S5 E7 - Your Remaining Balance of Time

My son turned 5 years old today, and it seems like the last five years have just flown by. Life has a funny way of passing us by. A good friend reminded me last night that time is the only currentcy we spend without knowing our remaining balance, so use it wisely. 

Are we vigilant and intentional with our time? If not, we might end up losing and never getting back the precious time we have on those we love the most. Use your time wisely, and start giving it to the ones who need it most. 

#SetYourMindAbovePodcast

Transcript

What if I told you that God could be seen in the most ordinary things every day? 

What if I told you that every day, ordinary events could teach us extraordinary eternal truths? Would you believe me? 

 Welcome back to season 5 of the Set Your Mind Above Podcast! My name is BJ Sipe, and I am a Christian, a preacher, a husband, and a father. And I’m excited to share a few moments together with you learning some important lessons from the simplest things. Let’s grow together! 

We’re back after a brief recess from the podcast! The last couple of weeks have been an absolute whirlwind for my family, and many of you are already quite aware. Two weekends ago, my wife, my youngest daughter and I all flew out to Oregon to attend the funeral of my late grandmother Eva Williams. It was so wonderful to be together with family and support one another as we simultaneously grieved her loss while all the while celebrated her victory even in death! God be praised! Then this past weekend, I had the blessing of traveling to the smokey mountains to attend a conference that was titled, “Act Like Men” – and I will have a little more to share on that in just a few moments. That too likewise was an incredible, challenging, and edifying experience. To quote one man who was asked if he’d made a lot of new friends, “No, much more, I’ve gained a lot of new brothers”. 

But today, all of our attention has been elsewhere – because today was a very special day for our family. That is because March 14 is our son’s birthday. His fifth birthday to be exact, which is really hard for me to completely wrap my mind around. He has been very excited about it, as all young children are with their birthdays. He’s so funny, earlier this week apparently Kylie was driving with him in the car, and they happened to pass the local hospital where he was born, and he goes, “Hey! That’s where I was born! I like driving past here, because it reminds me of the first time that I met you, Mom!” Hilarious. He’s a goofball just like his dad, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in a lot of other ways too. For example, earlier this week we had asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday and gave him some options that included things like a game arcade, the zoo, or the ark encounter to name a few. But without hesitation, Dane said, “I want to go hiking again!” That’s my boy. So that is exactly what we did today. We took the whole family out to the Pinnacles in Berea, KY and enjoyed an absolutely beautiful, summerlike day hiking nearly 4 miles with three young children. And they did fantastic! As I watched Dane jump from rock to rock and trounce down the trail, hiking stick in hand, I remembered how just a short time ago he was just learning to walk. It feels like I blinked, and the past five years just flew past so quickly. Life has a funny way of passing us by. 

My mind would have already been on this reality regarding time because of my son’s turning five, but to really drive home this lesson my dear friend Jeff Cooper happened to pass along the following thought late last night: ‘Time is the only currency that you spend without ever knowing your remaining balance…use it wisely.’  I’ll tell you what, that smacked me right between the eyes, and for a lot of different reasons. I told you we would return back to my time spent at the men’s lectureship last weekend, so let’s do that now. Our theme was, “Act Like Men” and our primary text was taken out of 1 Corinthians 16:13-14, which says the following: “Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.” 

While there are so many components of this passage I would love to break down further, we want to especially key in on the very first statement from Paul, “Be on the alert”. That is to say, we are called to vigilance. Someone who is vigilant is someone who carefully keeps watch over and guards something. Something that is vulnerable, something that is important, something that can be lost or destroyed if we are not careful. We could probably make an incredibly long list of things that come to our minds that we must be vigilant with, such as with right doctrine, or with temptation. But of all the things I believe we are called to be vigilant with, perhaps equally as important would be the way that we must be on the alert with the way we spend and use our time. Let’s examine why I am convinced this is so important. 

First, because our time is in great demand. There are so many things vying for our attention in our lives – and some of them are very important, aren’t they? A healthy marriage takes a considerable amount of time spent together. Our children need our attention, and a lot of it, in play, instruction, and discipline. Our church families, if they are to model the first century church practice, are not simply together for a few hours each week to worship, but together frequently spending time with one another. However, it seems that for many the majority of their time is not given to these kinds of important things, but rather all kinds of other things clamoring for our attention – especially entertainment. Television, movies, radio, video games, sports, or other hobbies are common aspects of each of our lives – but how much of our lives? While these things in and of themselves are not necessarily wrong, they have to the potential to frequently suck important time away from the most important things in our life and distract us. 

There is a phrase found in both Colossians 4:5, as well as Ephesians 5:16, and it is the following exhortation from the Apostle Paul, to “make the best use of the time.” In other words, we are called to be intentional with our time. As the old expression goes, “I’m just killing time.” But if we knew exactly how valuable our time truly was, maybe I would be a whole lot more careful with it. Intentionality with our time is of paramount importance to these important areas of our life – especially when it comes to our families and our faith. A husband or wife that is not intentional with the time they have with their spouse will find themselves overtime drifting apart rather than drawing closer to one another. They neglect each other and give their time and attention to far inferior things than one another, and before long, you’ve become little more than roommates or ships passing in the night.  A parent that is not intentional with the time they have with their children will not know their children as they ought to, and as a result is not able to connect with them in the ways they so desperately need you to. Children are desperately in need of the time and attention of their parents, and neglect can cause an incredible amount of damage both emotionally and spiritually. Our church families grow and build trust when we spend time together in each other’s homes, but when no time or attention is given to one another, our relationships can become stagnant, shallow, and as a result fail to produce the spiritual fruit that God designed a tightly knit spiritual family to do. These, and many others, are an ongoing battle for our time. The question I must ask myself and that I ask you today is this: are you being vigilant with it? Can I truly say that I am making the best use of my time and being intentional with it? 

Second, we must recognize that not only is our time in great demand, but it is also limited. There are only so many hours in a day, and as they old expression goes, ‘you can’t beg, steal, borrow, or make time.’ But even more than this, we have to recognize that our time is limited in the sense that one day we won’t have any more left. Hear the words of the Psalmist and take them to heart, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12) Attributed as a prayer of Moses, this psalm says something important here that I want us to recognize. What is going to help to enable us to use our time wisely and become more intentional with it? By learning to number our days. Every day we spend our time doing this or that, but if it was revealed to you just how much time you had left on this earth, how differently would you spend that time? I fear that sometimes we spend our time frivolously because we feel like we have all the time in the world, but in actuality we might be quite close to a zero balance. James reminds us in chapter 4 and verse 14: “Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” 

I don’t know how much time I have left, nor do I know how much time those that I love dearly have left either. It may be that tomorrow is the day that the Lord calls me home, or my wife, or even one of my children. We assume otherwise and then presume upon said time clearly by the way in which we spend it so poorly. But when we actually stop to take this seriously, and really consider that none of us truly knows the remaining balance of time any of us have left, that should give us pause. Pause enough to stop, reflect, and then make a conscious decision to start being more wise with the ways in which we spend our time – both to what we do and with whom we do it. My friends, time is ticking…so what will you do with the time that’s left?  

This has been the Set Your Mind Above Podcast, season 5 episode 7 – and I’m so thankful that we had this time to grow together! A new episode is dropped every Friday, so be sure to tune in next week.  Also, if you’re able to, go ahead and like and subscribe to the podcast, give us a good rating or most importantly share it with someone else – it would help to reach others that I never could alone.  And more than anything, always remember the following: know that I love you, that God loves you, and may we all each and every day set our minds above.