Psalm 90
A man once had a conversation with God.
He said, “God, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
God replied, “Certainly not, my son, ask away.”
“How long is a thousand years?”
“For me,” God answered, “a thousand years is like a minute.”
The man then said, “That’s fascinating. And, for you, how much is a million dollars?”
“For me,” God replied, “a million dollars is like one dollar.”
“Really?” said the man. “Then can you give me a dollar?”
“Certainly,” God answered, “just wait a minute.”
The language of time and money is interesting. We spend money and we spend time. We can save money and we can save time. We waste money and we waste time. However, while we can make money, we cannot make time. We can choose not to spend money. Time does not give us that option. Time is spent whether we want it to or not. We cannot stop time. You can exert all the willpower you want and time will keep on ticking, relentlessly, inevitably.
It has been __ seconds since I began this sermon and it is now __, __, __ seconds. Time does not slow down. Time does not stop so we can catch up. I know that Einstein said that as we approach the speed of light, time will slow down and that if we can exceed the speed of light, time will move backwards. But for we mere, earthborn, non-Einsteinian mortals, time moves steadily, relentlessly forward.
I went on line to see how long a statistical survey says I should live. Depending on which survey I took, I got a different answer, but the consensus seems to be that I will live to be 90 years old. If this is so and I die on my birthday, I will die on December 30, 2040. If that is so, then I will have lived for 32,873 days. As of today I have already lived 19,191 days leaving me just 13,682 days to go and I have already lost 9 ½ hours of this day.
I heard several years ago about what they call a life-expectancy clock, or in more direct terms, a death clock. You fill out a survey about your health, habits and history of your family and they figure out when you are expected, statistically, to die. Based on that information, they send you a clock that ticks backwards letting you know how many years, months, days, minutes and seconds you have yet to live. (I’ve always figured this would be a marvelous pre-evangelistic tool. “What’s that?” “Oh, that’s a clock that counts backwards telling me how much more time I am expected to live.” “Really!” and now the conversation is directed towards what really matters in life.)
Does that sound bizarre, macabre to you? Thus far, that has been the response from every person I talked to about this clock. It may seem weird to you, but listen to the wisdom of Job, David and Moses.
Job 14
Man’s days are determined;
you have decreed the number of his months
and have set limits he cannot exceed.
David in Psalm 39
4 “Show me, O LORD, my life’s end
and the number of my days;
let me know how fleeting is my life.
Moses in Psalm 90:12
Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
There is wisdom in thinking and knowing that we will not live forever. No rational person will deny that his or her life will one day come to an end, but many live their lives in a pretense that this will not be the case. While everyone will agree that life is finite, not many like to think about it and live with that reality.
Not only is time limited in terms of how long we will live, but we are limited by having just 24 hours in a day and those 24 hours often do not seem like enough time to get everything done that we want to get done. You need to spend an hour a day with God, praying and reading your Bible. Language study demands two hours a day, an hour for French and an hour for Arabic. That brings us up to three hours a day. Then there is the matter of exercise. An hour a day for exercise is required to live a healthy life. After exercising, you need to shower and get dressed and find the car keys. There goes another hour. We need another hour a day to read and respond to emails. Then there are the daily errands that must be done. Going to the bank, paying a phone bill or electric bill, getting some document. An hour a day on average for this is not too little. If I want to buy and register a car, it might take two days to do just that. This brings us up to seven hours. Shopping requires another hour. And then we add on work. Eight hours sounds about right and now we are at sixteen hours a day. If you are married, you need a couple hours with your spouse and a couple more hours with your children. If you are single, you need that time with friends. We’re up to twenty hours a day and still need time to eat and sleep, not counting the time it takes to get from here to there by car, bus, taxi or walking. We race from here to there and in all of this, where is the time to do nothing but sit and relax? Reflect?
Where is the time to lay on our back and look up at the birds in the sky? When do we have time to lay and watch the stars at night? When do we have time to watch the behavior of insects? When do we have time to think?
Time is limited. It is a finite quantity. It keeps slipping away. We are now _ minutes and _ seconds into this sermon. Those minutes and seconds are lost, never to be recovered. We can’t retrieve them. We can’t go back to the past. Only the future awaits us and we know that our earthly future is limited. We are racing ahead only one day to slam into a brick wall, ending our time on earth.
So what does this mean? There are two ways of approaching the finite limits of time. One is to try to be as efficient as possible and make good use of every second. Always take a shortcut to save time. Push away non-essentials to make way for essentials. Never waste any time. Time is a tyrant that must be resisted. Life becomes a race against time. This is the view of time that leads to ulcers and heart attacks and other stress-related diseases.
The second way of approaching the finite limits of time is to live each second fully and expand the seconds to make them meaningful. The goal is not to be as efficient as possible. The goal is to live life as fully as possible, which may mean going the long way around from time to time.
In our series of sermons on intimacy with God, we are looking this morning at the matter of time and how time affects the intimacy of our relationship with God.
I think it is fairly obvious that in order to have an intimate relationship with someone, you need to spend time with them. How intimate can you be with someone you see or email just once every couple years? Think back to friends you had when you were younger. If you were married more than ten years ago, think of the people you invited to be your ushers or bridesmaids. These were the friends closest and most dear to you. Where are they now? After just ten years, you have probably lost touch with some of them. The friends with whom I was close in college and seminary are distant friends now. I have no idea where many of them are. For some, we may still have affection for each other, but I do not know the significant issues in their lives. I have a more intimate relationship with people I’ve known for just a year than I do with these friends that I have known for twenty or thirty years. Why? It is because I have been spending time with them.
So, if we want to have an intimate relationship with God, we must spend time with him. That we all know. But does it matter what kind of time we spend with God?
Let’s say Bill made arrangements to meet a friend at a café. Bill dashes in, sits down and says, “Hi George. I’ve just got 15 minutes and then have to leave.” So he orders his tea and croissant and starts right in. “It’s going to be a busy day today. I have four appointments plus a lot of paper work. I’m feeling a bit depressed because of problems I’m having with my family. I’m tired because I stayed up late last night watching a movie. This is a delicious croissant. Oh my, look at the time. I said I’d stay for fifteen minutes but it is already 12 and that’s pretty close. Good-by.”
How intimate a relationship do you think Bill can build with George? He never stopped talking to hear what George had to say. He was not even present. It seems that his mind was already racing ahead to the rest of the day. There was no sense that he enjoyed being with George. He had made an appointment, but his heart did not seem to be in it.
It seems that this is how it has often been for me in my relationship with God. I have a program to follow. Pray a quick prayer, read a couple chapters of Scripture, pray for people in my life and then run off to get on with the day. And then I ask myself why it is I don’t have a more intimate relationship with God.
Jesus, in addition to being our Savior, modeled for us how we ought to live a Christian life. While Jesus was God in the flesh, he was also human and the marvelous things Jesus did resulted from his extraordinary relationship with God. Even Jesus had to work at this relationship. It did not come naturally, without any effort. The Gospels mention several times that Jesus made an effort to get away from the crowds and find a place where he could be alone with God.
Mk 1:35
35 Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.
Matthew 14:13
When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.
Jesus took time to get away when the crowds around him were pressing in on him and he needed time alone. He took time after hearing of the death of his cousin, John the Baptist, to get away and grieve for his loss.
When I read the book of Acts and come to the vision Peter had from God while praying on his roof, I have a longing to hear from God as Peter did. But how often do I take time to be away from the daily tasks that consume me to be alone with God and hear from him?
Paul and Barnabas were sent out on Paul’s first missionary journey as a result of the prayer and worship of their fellowship. Paul received guidance from God as to where he should go and where he should not go because of the times he spent with God.
Hearing from God, being in an intimate relationship with God does not happen without spending time with God.
I think it is harder for us today to have an intimate relationship with God than it was in the time of the disciples. Let me tell you why I think that. We live in a high-tech world and the rate of advancement of our technology is geometric. The pace of life is so much faster just because of the technology we have.
When I leave the US to come to Morocco, I leave from my parent’s home in New Jersey and make the two hour car ride to the airport. My father and I talk but we also have the radio on listening to music. Maybe I play for him a CD of some old comedy group or some music he likes from the 30s or 40s. I get to the airport, check in and wait an hour or two until I board the plane. The airport is full of stores selling books and magazines, clothing, souvenirs of New York and lots of places to eat and drink. So I wander around until it is time to board the plane. Once on board, there are movies to watch, music to listen to. We fly across the Atlantic and twelve hours after I left home, I am in Casablanca and heading for Rabat. I turn my cell phone on and begin making and receiving phone calls about what is going on and what needs to be done.
Depending on the time of year, I am four or five hours ahead of my body clock and so I am exhausted and need to take a nap to catch up. And within a day or two, I am back in the swing of things. Thousands of miles and four time zones in just half a day.
In contrast, think about the Apostle Paul on his journeys through what is today Greece and Turkey. Paul set off with his companions, walking, or from time to time, riding a donkey. They walked about twenty miles or thirty kilometers a day. To get from city to city, they had to spend a lot of days doing this. What did they do as they walked along? They had no walkman, no tapes, no radio, no CDs. So they talked. They observed the world around them, walking, not zipping by at 100 kilometers an hour. They had periods of silence when they reflected on things. Maybe Paul composed letters in his mind as he walked. Maybe he reflected on Scripture and thought through some difficult issues he was facing. They stopped somewhere along the road for lunch and rested. At night they laid around a campfire, told stories, sang songs, discussed theology and other issues, and then they looked at the stars until they fell asleep.
There was a lot of time to think and reflect, without the distractions technology offers. There was a lot of opportunity to observe and ask questions. With the pace of life today and with all the technology that bombards our ears, where do we find the time to do these things?
If I want to have time with God, I have to fit it in with all the busyness around me. I have a hard time seeing the world when I travel at high speeds through it. I go from Rabat to Fes in two hours, missing all the life that lies between here and there. I listen to tapes as I go, missing two hours of silence in which God could speak to me.
This is not an excuse. I’m sure that contemporaries of Paul had distractions that kept them from relating to God, but I do believe it has become harder for us because of the technology that surrounds us, picks us up and carries us from here to there at faster speeds than is good for us.
Technology is not an excuse, but it does mean we have to work harder and more intentionally at spending time with God. We have to put away the TV and computer games and CDs and cassette tapes, turn off the cell phone and take time to be with God.
I think it is important that we take some time each day to be with God. We struggle with this, at least most of us do. But we need to persevere. Even if we only have fifteen minutes, we need to work to make that time more than a quick formality. Even if there is only a brief amount of time, that time can be made to be meaningful. We can read and pray and keep on praying and reflecting the rest of the day.
Some time every day is important, but I want to urge you this morning to consider something much more radical than a bit of time each day.
Even in the relatively simple days of the Old and New Testament times, people made efforts to get away. God instituted three annual festivals that required people to leave their homes and work and go to Jerusalem to worship. These were Passover in the spring, Pentecost in the summer and Tabernacles in the fall. Psalms 120 through 135 are called the Psalms of Ascent because these were chanted as the pilgrims made their way up to Jerusalem to give joyful thanks to their God.
Three times a year, God’s people took time to push aside their regular schedule and focus on their relationship with God.
I want to suggest that this would be a good pattern for us to follow – if we really do want to have an intimate relationship with God. In addition to our daily time with God, I want to suggest that we take a day each quarter, one day each three months and set that aside to be with God. (I know that Israel had just three festivals a year but on the other hand, their journey to Jerusalem and back was a matter of a couple weeks, not just one day. So adding a day a year does not seem excessive.)
The idea of spending an entire day with God might seem intimidating to you so in the bulletin, there is a suggested schedule to follow.
A Day with God
(a modest proposal)
Find a place where you can be alone and uninterrupted, such as a park or retreat center.
Spend a brief time the night before to get ready, to ask God to bless the day, and to tell him you want to devote the day to him. This day is your gift to God, but even more, it is a gift God wants to give you. What do you need from the Lord: a sense of healing and forgiveness? Conviction for an apathetic heart? Compassion? A renewed sense of mission? Ask him for this.
Arrange the day around listening to God. The following format is adapted from Glandion Carney’s book, The Spiritual Formation Toolkit.
8:00—9:00 Prepare your mind and heart, take a walk, or do whatever will help you set aside concerns over tasks and responsibilities. Try to arrange your morning so you can remain in silence from the time you awaken.
9:00—11:00 Read and meditate on Scripture, taking time to stop to reflect when God seems to be speaking to you through the text.
11:00—12:00 Write down responses to what you have read. Speak to God about them.
12:00—1:00 Eat lunch and take a walk, reflecting on the morning.
1:00—2:00 Take a nap.
2:00—3:00 Set goals that emerge from the day’s reflection.
3:00—4:00 Write down these goals and other thoughts in a journal. You may want to do this in the form of a letter to God. Prepare to reenter society.
I used to take three days each year and go off to a Catholic retreat center. I fasted (and ran five miles each day – something I would not do now) and spent my time reading Scripture, praying, listening and reflecting. I took walks. I journaled. These were significant times for me but I have not done this for many years now.
But I am convicted that I need again to do this. One day each quarter is not too much and stretching one of those days to three is also not excessive.
I am convinced, because of the fast-paced, technological world we live in, that we have to do something like this. We have to work hard to find time to be alone with God.
Do you want to have an intimate relationship with God? It won’t come without your putting forth effort. God wants an intimate relationship with you. We’ve talked about that earlier in the series. But you have to put forth effort as well.
Make a decision. Get out your calendar and plan one day each quarter when you will have a date with God. Don’t put off your daily time, but take a day and get away. Make the effort and you will be rewarded.
