teaching and fellowship rather than to “die” to that particular comfort and spend the time talking to a person in a nursing home or a prison, or a neighbor who is depressed and needs loving help.

There is a second way of multiplying the usefulness of these finite bodies of ours. God has given us access to his infiniteness—through prayer. We can communicate with the infinite God and call upon him to do that which we cannot do. What a crashing through of the fences of limitedness as we make our requests known to the unlimited God. “He that cometh unto God must believe that he is, and that he is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him.” Do we act as if we believe?

The Lord has given us a clear command: “[Pray] always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and [watch] thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints” (Eph. 6:18). We are to pray while we are buried. We are to pray when he is bringing forth the ears of corn. We are to pray when Satan is casting fiery darts. We are to pray “without ceasing,” on all of the days on the calendar. We Christians with a year’s calendar in our hands are looking at history that we can affect by acting upon the Word of God on the specific dates ahead of us.

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