"Daylight Savings Time" Ephesians 5:15-17 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Let me read our text for us, Ephesians 5, verses 15 through 17, three verses.

Ephesians 5:15–17

The apostle writes, look carefully how you walk.

Not as unwise, but wise, making the best use of your time, because the days are evil.

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

Jonathan Edwards is perhaps my theological hero.

Obviously, my theology differs from him in some significant areas, but in terms of sanctification, in terms of taking the mind and pursuing the image of Christ in the minds and playing out what radical Christian devotion looks like in life.

He has affected me more than certainly any other author, any other preacher has.

If you're not familiar with him, we're talking the mid-1700s here in New England.

He graduated as valedictorian from Yale when he was 17 years old.

He gave his valedictorian address in Latin.

He led the charge against the Halfway Covenant.

We talked about that last Sunday night, but the Halfway Covenant was a deal that the American churches had to basically allow non-regenerate people to be members of the church, to allow people that weren't Christians to be part of the American churches.

And Edwards, when he became a pastor, led the charge against that, which even to this very moment really rescued American evangelicals and rescued churches like us almost 300 years later from following the footsteps of British Christianity, from becoming a place of cathedrals and really cultural Christianity into a place where there's actual belief in saving faith as an inherent part of what it means to be part of a church.

He edited one of the most powerful books on missions.

He translated the scriptures into the Indian into an Indian language.

He was the president of Princeton.

He helped invent the smallpox vaccination, which led to his death.

When you think of all that he accomplished in his short life, it's really staggering.

He's still to this day regarded as perhaps the most influential American thinker or theologian ever.

And that life that he led, certainly exceptional by any measure, did not accidentally happen to him.

He didn't just stumble into it.

And that's the thing I've learned the most from reading biographies about him, is that this didn't just happen to him, but he set out in his heart when he first walked to Yale from his house.

It was a several-day walk.

He set out on it when he was 13 years old to get down to Yale.

As he started down there, he set a course in his heart, said as he was leaving his family and going off to school, that he was going to follow that course the rest of his life, however many days God gave him, and he was going to stand out as an exceptional Christian in this world.

That was his goal.

And he had no problem saying it.

And it would bother us when, you know, we might say, How about a little bit more humility?

Like, don't, as you're walking down to college and walking off to seminary, don't make it your goal to be an exceptional Christian.

Tone your thoughts down.

But no, this was very much his goal.

As he charted out his life, he wanted to stand out in the world and be known as a really the brightest light.

To make this happen, he wrote a list of resolutions, seventy resolutions.

He at different points in his life, he read them every year, but he would often read them every week on Sunday evenings before he went to bed at the end of the Lord's Day.

He would read this list of 70 resolutions, not resolutions he got from somewhere else, not ones that he read in a book on Christian living, but one that he ones that he invented himself, that he would devote his life to following.

As I mentioned, there's 70 of them, but perhaps the one that is most jarring to me is number 63.

And I'm going to read it to you.

It's the longest of his 70 resolutions.

On the supposition that there was to be but only one individual in the whole world at any single time who is properly a complete Christian in all respects, having Christianity always shining in its true luster, appearing excellent and lovely from whatever part and under whatever character viewed, resolved, this is his resolution, resolved, to act just as I would do if I strove with all my might to be that one.

You understand that resolution?

Let me make it more modern English.

Let's pretend that there's only one Christian in the whole wide world whom God would look at and say, that is a true Christian.

That is a person who's letting his light shine.

That is a person who stands out in all respects.

Edward says, if we're going to grant that there's only one, I want to be that one.

Again, Armore.

Modern sensibilities might say, who exactly do you think you are?

Edwards didn't say there is only one.

He says, on the supposition that there might be but one, let me be that one.

That is the kind of drive that leads someone and motivates someone and compels someone to have an exceptional life.

To redeem their time.

This is the kind of motivation that will cause someone to lead a life that stands out from the world, to view their life as a succession of moments.

As I mentioned, he read these resolutions every week.

Do you understand that your life is a succession of moments?

It's a succession of time periods.

There's a chronology to it.

And as the moments go away, like water slipping through your hands, you don't get them back.

You can't scoop them back up again.

They go away.

It's the stream of time.

It flows by you.

You can never grab the moment again.

And as it goes away, the current pulls more than the skin off your body.

That current pulls your character and it pulls your legacy.

And the current of time, as it goes by you, ends up defining you.

It ends up marking what kind of person you are.

And again, you can't grab any one of those seconds.

You can't say, how I'm living at this second defines me.

How I'm living at this moment is the sum total of my life.

But as the currents of this world and as the currents of time rush over you moment after moment, time after time, over the course of that whole tide, it ends up marking who you are.

We don't often like to think about that.

Even to engage in thinking about time and chronology in that respect is to cede our mortality.

It's to concede it.

It's to grant that we are not eternal.

It's to grant that our lives are in the great scope of eternity, in that sense, insignificant, and we don't want to wrestle with that truth.

And yet the Bible calls us to.

The Bible calls us to live a life that stands out, that shines, to use Paul's words to the Philippians, shines as a bright light in a dark place.

Let me give you an outline today as we talk about these.

I have four daylight savings facts.

Four daylight saving facts.

And the bulletin that went out to you titled the sermon Daylight Savings Time.

I had my eyes out this morning to see if anyone was here an hour early.

But none of you read the bulletin, so that somebody asked, are you concerned that people will show up an hour early?

No, they don't they don't read the bulletin.

We've we've learned this.

My spell check also flagged this, notifying me that it is in fact daylight saving time, not daylight savings time.

But what do those people know?

They don't know anything.

Here's some truths about daylight saving time.

God has called you not just to redeem an hour of your life, not just to add an hour to your fall, but God has called you to rescue every moment of your life.

And this is one of the critical passages in Scripture that teaches you how there's four facts we're going to draw out of this.

First, God cares about how you use your time.

And if you get your mind around this first point, the rest of it will fall into place here.

The rest of it will come together like Legos if you understand this first point.

That God really does care how you use your life.

This is where the transcendent meets the immediate.

This is where the transcendent, incomprehensible, unimaginable God intersects with us in our life, in our time, and that the God who made the world, the billions of people in the world who created them with his voice, he brought the world into existence out of nothing.

That God, triune in glory, infinite happiness between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, apart from us, apart from any creation of the world, that triune, beautiful, incredibly joyful, and infinite and incomprehensible, God made us and didn't just make us look down on us like you might have an ant farm or something, and you might, you know, look at the ants.

Didn't make us like that, but made us to actually care about us and to judge us and to, and think of what judging means, that there is some semblance of authority and some semblance of compassion and some semblance of knowledge and concern for the people whom you judge.

You you have something that you're after, and these people whom God is judging, He He cares for them enough to actually watch, observe, and weigh their lives.

It's a very difficult point for us to understand.

Our minds very quickly reset into God is detached, He is distant, He is infinite, and so why would He care about us?

The God that was so commonly preached in Jonathan Edwards' lifetime, for example, was the God of the deists, the God of the uh American founding fathers, for example, very, very deistic, if that's even a word, very much a God who wound up the world and stepped away, a God who perhaps even inspired the Bible, but certainly wasn't judging how we lived our lives.

That's what Edwards is going to war against, and that's certainly what the Apostle Paul is going to war against here.

He's predicating his whole instruction to us on this very basic fact that God cares how you live your life.

He cares enough to examine them, examine the lives of the people on this earth, to watch them and observe them, and nothing escapes his notice.

There's nothing too small for him to see.

Nothing's too insignificant.

He's aware of all of it, and he cares about all of it.

He names you before you're born.

He knows your identity.

He knows how you'll be raised.

He knows where you're going to be born and what kind of family you're going to be born into.

He knows what skills you have.

He knows this about you.

He apportions them to you.

He gives them to you as a stewardship.

He numbers your days before you have them, and then he's going to weigh them and judge them.

He cares about your life.

I mentioned this as the intersection of the transcendent with the immediate because God, of course, is transcendent.

Time is external to God.

Time's not external to us.

I mean, I mean our hearts beat.

I had a roommate in seminary who had a synthetic valve in his heart.

This is his twenties, young twenties, had a synthetic valve in his heart.

And we would lay down in our bunk beds and go to sleep at night, and I would hear.

And after the first night, I mean I slept terribly.

And I asked him, how how do you go to sleep?

He's like, How'd you just get used to it?

And then he got married and a couple weeks and got back from his honeymoon.

I remember asking his wife, it's like you get used to it.

Okay.

I slept in a hammock in the backyard, is what I did.

So I got used to it.

But that ticking sound is in all of our minds.

It should be there.

I mean, it's your heart right now.

Time is inside of you.

It is ticking away.

Your heart is beating.

It is pumping its blood through your body.

You're having to breathe.

God made your mind with a whole, I don't even know if the right word is subconscious or involuntary.

Your mind, even while you're asleep, your mind is making your heart beat and is making your lungs breathe, and it is happening in a rhythm and in a cycle so much that in the hospital they can hook you up to a heart monitor and it'll have a rhythm to it.

I mean, it's just one succession of events after another.

Time is such an intrinsic part of who you are.

You can't imagine your existence without it.

God is the opposite.

The whole thing I just described is external to him.

There is no heartbeat in God.

There's no succession of events in God.

There's three persons in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are infinitely happy, infinitely joyful, overflowing with love towards one another, overflowing with delight in one another, overflowing with joy as the three persons fellowship with one another, but there is not a succession of events.

There's just love and light and life.

For us, there is just time.

And it passes us by.

Alex read earlier, our days are like grasshoppers.

They're like grasshoppers.

My family's doing the cocoons right now.

You know, we get sent away and we got a box in the mail that says live caterpillars, and we have them, and we're, you know, so they're making their little cocoons right now in a little net area in our dining room.

And the instructions tell us that you have to release them into the wilds before it drops below 55 degrees at night.

Last night it dropped below 55.

So we're already in the red zone.

Like these.

So DJ and I had a discussion about this last night.

Like is it and it says if it's too cold to release them, they can live out their entire life expectancy inside their little captivity.

So what's their life expectancy?

I mean, a year, I have no idea, but you have to feed them fruit and sugar, and it's like a hummingbird in there, and you have to fru feed them sugar water, and I'm not gonna feed insects sugar water throughout the winter.

So that's not going to happen.

So I'm gonna release them, I guess.

It's occurring to me now that my family is watching the live stream.

We have a sick child this morning, so they are going to be released.

And it's too late to do the live stream at 10.30.

I'm realizing this right now.

They are going to be released, so, and you think we'll wait till a more warmer time.

What's the difference?

What's the difference?

Does it live for a week outside or a month outside?

I mean, what is the actual difference?

It's an insect.

Our days are like grasshoppers, Moses says.

They're so short.

They come and go.

And yet God stretches the tent of his sovereignty over all of our days.

All of our days are caught up inside of his tent, and he has numbered them, and he cares for them, and he watches them, and we connect with him in time.

This is why Paul says, verse 15, look carefully, carefully how you walk.

This is the pattern of your life.

Walk.

We've talked about this.

This is the fifth use of this word in Ephesians, this command in Ephesians.

You're supposed to walk in love, in life.

You're supposed to walk in unity with other believers.

You're supposed to walk in wisdom.

You're not supposed to walk like the Gentiles.

You are supposed to walk in love towards each other, unity with one another, and in wisdom in how you in holiness is the phrase earlier in chapter 5.

You're supposed to walk in godliness.

That causes a distinction between you and the world.

You stand out, you shine in their darkness.

And so you have to be very careful how you do this.

You have to pay attention.

And here, careful means all kinds of things.

There's all kinds of connotations to this.

You can trip on something in the darkness, you can trip on something in the world and fall and hurt yourself.

So express care.

Like don't run into the wall.

But also, the word careful here doesn't just mean like duck, you know, around hazards.

It means more particularly, engage your mind and your heart, your affections.

Remember, head, heart, hands.

Think this through.

Think about how you're gonna live life.

Carefully consider it.

Cause yourself to love the right things in this world, and then you do the right things, you operate the right way.

This does not happen naturally.

Our minds reverse that process.

We we do things and we do them enough that we like them, and when we follow our emotions and we think about what we love, our minds get us all backwards because we're not careful.

So Paul says, you have to be careful how you do this.

You engage your mind because God actually cares.

Paul's not concerned about your time management.

Do you get that?

He's not concerned about how you juggle your priorities.

Paul is concerned about what glorifies the Lord, and the Lord is concerned about your time.

The Lord is concerned about your life.

Every moment, as I said, it's a succession of time.

You're in the river of time, time is rushing by you.

You cannot get a moment back.

You cannot get that water that flows by you back.

It touches you and it is gone forever and ever and ever.

And you can chase down that water molecule and you will not grab it back.

You'll only exert more energy and waste more time trying to reclaim what was lost.

But as time flows by you, it begins to define you.

It is who you are.

And you can take every moment and sanctify it for the Lord, or you can take every moment and waste it.

This day is a great example.

This is one of the days of your life.

One day.

It's one day of this week.

It's the first day of the week.

You have six days after this.

You had six days before this last week, not counting Sunday.

This day is alone.

It is carved aside from all the sequence of days for you to set this day aside and worship the Lord Jesus Christ corporately, to come together in church and worship him.

That doesn't mean you don't worship him the other six days.

That just means this day is different.

The other six days you worship him as well, and you worship him differently.

And it is so easy to fall into the habit of letting those other six days pass by you without worship.

Those six days just become the rest of your life.

And so you're supposed to grab those days carefully and sanctify them.

Set them aside.

8,000 or 86,400 seconds during a day, 86,400, 86,400 of those heartbeats.

168 hours in a week.

If you live to be 79 years old, I did the math for you.

That's 692,000 hours.

79 years old, average American life expectancy.

You spend one third of your life sleeping, 450,000 hours you get.

450,000 hours of awake time.

And let's just cut that the first 15 years of your life off.

First 15 years.

Because the 15-year-old and younger, you sleep, sleep is so erratic and so much, it's it makes the math impossible.

So from 15 to 75, age 15 to age 75, you have 350,000 hours.

350,000 hours.

That sounds like a lot.

Think about how many of them you'll spend watching Star Wars movies.

You're gonna give an account to the Lord for those 350,000 hours.

Some will have more, of course, some will have less.

You don't know.

And that's the point of Jonathan Edward's resolution to live at this moment if you were the one alive in this moment.

Because you don't know if you have the next moment.

You're a steward of the time that you have, and Jesus will judge you for how you use it.

Your life is on loan from God, and God will call it back.

And he will ask you what you did with it.

Your life is the rental car.

You take it out, you drive it where you want to, and it Comes back and it will be examined to see what kind of condition it's in.

And God is gonna ask, where did you go with it?

What did you do with it?

That's something we all have in common.

You know, President Trump and President Biden disagree on a lot.

You know what they have in common?

24 hours in the day.

They have that in common with each other.

And once you start thinking like that, you realize, you know what, you have something in common with at least two presidents of our country.

You also have 24 hours in your day.

Dusty Baker, Dave Martinez approach baseball entirely differently.

Yet they too 24 hours in their day.

The point is you have time allotted to you, and God is going to examine how you used it.

There was a recent study in the United Kingdom of 2,000 office workers that subjected themselves to the study.

They had to work in a company that was over 100 people.

This is pre-COVID.

They had to work in their office over 200 people.

They install an app on their computer, they fill out a study when they're away from their computer.

They did this for several months.

And what this study found is that the typical British office worker, and I'm going to assume it's the same for an American, is productive for two hours and 53 minutes a day.

That's less than three hours.

And I I have I pulled out my favorite parts of the study.

The average, and you know what the word average means, but I just want to say it again.

The average time in the study that a worker spent on social media was a day was 44 minutes.

Talking with others from work, so that's the self-selected survey, like you're away from your computer, what were you doing?

Talking with people at work, 40 minutes a day.

Making coffee, 15 minutes a day.

Texting with non-work people, 15 minutes a day, on the phone with family 20 minutes a day.

And my favorite part of the study: the average time a British office worker spent searching for a new job 26 minutes a day.

When you tally all that up, you get two hours and 53 minutes of productivity, actual work a day.

By the way, there was a similar American study done during COVID that found that for many larger companies, workers are actually more productive at home than they were in the office.

In other words, companies are often structured in a way that wastes time.

And that shouldn't surprise you because our life is structured in a way that wastes time.

We design our lives so easily, so it's so much time is wasted.

We do that intentionally.

We set ourselves up with tasks that are unnecessary to do, and it's a waste of time.

Our life can go by like an office worker's life.

Or at the end of a week, we were productive for name moments of our time.

But God sees, God knows, God cares.

Secondly, there is a best way to use your time.

Look carefully how you should walk not as unwise, but as wise.

And then verse 16, making the best use of the time.

Notice Paul's phrase here, there is a best use of your time.

So you have to be careful about how you live your life, knowing that you'll give an account to the Lord.

2 Corinthians 5, he's going to judge you for the deeds done in the flesh, rewards you for good and foul on emptiness.

In other words, God looks at your life and rewards you for how you lived it, and there is a best use of it.

I don't know how else to understand, verse 16, making the best use of your time.

And that won't be easy, of course, because the whole current of time is pulling you away from the best use of your time.

If you think about it, what does it mean to sanctify the time?

Well, it means to set it aside, to recognize its connection to God, to set it to recognize this moment is connected to God through our affections, through our intellect, through our conduct, through our head, hearts, and hands.

The way we act in this moment can sanctify this time by recognizing God as sovereign over it, and we will give an account to him for it.

Or this moment in time can be lost to the frivolity of this world by disconnecting it from that eternal reality.

By saying that, you know, my life is mine and I'm not gonna think about God right now.

I might believe in him, but I'm not gonna think about him.

I'm not gonna use this moment of time in a way that he wants me to, or in a way that I'm gonna give an account for him.

Or the lazy steward, we think that I don't know what time the owner's coming home, but it's probably not gonna be now, so I'm gonna sit down on the couch.

Not the attentive steward who says, I don't know when the owner's coming home, so I need to be awake, alert, light the candles.

Every moment you're acting like one of those two people.

When you act like the attentive steward, when you take this time and sanctify it, that's the best use of time.

Romans 13, verse 12.

Romans 13:12

The night is far gone, the day is at hand, so cast off the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Wrap it around you.

There is battalionware, there's there's wartime clothes that you put on yourself.

It's the armor of light so that you live in a dark world.

That's the best use of your time.

Now, the word time here is verse 16, making the best use of your time.

The word time here is not the normal Greek word for time, chronos.

There's two Greek words for time.

Perhaps you've heard this before.

The common word is chronos.

Chronology, we get our English word chronology from that.

It's the sequence of seconds, it's all the stats I gave you earlier.

That's the normal concept of time.

That's not the word that Paul uses here.

The word that Paul uses here, it's translated time in the ESV, but it's the word for seasons.

It's the word for epics, it's the it's the word for just, you know, a period of time, a longer period of time.

Not sequential, just a season of life would be the way we'd say it in English.

Making the best use of your seasons of life.

You think about your life in seasons?

Somebody challenged me before I started college as a brand new believer.

To live my time in college, knowing that I'm not going to get those four years back.

To live it completely for the Lord.

So when I graduated college, I will have shared the gospel with everyone I wanted to share the gospel with.

I will have taken whatever stands in whatever classes I want to take.

I'll have given my all in sports.

Where I was in soccer, that I would give my all in soccer, so I would never look back at that as wasted time, that I would never look back at any evangelistic opportunities, wasted time, that I would pour it all out, knowing it'll be over in four years, and I can reset with something new.

I'm very grateful for the person who challenged me with that because you can apply that thinking.

It's so easy with school because there's a set start and a start, a set finish.

But every season of your life is marked out like that.

Make the best use of your singleness.

Recognize that your singleness is here for such a brief period of time.

Perhaps, and by the way, all periods of your life are brief.

You know what I mean by that.

You may be single your whole life, but in the eyes of the Lord, you will be single for such a brief period of time here on this earth.

Make the most of your singleness.

Make the most of your early marriage before you have kids.

You're married?

Make the most of that year or two before you have kids, or however long if the Lord delays it.

Make the most of that time period.

No, you're not going to get it back.

Make the most of the time where you have the little ones at home, because it seems like that's the longest time.

But it's a season of life you have, and it's it goes by so quick.

And it's so tempting to fill it with other things.

It's so tempting to say, I need to find my significance outside of this little moment of time right here, outside of these little kids the Lord has given me for such a brief period of time.

Let me find another way to find my significance in life and experience it that way.

Make the most of your mid-career, knowing that God has placed you in a position in your life now with income and whatever and opportunities and difficulties.

You have this for such a short season of time.

Don't waste it on yourself.

Make the most use of your time as an empty nester.

Your kids are gone, they're off at college.

You have a new season in life.

Make the most use of it.

You're not going to get it back.

You're not going to get another chance.

Just like you won't get another chance at college, you won't get another chance at that season.

You have your health and you have your strength and you have your money and you have time.

And oftentimes I'll hear people lament that.

No, it's a it's a rare opportunity.

God's given you this unique season in your life.

As you get older and the health difficulties increase, and caring for parents, and all those things increase.

Make the most of that period of time in the same way you do every other time.

Make the best use of a phrase I've heard Tom Joyce using a lot in some books he gave out.

Make the most of the last few laps of your race.

You've got a few laps left.

Make the most of it.

Your life comes in stages.

Grab them up.

Make the best use of it.

Now, this phrase, make the best use of it, I don't like that translation, make the best use of it.

It's the Greek word for redeem, is the word.

That you're buying it.

It's something that is given to you, but it's going away, and you've got to buy it back.

That's the word for redemption.

You can say make the best use of it because I mean I guess that's a fair understanding of what the idiom means.

It is an idiom.

You're supposed to, we say it in English, redeem the time.

Think about what that means when you use that idiom in English.

I'm going to redeem the time.

You redeem coupons, you're redeemed.

Your life should belong to the Lord.

Are you sold into slavery of sin and the Lord redeems you out?

You've been redeemed.

Well, your time needs to be redeemed.

How do you redeem your time?

Well, you sanctify it and you set apart the love of Christ in your heart.

You buy that time up.

Your time is for sale.

You buy it and you buy it not to save it.

You cannot save time.

If you buy it to save it, you will lose it.

The way you buy time up is using it at the moment, not letting it pass you by.

You think, I'll buy this time tomorrow.

That time's not for sale tomorrow.

It's like the housing market in Northern Virginia right now.

You see the sign go up and from the house.

You're like, oh, that might be a nice house to buy.

Let me look at it tomorrow.

You drive by tomorrow.

Sold.

No trespassing.

I didn't even get to put in the address in my search engine.

Your time is like that.

The house is on the market now.

You can use this time now.

And if you wait until tomorrow to use today's time, it is off the market.

Psalm 90, verse 12.

Psalms 90:12

Teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Do you follow that verse?

Teach us to number our days.

And you say, Well, only God knows the number of our days.

Then what is Moses talking about?

Number your days.

View your life in seasons, view your life in a sequence of events, number them up, count them up, and live them out for the glory of God through a heart of wisdom.

Calvin on Ephesians 5 gives way to one of his, I think, the most powerful word picture that Calvin used.

All of life in a theater before the glory of God.

It comes from Ephesians 5.

It's this idea that you are in a theater and that God is the audience.

And your life is played out on the stage.

You're not the lead role in the play.

Do you know this?

You're not the lead in this play.

The Lord is the lead in this play.

The world revolves around him.

And we have supporting roles to play.

So you might be a prop.

You might have a few speaking lines.

You're coming in and out.

And so ask yourself, what kind of supporting character are you going to be?

Are you going to be the kind of character that angers the rest of the cast?

That you cause hurt and heartache in your few moments on the stage?

Are you going to be the kind of character that brings joy to the cast?

And specifically, what's the point of the play?

To bring joy to the audience.

In this case, the audience is God.

You're going to live your life before Him, knowing it's so short.

You have just a walk, you have a cameo here.

You're a walk in across the stage.

Are you going to make the most of it?

Are you going to squander it?

I think you can extrapolate that to a more American time.

Calvin's writing in, you know, he was familiar with the theater, of course, but he's writing hundreds of years for movies.

And you think, are you going to be content to live your life hiding in the darkness of the audience?

Or are you going to get out of the chair and get onto the stage?

If you're going to make Calvin's analogy more Americanized, get out of the crowd and come onto the stage.

Live your life.

Take the moment and sanctify it for the Lord.

There's the best use of your time.

Thirdly, you can grow in discovering what that use is.

You can grow in figuring it out.

Look at verse 17.

Do not be foolish.

Understand what the will of the Lord is.

This is the imperative in this passage here.

Understand.

So realize is the another way of putting it.

Think about this.

Get it.

Let this into your head.

There is a best use of your time and God judges it.

Now, there's a wild dichotomy here in Ephesians when it comes to walking in your life.

Isn't there Ephesians 2?

You are dead in your sins and trespasses.

You don't find a dead body and say, hey, watch where you walk.

He's dead.

He's not walking anywhere.

Ephesians 2, dead in sins and trespasses, you cannot be pleasing to the Lord.

It's impossible to do so.

You're in captivity to sin, you're dead.

Now Ephesians 2, 10, you come to life, and God has appointed deeds for you to walk in from before the foundations of time.

So before you come to Christ, you cannot walk.

Now you're in Christ, you can walk.

And that's where Ephesians carries on.

Now that you have the ability to walk, you've regained it.

Don't walk like the Gentiles, who are dead again, remember, but walk in holiness, walk in love, walk in unity, walk in wisdom, and here understand what the will of the Lord is, which you couldn't do before because you're dead in your sins and trespasses.

So Proverbs 19, verse 20.

Proverbs 19:20

Listen to advice, accept instruction, so you will gain wisdom.

You can grow in wisdom.

You can grow in your knowledge of the word.

This is where biblical wisdom is so different than IQ or intellect, which I don't even know if this is true, but people say and textbooks say at school, which who knows what that means anymore, but that you can't grow in your IQ, more or less.

You can maybe bunce it at a few points through tutoring or whatever, but basically you're as smart as you're going to be, okay?

Just deal with that point.

But biblical wisdom is different.

Biblical wisdom, you can engage your mind, you can memorize scripture, you can apply it to your life, and you will gain wisdom.

Romans 16, verse 19.

Romans 16:19

I want you to be wise concerning what is good and innocent concerning what is evil.

In other words, grow in your understanding of what God's will is.

I mentioned this a few weeks ago, and time gets away from us so fast this morning, ironically and providentially, both.

But if you go through the Bible and you trace out what passages tell you what the will of the Lord is, and there are a few.

Here's an imperative.

Understand what the will of the Lord is, verse 17 is.

You're commanded to understand what the will of the Lord is.

A great place to start is looking up the Bible verses that say, This is the will of the Lord.

It's not even hard.

You don't even know Greek or Hebrew.

Understand what the will of the Lord is, okay?

Bible search.

What is the will of the Lord?

The will of the Lord is that you would be saved.

1 Timothy 2, verse 3.

1 Timothy 2:3

This is the will of God, that you would be saved.

You would give your life to the Lord.

You'd repent from your sin.

You would trust the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for your salvation.

You would be saved.

This is the will of the Lord, that you would stop living for yourself and give your life to Christ.

That you would be sanctified.

1 Thessalonians 4.

This is the will of God, your sanctification.

There, another real tough verse to understand.

This is the will of God, your sanctification.

That you would be sanctified, that you would put off sin and put on righteousness.

1 Peter 2 verse 13.

1 Peter 2:13

This is the will of God.

That you silence foolish people by how you submit to authority.

1 Peter 2 verse 13.

1 Peter 2:13

This is the will of God that you silence foolish people by your submission to authority.

That you would be thankful.

1 Thessalonians 5.15, this is the will of God.

That you would be thankful in all circumstances.

Man, those are five easy verses to look up.

A lot harder to live.

You would be thankful in all circumstances.

This is the will of the Lord.

You can grow in how you apply that throughout your life.

You grow in thankfulness, you grow in obedience, you grow in submission throughout the rest of your life.

You grow in how you use your time.

Totally appropriate.

You don't see neighborhood kids playing on the swing, neighborhood kids playing in the park, and think, man, those guys are wasting their life just playing.

It's totally appropriate that's age of life.

Middle school students play video games.

That's what they do.

High school students play video games a little less cute, a little more obnoxious.

College students play video games, yikes.

Grow up.

Make the most of your time.

It's weird.

It's wasting your time.

I'm picking on video games, but apply that.

Every moment of your life can be sanctified, set apart for the Lord.

Finally.

Failure to do that is foolish.

Notice the word Paul uses.

Do not, verse 17, be foolish.

That's the opposite.

If you're not going to dedicate your intellect and your affections towards pursuing Christ's likeness, you are a fool.

And the Bible calls you a fool.

Here it says foolish, but believe me, I can go to a lot of verses that call you straight up a fool.

Here, Paul's giving you the ish at the end here, to help you feel better about yourself for a second.

He didn't say I'm a fool, he said I'm foolish.

And the fool thinks there's a difference.

Ephesians 4, verse 14.

Ephesians 4:14

Worldly living and cunning are attractive.

This is just the earlier chapter.

If you just the default condition of your life is it's surrender to the currents of this world, that is foolish and it is so attractive.

So let me say it this way.

If you do not pay close attention to how you live, you will live like a fool.

Because the natural default setting is not rest.

Okay, it's not rest.

Just like the natural world, you think that an object is just naturally resting there.

It's not naturally resting there.

Gravity is pulling it down, whatever is stopping it is holding it up.

That's the natural condition.

It looks like it's resting only because something is propping it up.

The natural condition of you in this world is falling.

It is falling.

And if you are not careful about how you live your life, you will fall into foolishness, you will fall into wickedness, false cunning, Ephesians 4.14 says, worldly living is attractive to those in the world.

You have to go against the tide of time, against the current of time.

You live your life walking through a minefield of worldly dangers that you don't even know where they are.

This world is filled with dangers underground that will devastate you if you step on them, and you need to pay close attention.

If you just walk like you would want to walk, you will blow yourself up.

To live immorally is to live foolishly, but to live morally is to live wisely is another way of rendering verse 17.

In the Garden of Eden, there was not a moment wasted.

Not a moment wasted.

Adam and Eve did not have to fight to redeem the time in the Garden of Eden.

Their hearts were filled with worship, they were walking with the Lord.

Everything glorified the Lord.

Sin enters the world, it gets turned upside down.

Sin enters the world, now everything is dying, and the course of time is running away from Eden.

The river runs out of the garden.

Do you get that?

Time is taking you away from the garden.

It's pulling all things away from glorifying the Lord.

That's the direction the river goes.

And you gotta go against it.

You gotta go against it.

In this fallen world, the natural tendency of things is down.

The authority is the devil, the prince of the power of the air.

Our time belongs to him.

He is the prince of this world.

But through faith in Christ, you can be redeemed, and now you can go to war against the devil.

And the main thing the devil possesses that you can win back is your time.

Hebrews 2, Paul says, people are live in the fear of slavery of death.

They're enslaved to the fear of death.

Everybody is.

When you come to faith in Christ, you're freed from the fear of death because of the surety of the resurrection.

And now you are fighting back for your time.

You're taking it back.

One moment, one moment, one moment.

You're wrestling every moment of your life back from the devil.

Second Kings 6.

Incredible story.

The man is working with an axe.

And the axe head flies off into the river.

It's gone.

And he turns to Elisha the prophet and he says, My master, my master, and this is broken.

It's like an incredibly heartfelt.

Weeping, 2 Kings 6, my master, my master, the axe head was borrowed.

And of course, you remember the story, Elisha floats the axe head back to the water, fishes it out, and the man's burden is released.

When you stand before the Lord, 2 Corinthians 5, he will judge you and reward you for the deeds you did in the flesh.

Both good and empty, meaningless.

You look at your life.

Don't waste it.

Don't let that cry in 2 Kings 6 be your cry.

Don't say, My master, it was borrowed.

This life you gave me was borrowed, and it's gone now.

It's gone.

It's at the bottom of the lake.

I had this life for a moment.

You gave it to me.

I was trying to use it and I lost it.

And now it's gone.

There will be no resurrection of the axe head.

There will be no second chance at life.

There will be no sending you back to give you another go at it.

There will only be the lament of 2 Kings 6.

Master, it was borrowed, and now it's gone.

Lord, we're thankful that you redeem the lost.

We were lost, we were dead in sins and trespasses, and you fished us out of this world.

You pulled us out of the lake, you gave us life and light and love towards each other.

And you set us back into the pond.

You set us back into this world now with the light illuminating, now with the love radiating to our brothers and sisters in Christ, now with eternal life on full display in how we live our life.

Oh, don't let us lose what you have bought.

Give us self-control, give us discipline.

Give us the mindset to pursue you with energy and integrity.

There be but one true Christian in this world.

Let it be me.

Let that be our desire.

Set us apart for your good purposes.

So we will not waste a moment.

We all have different abilities, we have different families, we have some of us raising little kids, some of us with no one at home, some of us in college.

Wherever we are, Lord, grab our life and let us use it completely for your glory.

So we stand before you without regret.

We stand before you with a smile on our face, and we hear, not it was wasted, but we hear, well done, good and faithful servant.

Enter into the rest of your master.

We long for that day.

We give you thanks for it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and church information are on our website at ibc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.