Ep. 033 The Final Countdown

Welcome to the Potter's House, Salmon Arm podcast.

We are a Bible-believing church located in beautiful British Columbia, Canada.

We are proudly part of the Christian Fellowship Ministries with 3,000 churches around the

world.

We are a church focused on world evangelism, discipleship, and church planting.

Here we will share recent sermons from PHSA Church and other sermons from throughout our

fellowship.

I am Pastor David Bigford and I will be your host for this podcast.

I thank you for listening today and we hope these messages are a blessing to you and bring

you closer to God.

Hello and welcome back to the podcast.

My name is David Bigford.

I'm the pastor here at the Potter's House in Salmon Arm.

Today I have a message that I've put together.

It's called the Final Countdown or the Ever-Running Clock.

Our text that we're going to be working off of today is James 4, verses 13 through 17.

James 4:13–17

Before we dive into this, just a little bit of a fun story.

I had been wanting to do this hike locally here for months, actually probably over a

year.

It's called the Large Hill Traverse.

If you're in the area, you know that this can be a cross-country skiing route or it

can be a mountain biking route.

I decided that I've been thinking about it for a long time.

I wanted to do this track as a hike.

It's about 40 kilometers long from Sycamore to Salmon Arm.

It does go over or near a high point in the terrain.

Because we had fairly little snow this year, I thought, okay, well, let's give it a shot

and see if it skirts the snow line.

It was great for the first 20 kilometers into the hike, but as I progressed through the hike

and I got past that 20 kilometer mark, I started seeing a little bit of snow.

It didn't give me really any concern.

But before I knew it, I was knee deep and then thigh deep into some pretty, pretty soft snow

and ended up spending a good six kilometers just post-holing through some pretty heavy

snow.

I was planning this hike as a one day.

I had some safety gear, so I wasn't really in any real danger.

But man, it started hailing and it was a bit rainy and it was a trial.

As you're hiking through this and this goes into the story a little bit, I started thinking

about the time running out.

I was watching my watch and I started watching my average speed just clicking away and lowering

because I was keeping pretty good pace of time.

Now, mind you, I have a pack, so I'm rucking.

It's not super heavy, but I was able to average about a four and a half kilometer per hour

clip, even with some pretty good elevation gain.

But as I hit that snow, it just started slowing down, slowing down, slowing down.

So I was getting pretty worried.

I wasn't going to be able to get back in time.

I was getting tired because of the postholing and luckily, as I remember crying out, Lord,

I'm going to need some help.

I'm going to need to bail off this hike and just go down below the snow level.

And it was at that point that a good Samaritan was there.

The person was looking for their dog and was able to give me a ride to get me back on track

past the snow level and further down the trail and, yes, they found their dog.

So that story ended great, but it was just a tremendously powerful time.

That's one of the reasons why I like doing extreme solo backpacking and hiking and stuff

of that nature because when you're pushing yourself past your boundaries, when you're

pushing yourself against the clock, you really start to get a better idea or a better understanding

of who you are as a person and what you're capable of.

My neighbor this same weekend did a backyard ultra where he was running a laps and each

lap was, you had an hour to complete like six kilometers-ish or something.

And the winner of the race is the person who was able to keep going the longest.

And he had a goal that he achieved where he was able to do about 53 or 54 kilometers in

about eight or nine hours somewhere in there.

But the other people, he said, we're still continuing on until the next day.

So they were still running.

So it's just pretty neat because we think about what we're capable of as people or we're

capable of in the manner of timing and just understanding that there is a clock running.

And it's just kind of an interesting story.

So let's go ahead and jump in.

So the hourglass and the mechanical clock, this is an article I pulled for this sermon

and it says, how old is the hourglass?

2000 years, 4000 years.

Oddly enough, historian R.T.

Ballmer dates it to about the same time as the first mechanical clocks.

It's only about 700 years old.

The hourglass had some strong characteristics on the positive side.

It was far simpler and cheaper than the mechanical clock or the earlier water clock.

Resetting it after it ran down couldn't be simpler and it didn't vanish when you used

it the way a graduated candle did.

Its accuracy wasn't bad either.

Once some problems had been solved, you couldn't have loaded just any old sand into it.

You had to find a free flowing material that was unresponsive to humidity.

On the downside, hourglasses were pretty short term timepieces.

The very name tells you it's hard to find one that'll run more than an hour.

The other big drawback is that they can't be calibrated.

Sand moves downward and jerks.

The edge of sand is uneven and if you mark five minute intervals in the glass, the sand

will hit those marks differently each time you turn it.

An hourglass really tells you only when an hour is up.

So as we think about that time, we think about sand running through the hourglass and time

slipping away from us.

Let's go ahead and look at James 4, 13-17.

Boasting about tomorrow in verse 13 it says, Come now, you who say, Today or tomorrow we

will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make profit.

Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.

What is your life for you are missed that appears for a little time and then vanishes?

And you ought to say, If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.

As it is, you boast in your arrogance, all such boasting is evil.

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him, it is to sin.

So why am I talking about clocks?

What's so important about the passage of time that we have created these clocks to measure

it?

Let's think about that for a second.

How many timepieces do you think you have around you at this very moment?

As I sit here recording this, I've got one on two, a clock on each computer display.

I've got my watch, that's a clock.

I've got my phone.

I've got a work phone.

So I've got several clocks kicking around just right here.

So that shows us that it is important for us to have clocks.

I mean, you can also think of, there's a clock in my car, there's a clock on the oven, there's

a clock on the microwave.

That's a lot of clocks.

Clearly we have a desire to know what time it is, but why is that?

Are we really so busy that we need to constantly be told what time it is or is it more because

we're constantly faced with anxiety that comes from our own mortality?

We never have enough time.

I struggle with this thought myself.

Do I have enough time?

I struggle with it.

Is there enough time to get the tasks I want accomplished finished?

This is going to take too long, or can I really survive in this world into my 80s or 90s or

beyond?

Like these kind of thoughts of morality are all time-based.

The Bible talks a lot about time, and in our texts we are warned not to boast about tomorrow

because we don't know what tomorrow will bring.

And it's important as we move on in this to remember that God exists outside of time.

He is omnipresent, omniscient, and all powerful.

So he's outside of the reality of time.

In Ecclesiastes we learn that there is time for everything.

It says in Ecclesiastes 3, 1-8, for everything there is a season, a time for every matter

under heaven, a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to pluck up what

is planted, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to break down, and a time to build up,

a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to cast away

stones, and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from

embracing, a time to seek, a time to lose, a time to keep, a time to cast away, a time

to tear, a time to sow, a time to keep silence, a time to speak, a time to love, a time to

hate, a time for war, a time for peace.

So as we jump into my first point, which is the hourglass, we know that time is something

that God created for us.

It's a measuring point for our life, and it's something that is critical for us in this

temporal time that we live in.

The hourglass found their place in setting off these blocks of time, the time between

the canonical hours in a monastery or between watches on board a ship.

Of course, they didn't run long enough or accurately enough for marine navigation.

They were a poor man's timepiece, a kind of clock for every man.

Both the mechanical clock and the hourglass found powerful symbolic roles during the Renaissance.

The complex mechanical clocks, with its rotary gears, became a metaphor for the heavenly spheres

of the wheels of fortune.

But the hourglass, whose sand runs out, became a metaphor for the running out of sands that

we all inevitably face.

It became and remains a universal symbol of death.

The two technologies, one simple, one complex, running side by side.

The clock making a continuum of time and the hourglass segmenting that time.

The clock speaking of timelessness and the hourglass showing us finality.

The clock evoking things celestial and the hourglass reminding us of the base earth.

The two technologies, why was the hourglass so late in coming?

Maybe it had to wait for its opposite, the clock, to be invented.

As we think about these different ideas of time, it's pretty powerful.

The sand flowing through an hourglass, the finality of the hourglass.

Whereas a geared clock, or even like we use these days, digital clocks, you could just

recharge it.

You plug your phone in, or it's plugged into the wall, it goes continuously.

So I believe the desire to segment time is important for our society.

It gives us boundaries and structure in our day and for our lives.

In the pre-industrial age, we began our day with the rising of the sun or when the rooster

crows.

Once awake, we would use the sun as our timepiece.

Time was segmented as dawn, morning, midday, afternoon, dusk, and evening.

We also break down time into seasons, years, decades, generations, and many other ways to

mark the passage of time.

The Bible makes it clear that the time is precious and should not be wasted, but that

it should be used wisely.

In Ephesians 5, 15-18, it says, Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise,

making the best use of time because the days are evil.

Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is, and do not get

drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.

And again in Colossians 4, 5-6, it says, Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best

use of time.

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought

to answer each person.

We are told to make the best use of time and not to remain idle or passive with reverence

to the time that Christ has given us for His purpose here on earth.

The hourglass represents a timer for us that measures those segments of time that we set

for specific tasks.

We use digital equivalents every day, the timer on our phone or on the oven, the timers

represent the time we have to complete a task like baking a cake, or maybe the time you

set aside to read the word or pray.

We should segment our day to glorify God in all that we do, even in today's age, long

after the Industrial Revolution, we can set time aside for God, the things of God.

That does not mean we shrink from our responsibilities, but rather that you doodletly attend to your

daily responsibilities so that you will preserve the time needed for the things of God.

What I mean by this is that it is relatively simple.

It is really simple.

Colossians 3.23 says, Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men.

Here is an example.

I took the time yesterday to go for a really long hike.

I was out there for just after nine hours.

Even with that kind of hike and arduous task, there are repercussions on the fringes.

You have the time preparing for it beforehand and you have the time recovering from it afterwards.

You have to make space for that time.

Why would I use this block of time for that?

For me and my person, I feel that pushing myself to those kind of extremes helps me

draw closer to God.

It might surprise you, but it does bring a little fear.

I have safety precautions.

I feel like I'm comfortable when I do these things, but that doesn't mean that when I'm

out there, three kilometers into an unknown six kilometers of post-holing through snow,

that I'm not worried.

What did I get myself into?

Why did I do this?

You have to throw yourself these anxieties and everything upon the Lord.

At least that's how I do it.

When I'm out there, I spend a lot of time in prayer, contemplation, listening to the

Word of God on a podcast or audiobook.

I find it to be a very useful time away from all other distractions.

You're just pumping and breathing your heart's beat racing and you're accomplishing a task,

but it gives me the time and space to think about what I am focusing on in my life.

I think that's a very important part of our lives, is having those times where you pull

away from the minutiae of your day-to-day and the monotony of your day-to-day to shake

things up in your mindset.

Our focus should always be on the Lord, so that means our job should be done properly

and promptly, so as to put God first in all we do.

The world tries to make their own God, and therefore they have their own clocks, timers,

and hourglasses.

One of the most prominent in our society day is the doomsday clock, or the climate clock.

You might have heard of these things.

Inheriting to both these clocks is this presumption that man will doom itself to annihilation.

The doomsday clock marks the likelihood of humanity being destroyed by nuclear war, and

the climate clock marks the time before we destroy our planet via the increase of climate

change.

Interestingly, both these clocks demand the removal of freedom from the majority of the

world's population in favor of a few powerful people, more important people, and leaders

who can govern the world free from God.

The machinations of men seeking to control the world through secular paganism, they

desire to create a world not bound by God's laws, but the laws of the few who seek to

subjugate the many.

They want to control your freedom of mobility.

They want to control your time, all for an idea of a different kind of apocalypse, not

an apocalypse like what we'd read in the end times within the Bible, but a man-made apocalypse

that only they can save you from.

So it's very interesting.

And so we have to be very aware of how others want to manipulate our view of time for their

own gain.

This brings me to my next point, which is the mechanical or electrical clock.

So back in March 2019, the UN held its 73rd session.

During that meeting, they held a high level meeting on climate and sustainability.

The title of the press release that came out from that meeting was, only 11 years left

to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.

The subtitle of this article was, Ambition, Urgency Needed to Address Global Emergencies,

which the Secretary General says.

And here's the opening statement.

Just over a decade is all that remains to stop irreversible damage from our climate change.

World leaders heard today as General Assembly opened a high level meeting on the relationship

between the phenomenon and sustainable development.

So this isn't that old, it's 2019.

And so they're basically saying it, doomsday is coming.

At the end of this meeting, the group agreed to fix the problem by supporting equity funds

or green portfolios for business.

So the stage is set.

There's an emergency.

And at the time, the time is of the essence, and we need to give our resources to the elite

so they can save us from ourselves.

The idea that time is running out resonates with most of us and it prompts us to want

to help and do something.

But the flaw with this thinking is that by putting men above God, we are making ourselves

slaves to men just as the nation of Israel did when they clamored for a king.

So let's take a step back and look at the whole scale of time and not just the segmented

time that they argue.

They argue that the sands of time are wasting away, but they neglect the very real truth

of the entirety of true time.

When we read the scripture, we see that there has been global catastrophe before, Genesis

7, 19 through 20, and the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high

mountains under the whole heaven were covered.

The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them 15 cubits deep.

And after the great flood, God promised to never flood the whole earth again in Genesis

8, 21 through 22.

And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again

curse the ground because a man, for the attention of man's heart is evil from his youth.

But will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done?

While the earth remains seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and

night shall not cease.

So here we see in the scripture that God too has a clock, and he has promised that for

as long as there is an earth, we will have seed time harvest, cold and heat, summer,

winter, day and night.

I do find it interesting that the same people who claim that God could not cause a global

flood are the same people teaching you and your kids that mankind is going to cause a

global calamity.

You have to wonder why they would diminish the power of God while exponentially multiplying

the power of mankind.

It's also interesting because if they held logically to their evolutionary beliefs, there

would be no point in saving the earth from humanity because something else would certainly

evolve to take our place.

And there's no reason to hold mankind to any higher standard than the animals that came

before us.

It is only because we have made ourselves gods in our own right that we believe that we have

the authority to make such claims.

Dr. William Provine, professor of biological sciences at Cornell University, wrote an article

that says, Darwinism, Science or Naturalistic Philosophy.

And it says this and is a snippet from this article.

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear.

And I must say that these are basically Darwin's views.

There are no gods, no purposeful forces of any kind, no life after death.

When I die, I am absolutely certain that I'm going to be completely dead.

That's just all that's going to be the end of me.

There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, no free will

for humans either.

So as you go back to our story about the hourglass and the mechanical clock, we remember these

two devices ended up representing something very different to society.

The complex mechanical clock with its rotary gears became the metaphor for heavenly spheres,

but the hourglass whose sand runs out became the metaphor for running out of time.

The two technologies, one simple one complex running side by side the clock making the

continuum of time and the hourglass segmenting it.

The clock is used in society to show the endlessness of time, but the time that is devoid of God.

The hourglass is used to show the impending calamity of society, a calamity that is of

our own doing, and only we can save ourselves from this self-imposed destruction.

But to what end?

If we have nothing past this life, then what is there worth working towards?

The reality is, God is the ultimate clock maker.

And this lets, as we close, we're going to look at the last point which is the graduated

candle.

So in the article above, there was a mention of the candle clock, and I like the imagery

of this clock compared to the hourglass.

There is an extra amount of finality to the graduated candle that is more pronounced than

an hourglass.

A candle just like life burns through time, and at some point will run out of fuel and

will sputter and go out.

And James 4, 14, it says, 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.

It is because of this very nature of life that time is so important.

It is not because of what the world tells us, but rather what the promises that we have

through our fate.

The world wants you to be anxious and fearful about the passage of time because they believe

that this is all that you have.

And that is it.

We do not believe in the finality of death, but rather the resurrection of life.

So as our time draws near and the candle burns down, it is not the end for us, even if it

is the end of our world.

We cling to our faith in a resurrected Christ and our subsequent salvation through Him.

Even if you have lived a life full of sin and the sands of time are almost gone, your

hourglass is almost spent.

God can just turn it over and give you more time.

He can rewind the clock of your life.

Even if your time on earth is over, you can, through Jesus Christ, be saved and enter into

the kingdom where there is no time but eternity.

So how do we spend our life and the knowledge of Christ?

In Galatians 6, 9 through 10 it says, And let us not grow weary of doing good, for due

season we will reap, if we do not give up, so that when we have the opportunity, let

us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

Let us do good and not be anxious about the passage of time.

Let us rejoice in our God who knows all these things and has given us clarity of His Word

to strengthen our faith in Him.

It is through faith that we are saved and in salvation we strive for the perfection

in Christ.

So this is the importance of time in our life, is to do everything unto the Lord because

through Him we have eternity.

If you are not saved, if you haven't given your life to Jesus Christ, yeah, this life

can be terrifying.

But I have to ask you, if you do believe, if you are at this point in your life, an atheist

or agnostic and you don't really know that there is anything past this life, then why

is it so important for you to fight for this world?

If there is nothing worth continuing on because once you are gone, you are gone, then it doesn't

make sense to be so anxious about all of the calamity that you see in the world.

Because it is like our biologist said, Dr. William Province or Provine.

If you believe in Darwinian view, then when you die, you are gone.

And there is no point.

But we as Christians believe that there is a point.

We believe that there is an eternity to account for.

And we believe that it comes through faith in Jesus Christ, the repentance of sin and

the acceptance that Jesus is your Savior.

And so with that, as I close, I just like to have every head bowed, every eye closed,

wherever you are listening, unless you are driving, of course.

But I want to give a quick invitation that if you are not a Christian, if you haven't

given your life to Jesus Christ, or maybe you have in the past, but you have walked

away and you are not right with God, I like to give an invitation for you to come into

the family or to come back.

And you can do that.

It's a very simple thing.

I'll lead you through a quick prayer real quick.

It's a sinner's prayer.

It's just simply as this.

But I want to make sure that you can signify that with an uplifted hand right now that

you want to get saved.

Because I can't see it as a podcast, but God can see it.

God can see your heart.

He can see your soul.

And if that's you and you rose your hand, then I want you to repeat this after me.

Dear Lord God, I know that I'm a sinner, but I know that you sensed your son, Jesus Christ,

and that he died for my sins.

I accept Jesus to be my savior, and I thank you for salvation through grace in Jesus'

name.

Amen.

Simple prayer, and it takes your name from destruction into the Lamb's book of life.

Now you have eternity to be concerned with, not the temporalness of this time.

And it's a very powerful thing because now you can cast all the anxieties of this world

onto Christ, and he will bear that load for you.

So with that, it's important things.

Next steps is simple.

You just get a Bible, download the app.

It's free.

Start reading the words.

Start in the Gospels, the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

That'll help you.

Start praying, crying out to God, and then find a church to lock into.

If you're in the Saminar Mary, come to our church.

We'd be happy to have you.

If you're not from around here, then reach out.

We have 3,500 churches globally, and we would be happy to have you join with us in worship

of our God.

I want to thank everybody for listening today, and just to look at as I kind of close, I

just want to say the hikes that I do, the kind of stuff that I do, it's a good way to

push yourself mentally, to put yourself in uncomfortable situations so that you're alone

with your own thoughts.

That's really what prayer can be oftentimes as well.

But I think it's important that as we travel through this space and time of life, to understand

that you're never alone.

When you're scared, when you're tired, when you're exhausted, God is always there.

And it's a powerful thing as you come to Christ and you accept Him as your Lord and Savior

to know that you are never alone.

That there is always a God, there's always a Father in heaven that cares for you.

And so with that, I want to thank you for listening.

I want to ask a favor that if you can like, share, and subscribe to this podcast, that

would greatly help us getting this message out.

We're really excited here.

We're going to be moving into a new building next month.

Well, a month in a week or so.

So we're very excited about that.

We have some big plans for the summer with some outreaches and stuff planned and Salmon

Arm.

And so I want you to continue to pray for us that God will help us.

And I want to again thank you for listening and have a great week.

God bless.

Thank you for listening to the PHA Potters House Salmon Arm Podcast.

Be sure to follow us on Instagram at pottershouse underscore salmon arm to keep up to date on

what we are doing.

And join the conversation and discover how Jesus Christ can revolutionize your life.