Time: God Can Extend Time

So why would I make a bed in my shame when the fountain of grace is running my way?

I know I am yours and I was made for more.

Heavenly Father, we just want to say thank you.

Lord, thank you for the opportunity to come and to sing and to celebrate and to hear

just the wonderful calling that you've placed on people's lives to serve you.

And Father, as we come together this morning, Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit

would be felt so strongly within our hearts.

Lord, we know what your word says and we believe that you're already here

and that you're already present, but God, I pray that you would open up our eyes,

that you would tear down the walls and you would do the work within us, God,

that we cannot do for ourselves, that we can see you and feel you

in a way that we've never been able to before.

And Father, thank you for songs and times of prayer

and Father, we just thank you for the opportunity to come to you.

Lord, I thank you for being with Donovan and Nettie and the birth of their baby.

Lord, we thank you for seeing them through some of those complications

and Lord, just letting everything be totally fine this morning.

Thank you for that.

God, I pray that you would be with our shut-ins

and our people who aren't able to be here this morning,

be with our people who are traveling and on vacation.

God, that your spirit would be with them just as you're with us now.

And Jesus, help us as we dive into your word to see truth.

Lord, we're all stubborn and we're all stuck in our ways.

We all have things that we're prone to and things that we believe,

but God, I pray that you would help us to see your truth

in your word this morning.

That you would speak to us in a powerful way,

in a way that we would not be able to help but to leave this place

and tell others what you've told us.

Father, this morning we give this time to you.

It's yours.

This is your church.

We are your people.

And I pray that everything that we do would be pleasing and honoring to you.

Jesus, we love you today.

And we ask all this in your precious and holy name,

all God's people said.

One of my really good friends, who's also in ministry,

said several years ago that the school was the perfect mission field.

You're literally there five days a week, eight hours a day for 40 hours.

You're bored out of your minds and you're trapped.

And you're stuck beside the people in your class or each of your classes.

And like you have them every single day to say to them whatever you want to say.

And they can't go anywhere.

Like you got them.

So you can tell them about Jesus.

You can tell them about whatever you want to.

You can talk to them.

The school is a beautiful mission field that needs Christ

more than probably any other aspect of our society.

We've been talking about time.

And today's our last message.

And if you are new or if you've been gone,

you can catch our services on Facebook, YouTube, or the podcast.

Just want to remind everybody of that.

But our first week we talked about how time's our most valuable resource.

It's a resource that we can't get back.

We're constantly spending it.

You can't put it up and save it.

And so each day as it trickles away,

we have to make a decision of how we're going to use that resource in this world.

The second thing we talked about, how there's a time for everything.

Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, there's a time for everything under the sun.

And how we need the wisdom of God to help us in our lives

to know when those times are

and how we should maneuver throughout our lives to do those certain things.

The third thing we talked about is how we're stewards of God's time.

You know, it's our time or God's time.

And we have to make a decision and come to a realization in our life

that the time that God has given us is really His.

And we're just stewards of it.

We can't stop it.

We can't hang on to it.

And we have to make a decision in our life

if we're going to use the time that God has given us

to gratify and lift up ourselves

or we're going to gratify and uplift God.

We have to make those decisions.

Our last service that we're talking about today

is how God can extend our time.

And this is a pretty crazy thing to think about.

But when you look at God,

our God is not limited by anything.

Amen.

Yes.

Only one.

Our God is not limited by anything.

That is something that we need to remember in our lives

in every aspect of life,

but especially when we talk about our time.

So I have a passage for you this morning,

2 Peter chapter 3 verses 8 through 10.

2 Peter 3:8–10

This will be our focus passage for today, but we got a lot of scripture.

So Peter wrote, talking about the second coming of Christ.

Let's read this together.

But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends.

A day is like a thousand years to the Lord

and a thousand years is like a day.

The Lord isn't really being slow about his promise

as some people think.

No, he is being patient for your sake.

He does not want anyone to be destroyed,

but wants everyone to repent.

But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief.

Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise

and the very elements themselves will disappear in fire

and the earth and everything on it will be found to deserve judgment.

Pretty strong words, right?

How in the world does that apply to our time?

Well, point number one this morning is,

is that God does not view time the same as we do.

That's really important.

And you need to remember that today.

The younger you are, the more important that is.

The older you are, you've probably already started to understand that.

But God does not view time the same that we do.

A day or a thousand years to him are the same.

You know, when you think about a timeline,

each and every single one of us who are in this room,

we look at time based off of our own individual timelines.

Like you don't see time based off of the person

or maybe if you're really close to the person you kind of do.

But if you don't know the person beside you,

you've never considered this morning looking at your timeline

based off of whether or not Mr. Young over here

is on the same timeline as you are.

You've probably never considered that.

You've never crossed your mind.

We look at our timeline as we know hindsight's 20-20

and we're focused on our time that's coming before us

and hindsight's 20-20 but foresight's fuzzy at best, right?

Like we know what we want.

We know like our hopes and our dreams and our aspirations

and we know what we would like to happen

and maybe we have a calling from the Lord

and we feel like God is leading us a certain way

but we don't really know what that timeline looks like.

And the whole time God is sitting up above

like each and every single one of our timelines

and he sees it perfectly clear.

And whether it's a day or a thousand years

from the aerial view that God has over our lives

and over all of creation is a completely different perspective

than what you and I look at time.

We're constantly looking at our phones or our watches

or a clock on the wall looking and measuring time

and figuring out what we can accomplish

or what we can do to pass the time

or what we can get within a certain amount of time

and for God, he is not limited by time.

You ever thought about how God created everything

that we measure time with?

Like time is something that we have brought up

and we've developed and between the sun revolving around the earth

and rotating as it's revolving if you're not a flat earther.

I want to start that argument this morning.

But going back to grade school science,

for how we believe that we measure time,

like it's literally something that God created the sun,

he created earth, the moon, the stars,

the seasons upon which we measure everything,

God created all of that.

And our God is not limited by his creation.

And it doesn't define him in any way shape or form.

And so for a day or a thousand years of God,

it's the same, it does not matter.

He's eternal.

And the thought this morning to think that God existed

before everything else existed is mind-blowing

because like, well, what the heck did he do?

Like, what was there?

What did he do?

And that's just like really hard to wrap our minds around.

And the fact that it's going to be gone,

the heavens and the earth will be destroyed.

There will be a new heavens and a new earth.

And so God existed forever before and exists forever afterward,

a day or a thousand years is nothing to him.

But it's everything to us, right?

You remember week one, $10 million.

And everybody who was in here with common sense,

except for my one niece,

raised their hand for $10 million

and you all put them down and said,

I wouldn't want it if I had to die this time next year.

One year of your life is worth more than $10 million.

Think about that.

It is so valuable to us, it means nothing to God.

It's like the old joke when people talk about heaven.

It's like this guy showed up at the pearly gates

and he had all this gold that he brought with him from earth

and the angel asked him, what are you doing with pavement?

The streets are made of gold.

He does not look at things the same way that we do.

It's a totally different concept.

Going back to 2 Peter,

the verses that follow our focus passage, 11 through 13,

says, since everything around us is going to be destroyed like this,

what holy and godly lives you should live,

looking forward to the day of God and hurrying it along.

Think about that for a second.

That you should look forward to the day of the coming of the Lord

and hurry it along.

On that day, he will set the heavens on fire

and the elements will melt away in the flames,

but we are looking forward to the new heavens

and new earth that he has promised,

a world filled with God's righteousness.

Can I be honest with you this morning?

I'm not in a place in my spiritual walk

where I'm hurrying it along.

I don't know about you,

but I've sit at the bedside of a lot of people

who were literally in the process of passing

and none of them were hurrying it along.

It is one of our biggest struggles that we will overcome in this life

to consider this world to be a thing that we discard

and put to our past and look forward to what God has for us in eternity.

I have yet to meet, use proper English for a second,

I've yet to meet anyone who was in that place in life

where they were literally hurrying it along.

But that's what Scripture says that we should be doing.

When you look at time,

time is not the same for God as it is for us.

God sits in heaven.

He has always dwelt in the realm of eternity

and he looks at us like little children who are clinging to something

that we literally cannot hold on to.

I don't know if you've ever watched a kid just want something

or demand that they have something that is literally pointless.

We fight those battles with our three every day.

They want things and they want something

and it's just like, oh my gosh, why today?

Why this? Why this thing?

What is so important about it right now?

And God looks at us like this, like we cling to time

like it is the most valuable thing in the world

because in ways it is.

It is our most valuable resource that we have to honor and serve God with.

And God looks at us like, why are you clinging to this life?

If you will give your life to me, I'll give you eternal life.

If you will die, you will live forever.

But we cling because we don't look at the same way,

we don't look at time the same way that God does.

And so we stumble through this life looking at time

like it's this thing that we have to cling to and make the most of.

But God looks at eternal things.

He doesn't look at momentary things.

He looks at eternal things.

And in this life, like we said, we can see hindsight 2020.

Foresight is what's fuzzy.

Part of the reason why we have such a struggle as believers

is because we don't have a whole lot of information

on what heaven's actually going to be like.

I don't know if you've ever thought about that before.

When you start reading Scripture,

there's some things that describe heaven in it,

but there's not a lot.

And it's hard for us as people to say, man,

like thinking about what heaven's going to be like on the other side

of how it's going to be so much better than what I have here.

That's hard for us to see because it's fuzzy at best, right?

It takes faith.

It takes stepping out in faith and trusting God

that He has something better for you waiting on the other side.

And until we get to that point,

we're never going to be able to truly die to the things of the world

because God does not look at it the same way we do.

He's looking at us like little children who are clinging to things

that are so unimportant.

Investing in things that literally mean nothing.

And one of the most valuable resources in the world, gold,

if you could take all of it with you to heaven,

you'd just be paving another quarter mile of road.

It would mean absolutely nothing to Him.

He doesn't look at it the same way that we do.

Point number two,

it wasn't meant for us to know everything.

That's a really hard thing to swallow.

And as I raise kids,

and I'm in the midst of them kind of getting to the age

where they're beginning to ask questions,

there are certain things that they ask questions about,

like they really don't need to know everything.

I don't know if any of you have ever been through that,

but it's like they're asking questions about a lot of different stuff

and you really don't...

They don't need to know everything yet.

There's a time.

There's a time for everything.

Now is not the time.

God did not intend for us to know everything.

In verse 10 of our focus passage,

it says the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief.

And some versions say as a thief in the night.

God has abundantly warned us of His second coming.

I don't know if you ever thought about that before.

It's one of the most written about things in the New Testament.

It's one of the things that Jesus over and over again emphasized

that He would die. He would be crucified.

He would die. He would rise from the grave.

He would go to the Father. He would send the Holy Spirit.

But He would come back.

It's one of the most emphasized things in the New Testament

that Jesus would return.

And yet there was never a day or a year or a month

or any sort of physical earthly human measurement

in which we would know when that would be.

He said it's going to come as suddenly as a thief comes

and sneaks up on you.

And I don't know if you've ever been robbed before.

When Hannah and I were remodeling our house,

we would have visitors all the time.

And I would go over there and I would camp out

and I would try to catch them.

Like literally Hannah can tell you, she'd get so worried.

I'd go around and I was like,

I'm going to catch these rascals

and I'm going to put the fear of God in them.

And I would camp out. They'd never come.

And I'd go home and I'd go.

It's like they were sitting there watching and laughing.

They know.

It's as unexpectedly as a thief.

It's not something that we can predict.

And I just want to speak with some truth and wisdom this morning.

Can we do that right here?

And you can take this.

This is not, I'm not going to say this is not biblical,

but I'm not going to say you're going to find a passage of Scripture

where you're going to be able to say this.

But I feel like we need to talk about this for a second.

As Jesus talked about his second coming regularly,

I think it's really important this morning that he plainly said,

even the Son of Man does not know when this day will be.

So if Jesus does not know when this day will be,

then there's no one else on earth

who's going to be able to know when this day will be.

And when you look back throughout Scripture

and you look back at the apostles who were wrong

because they thought it was going to happen in their lifetime

and then the early church fathers

thought that it was going to happen in their lifetime

and they were wrong.

And everyone who has ever tried to make a prediction

about the month, the year, the season,

the decade, the century, the millennial,

they've all been wrong.

Now in saying this,

I want to speak truth and wisdom to you in that.

Be very careful as we talk about the second coming of Jesus

about predictions and people making claims

and when that's going to be because Jesus said,

even I don't know.

And it's not for you to know,

only God can set those dates.

We can look at the signs,

we can look at things that are happening

and we can kind of say, hey, man, it's closer than ever.

And theoretically, one day further

is closer than it was yesterday, right?

I believe wholeheartedly Jesus is coming back.

I believe with all my heart

there's going to be a second coming.

But we have to be very careful

that we're not throwing numbers around in dates and times

because that is not scriptural.

God does not look at time like we do.

In fact, Peter addresses this in the focus patches.

He says, look, God is delaying this day for your benefit.

And I don't know about any of you,

whether or not you have a child or a grandchild

or some siblings or a great aunt Gertrude

or whoever it is in your life that you've been praying for

and wanting them to get saved.

God prolongs his second coming for their benefit

so that they have time to repent.

My goal for this church

is that we would be a body of believers

that people are continuing to be saved

and given their heart to the Lord

and being sent out to minister

so that we can help prolong that day.

In a way, we hurry the coming of the Lord alone.

We're called to hurry the coming of the Lord alone

because we know what he has on the other side should be better.

But in the other way, we should be doing ministry

in a way that's producing fruit

so that God prolongs his coming

so that more people can be saved.

You ever think about that?

Just a thought.

Acts 1 verses 6 to 8.

Acts 1:6–8

This is the focus passage for Jerusalem project

which our teenagers did this past week.

They used this every year.

So when the apostles were with Jesus,

they kept asking him,

Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel

and restore our kingdom?

He replied,

The Father alone has the authority

to set those dates and times

and they are not for you to know.

We're not meant to know everything.

And the dates and times are not meant for us.

He replied in verse 8,

But you will receive power

when the Holy Spirit comes upon you

and you will be my witnesses

telling people about me everywhere in Jerusalem

throughout Judea and Samaria

and to the ends of the earth.

God has not intended for us to know certain things

but he has intended for us to know some things.

In this passage,

the disciples are very much focused on Jesus.

When are you coming back?

When is Israel going to be set free?

When's the kingdom going to be established?

When are we going to get to experience you

releasing your power and authority

into this evil and sinful world?

And Jesus says,

I don't know.

It's not for you to know.

But let me tell you what you should know.

And then he begins to talk about the Holy Spirit.

And so in this process,

the disciples are super worried about dates and times.

Jesus is concerned about the Holy Spirit.

You've got to ask yourself in your life,

which one are you going to be concerned with?

Are you going to be concerned with dates and times?

Or are you going to be concerned with the Holy Spirit?

Because Peter said,

because that day is coming,

that terrible day when everything will be destroyed,

what holy and godly lives that we should be living

so that we will be prepared when it does happen.

And in this passage,

when the disciples are very focused on dates and times,

and when Jesus, when you're going to come,

when you're going to let the cat out of the bag

and really show everybody who you truly are,

he says, that's not for you to know.

But you should know about the Holy Spirit.

And it will come on you.

And it will empower you.

It will help you to do everything that I'm calling you to do.

Which one will you be concerned with?

Point three, last one.

Because the Lord is not limited to time,

the Lord can extend time.

The Lord can extend our time.

He can extend your time.

I don't know if you've ever sit around and thought about that.

You could live as healthy of a life

as anyone could ever live,

and you could die in a car on the way home today.

You could do everything exactly right,

and there's no guarantees.

The Lord is truly in control

about how much time we have or don't have on this earth.

And in our focus passage of 2 Peter 3.9,

he says the Lord isn't really being slow about His promises.

Some people think, no, He's being patient for your sake.

He does not want anyone to be destroyed,

but wants everyone to repent.

He prolongs the day of His return.

He's extending the time of the second coming

so that more and more people can be saved.

And He can do it on a personal level too.

In 2 Kings chapter 20 verses 1 through 10,

2 Kings 20:1–10

there's this really cool story about King Hezekiah.

And it says, about that time Hezekiah became deathly ill,

and the prophet Isaiah, son of Amaz,

went to visit him and he gave the king this message.

This is what the Lord says,

set your affairs in order for you are going to die.

You will not recover from this illness.

When Hezekiah heard this,

he turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord.

Remember, O Lord, how I have always been faithful to you

and have served you single-mindedly,

always doing what pleases you.

Then he broke down and wept bitterly.

But before Isaiah had left the middle courtyard,

this message came to him from the Lord,

go back to Hezekiah, the leader of my people,

tell him this is what the Lord,

the God of your ancestor, David, says,

I have heard your prayer, have seen your tears,

and I will heal you, and three days from now,

you will get out of bed and go to the temple of the Lord.

I will add 15 years to your life,

and I will rescue you in this city from the king of Assyria.

I will defend the city for my own honor

and for the sake of my servant David.

Then Isaiah said, make an ointment from figs.

So Hezekiah's servant spread the ointment over the boil,

and Hezekiah recovered.

Meanwhile, Hezekiah had said to Isaiah,

what sign would the Lord give to prove that he will heal me

and that I will go to the temple of the Lord three days from now?

Isaiah replied, this is the sign from the Lord

to prove that he will do as he promised.

Would you like the shadow on the sundial

to move forward 10 steps or backward 10 steps?

The shadow always moves forward, Hezekiah replied,

so that would be easy.

Make it go backwards 10 steps instead.

So Isaiah the prophet asked the Lord to do this,

and he calls the shadow to move 10 steps backward

on the sundial of Ahaz.

Pretty wild, right?

That the Lord pronounced this judgment in Hezekiah's life

is like, okay, your time's done.

And Hezekiah's response in this moment to pray and to weep

and to acknowledge that God, you're it.

I've served you.

I've done everything that I could do.

He weeps bitterly.

He prays to the Lord, and the Lord sends a message to Isaiah

and changes his pronouncement upon Hezekiah and says,

no, I'm going to give you 15 more years.

And think about this.

Just to put a little icing on the cake,

he says, will you like the sundial to move forward?

Well, will you like the sundial to move backwards?

Sounds pretty crazy, right?

And Hezekiah says, let's do backwards.

It always moves forward.

Let's see if it can move backwards.

And God, who is the only one,

and let's go back to our earth model that we were talking about,

the earth only moves in one direction.

It only spins in one direction.

The sun stands still.

According to what we believe that science has taught us,

that's our model.

And God calls the sun on the sundial

the shade to move back 10 steps.

Theologians debate over how much time this actually was

because they don't know how the sundial was marked.

But said from the way that they have found sundials to be marked,

it could be anywhere from 20 minutes to five hours.

It's according on how many marks were actually on the sundial

to divide up the amount of time that they measured throughout the day.

And they don't know how many marks was on that sundial.

We just don't have it to know.

So anywhere from 20 minutes to five hours, it was reversed.

You serve a God who does not look at time the same way that you do.

There is nothing in your ability or power

to go back and undo anything that has been done.

The only thing that we can do is people is eat it

and turn around and move forward.

But we serve a God who's not limited by time.

He's not cut off by it.

He may have a time for you

and he has the ability to extend that time or to cut it short.

And we also serve a God who's able to turn it back.

He didn't just give Isaiah 15 or Hezekiah 15 more years.

He gives him maybe a few more minutes on top

or maybe a few more hours on top because he moved time backwards.

Only our God can do that.

We cannot do that.

We have a decision of how we live our lives

and how we use the time that God has given us.

And to boot, you go back to Joshua chapter 10

Joshua 10 · chapter mention

and God made the sun stand still in the sky

so that the Israelites could finish the battle and win the victory.

Our God is not limited by the things that we are so limited by.

It's not a resource to Him.

He has abundant, infinite, endless resources to bestow upon us.

And this morning you have to decide where you're going to go

and who you're going to call out to to have those resources.

Time is just one of the things that God has given us

that we are called to be stewards of.

And we talked about it early on in the first week, four weeks ago.

There are certain things that Scripture has told us that we can do

to extend our time.

You know, since I've been at Graham Chapel,

I came here in the fall of 2000 as a teenager.

And I've had the privilege of knowing lots of people here

who have made it into their nineties and even three people

who've lived to their hundreds.

It's pretty impressive, right?

I was telling somebody at that time,

nobody in my family had lived past their seventies.

And so I was fascinated at all these ancient people.

I'll say they were ancient, walking around Graham Chapel.

I'm like, how old's that person?

How old's that person?

Like, you got to be kidding me.

Like, they're all, they live forever.

And I thought that was fascinating.

And as I've gotten to know them,

you know, one of the things that I've really appreciated about them,

and you're probably not going to like some of these things, right?

It doesn't necessarily mean these things are sinful or wrong.

But I do think there's a timing in our life

where we as believers are called beyond things of the Lord.

And I do believe the Lord rewards those who pursue Him with all their heart.

Of these people who lived to their nineties and into their hundreds,

one of the things that I've noticed about them is they didn't drink.

They didn't smoke.

They didn't do drugs.

They didn't gamble.

They didn't overeat.

They didn't party.

They didn't stay up late.

They just didn't do things that a lot of us do without thinking about it.

It's just part of our normal everyday life.

They live very simple lives.

A lot of them ate a sandwich every day for lunch.

Like, they didn't go out to eat.

They didn't eat extravagant meals.

They just ate a sandwich.

They just lived simple lives, and they loved the Lord.

They were not perfect.

I dealt with several of them.

They weren't perfect.

They were great people.

They loved the Lord like they really did.

They served God with all their heart.

And I'm not perfect.

They're not perfect.

None of us are perfect.

But in their lives, they had a choice to make,

and they made it at some point that they were going to live a holy and righteous life.

And we don't know when God's going to come in and say,

hey, your time's up.

Get your affairs in order like he did with Hezekiah.

But we do know that he's the God who is more than able to tackle him 15 more years.

And he's also more than able to set the sundial 10 steps back.

And he's also more than able to make the sun stand still in the sky so the battle can be won.

And when the time comes for the Lord to say, hey, set your affairs in order,

if you want to be the type of person who gets some time tacked on the end of your life,

what bargain in ships are you going to say?

What's your prayer going to be?

Hezekiah cried out to the Lord, and he said,

remember, O Lord, how I have always been faithful to you

and have served you single-mindedly, always doing what pleases you.

Not many of us can say that, but he was able to say it.

And there was truth in it because God acknowledged it.

When it came time for God to bring up his calling card and said,

hey, man, your time's up, those were the chips that Isaiah had on the table

that he could bargain with and say, God, remember this.

Now, let me remind you, Hezekiah wasn't hurrying that day along.

We're called to hurry it along.

But I'm not in a hurry.

And so I'm not going to throw any shade at him today.

But what's our bargaining chips going to be?

What are we going to be able to say to the Lord?

Lord, remember how I pursued you.

Remember how I served you.

Remember how I gave my life to you.

I surrendered everything to you.

Or will we not have any chips at all to throw in on the table at that time?

That's only something that you can address in your life.

From a very personal level in your relationship with God, only you have that.

And we serve a God who's more than able to do anything that we could possibly imagine.

The question is, are we going to have enough faith to ask it when the time comes?

Let's pray.

Father God, thank you for everything you blessed us with.

Thank you for the opportunity to come before you today to seek your face.

Lord, it's very humbling as people to think about who you are and what you find valuable

and what you place your sight and your emphasis on compared to what we do.

And this morning I pray that you would change our hearts,

you would change our minds, that you would change our vision

so that we can see things the way that you do.

Jesus, help us to be good stewards.

Help us to surrender.

Help us to get to the point in our life where we are 100% satisfied

and at peace if we go to meet you today

or if you give us 15 more years or if you give us 50 more years.

Jesus, help us to be in tune with you, to be in alignment with you.

And I pray that your Holy Spirit would fill us and guide us through it all.

We love you and thank you and we ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen.