You’ve heard me say it before, and I’m sure that I will say it again, “God loves me and everyone else has a wonderful plan for my life.”

And while I’d like to think that was original with me, and I’m not sure when I first heard it or when I first started using it, Bill Backus used it in his book, “Telling Yourself the Truth.”

This is week 5 of our finding time series, and over the past few weeks we’ve been going back to my premise that you can’t make time. Time has already been made. We can only find time, and the way we find time is that we use time that we might have used somewhere else. That isn’t always easy, and sometimes it requires us to sacrifice the good for the better.

I mentioned in week 1 that I’m a prolific reader, and the only way I can read the amount of fiction that I read, is by snatching time away from other activities.

But not everyone is a reader, so this might be more familiar and resonant with more of you.

Sometimes, I feel like I need more sleep. Can anyone else identify with that? But I also know that I don’t sleep in. Not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I wake up most mornings between 6 and 6:15.

And yes, 6 o’clock does come twice a day. That might be sleeping in for some people, and might be stupidly early for others, but it is what it is for me.

And so, I know that if I want to get extra sleep, it won’t come in the morning, so it has to come at night. I have to find time to go to bed earlier. In order to find the time to do that, I need to take it from someplace else. Watching TV, reading a book, whatever it is, I need to stop doing it and go to bed.

And sometimes, I have to stop doing something good in order to find the time I need to do whatever it is I choose to do. Whether it is reading or going to bed early.

So, let’s look at what that principle looked like in the Jesus story.

The scripture that was read for us earlier begins with these words.

Mark 1:35 Before daybreak the next morning, Jesus got up and went out to an isolated place to pray.

The first thing the story tells us is that We need to Find time to Hear From God

If you read the gospel stories, you’ll discover that it is mentioned 34 different times that Jesus went away by himself to pray. Now some of those were the different authors telling the same story, but regardless, it seems that prayer was a priority in Jesus’ life. In fact, 15 of those 34 times were in Luke’s Gospel alone.

If you look at what happened before the scripture that was read earlier, we see Jesus is in Capernaum, and he was staying with Peter and Andrew and it’s there we see him healing Peter’s mother-in-law.

As a result of that healing, a huge crowd gathered. We pick up the story in Mark 1:32–34 That evening after sunset, many sick and demon-possessed people were brought to Jesus. The whole town gathered at the door to watch. So Jesus healed many people who were sick with various diseases, and he cast out many demons . . .

And the next morning, we read that before daybreak, zero dark thirty, Jesus goes to an isolated place to pray. He knew the day would be full, so he found time to pray by taking it from time he would have been sleeping.

In Luke’s gospel, we are told, Luke 5:16 But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.

In Matthew’s gospel, after Jesus heard that his cousin John had been executed by King Herod, we read that Jesus went to an isolated place to be alone.

The night before the 12 apostles were selected and named, we read that Jesus spent the night in prayer.

After feeding the 5000, we read that Jesus went away to pray, and the same thing happened before he fed the 4000.

After the Last Supper just before he was arrested, we read that Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane. Why? To be alone and to pray.

Prayer was an important part of Jesus’ ministry. It connected him to the Father, and it helped Him to stay centred on his mission and on his vision.

 Too often we see prayer as a parachute or a life jacket. When all else fails, we pray. When the kids are sick, we pray. If we lose our job. We Pray. If our spouse strays or if money is tight. We pray.

Have you ever had one of those people in your life that whenever their number comes up on your phone, your immediate thought is: I wonder what they want now?  

I hope I never give God reason for that thought to cross His mind when I pray.

But Jesus didn’t make prayer an afterthought. He made it a forethought.

What would happen if we used prayer to connect with the Father and to stay centred in our faith and in our life?

Not as a time management tool, but as a way to enter into communion with God and to allow him to direct our time.

Let’s keep going in the story, so Jesus has gone away to pray and after a while, the apostles track him down, and we pick up the story in Mark 1:36–37 Later Simon and the others went out to find him. When they found him, they said, “Everyone is looking for you.”

Like Jesus, We Need to Recognize the Limits of Our Time.

Another thing I mentioned when I started the series is that we all get the same amount of time as everyone else does. And I know, when we are living our lives, it doesn’t seem that way.

But we can’t mess with the spacetime continuum, I don’t actually know what that means, but it sounds cool.

We all get seven days in our week, and each day contains twenty-four hours. Each hour contains sixty minutes, and each minute contains sixty seconds.

And that reality is the same for you, as it is for me, as it is for Prime Minister Carney, and he has a country to run.

Now, if you are a single parent, someone who is working multiple jobs, or a parent with kids in multiple activities, or maybe a combination of all three, it may feel you have gotten cheated out of some of those days and hours. That you ended up with the short end of the stick.

And I’m not trying to minimize your reality. In some seasons of our lives and some days, we really don’t have enough hours to accomplish everything we need to do, and we wish we had the Prime Minister’s staff to take up some of the load.

Albert Einstein was famously credited with using a hot stove analogy to explain his theory of relativity in a simple way. We’re not really sure he said it, but we’ll give him credit for it: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

And sometimes it seems that we only have minutes in our day, and other times it feels like we have only hours. We’ve all said, “Where has the day gone”, and most of us have asked at one time or another; “Will this day never end?”

However, regardless of how little time you might feel you have, we all get the same time.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that my favourite song was Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle”.

Along with being my favourite song, Chapin is my favourite musician. But probably my second favourite musician, mabye tied with Willie Nelson, is Jim Croce.

One of Croce’s best-known songs, was entitled “Time in a Bottle”, which was written just before he died in a tragic plane crash in 1973. And I’m never sure if that was ironic, or just a tragedy?

The song begins with, “If I could save time in a bottle, The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day ’til eternity passes away, just to spend them with you”

However, the reality is that you can’t save time in a bottle. Or in a piggy bank or in your sock drawer.

Every day, we are given 24 hours or 1440 minutes, and at the end of the day, those minutes are gone, regardless of whether we have spent them wisely or foolishly.

Let me try and put it in more practical terms. Suppose I was able to give you ten cents for every minute of your time. And you are thinking, “Ten cents. That’s not much”. Hey, do you think I’m made out of money?

And understand that’s not paying you to work. That’s just for your time. Ten cents every minute is six dollars an hour. For twenty-four hours it works out to $144.00, to spend any way you like.

The only caveat is that you have to spend it all by the end of each day. At midnight, your balance goes back to zero, and you have to start over.

Regardless of how much you have at 11:59 p.m., At 12.01 a.m. you have ten cents in your account.

You can’t save it in a bottle, a piggy bank or your sock drawer. You have to spend it.

It kind of sounds like year-end with government departments. Although it being your money, you’d probably be less likely to waste it.

And if we would be so conscientious with a $144.00, why are we so careless with our 24 hours.

We are probably all on the same page regarding Jesus’ divinity. He was God.  All powerful, all knowing and all present.

However, when he was living on the earth, he was bound by the same time constraints as the rest of us. His days had 24 hours, his hours had 60 minutes.

He may have been able to make time stand still, but he didn’t.

Just like us, he had to choose how to spend his time. He knew that he couldn’t do everything, and he had to prioritize where he would spend the hours, he had.

This is where things get tricky, because by choosing to spend his time doing some things, he was making another decision to not spend his time doing other things, and they weren’t bad things. Which brings us to the next part of the story.

Mark 1:38 But Jesus replied, “We must go on to other towns as well, and I will preach to them, too. That is why I came.”

Just like Jesus, We Have to Make Choices That Reflect Our Purpose

I’m sure that there were those who would have been quite happy for Jesus to spend his time healing the sick, feeding the hungry and turning water into wine.

And there are those today, who feel the same. Jesus is the lovable guy, playing with little kids, carrying a lamb over his shoulder. Never judging anyone, never condemning anyone, and always ready to answer our prayers and give us whatever we ask for. But is that the reality?

Now to be fair, Jesus could have spent his entire ministry, his entire life, healing the sick and feeding the hungry. Healing sick people who would eventually die and feeding hungry people who would eventually be hungry again.

And while it might have made a difference in their present circumstance and helped meet their immediate needs, Jesus said that he came for something even more important.

As good as those things seemed, without giving people a chance to hear His message of salvation, it wouldn’t have made an iota of difference in their eternity.

So, if the reason Jesus came wasn’t simply to heal and feed people, why did Jesus come?

He spells it out in Luke 19:10 Jesus said, “For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.”

And he could have spent his days healing the sick, feeding the hungry and casting out demons, but that was such a small part of what he was called to do.

I love the story about the farmer who got up one morning to feed the sheep. He started to get the feed when he saw that the tractor needed to be fixed.

He started for the barn to get the tools to fix the tractor when he saw that the wood needed to be chopped.

He started to the woodpile to get the axe when he noticed that the horses were out of the corral. He ran to catch the horses and then noticed that the barn had caught on fire, so he forgot about the horses and ran to put out the fire.

While putting out the fire, he heard his wife yelling to him that the WIFI wasn’t working and he needed to fix it. And the sheep were still hungry.

We can become so focused on the urgent, that we miss out on what we are supposed to be doing.  Not bad things, just not the best things.

For years, I didn’t go on short-term mission trips, because I didn’t feel that they fit in my calling.

The teams went over to paint walls and hold babies. I know that is simplistic and not necessarily a reality for every mission trip, but that was how I saw it. And I know that there is a need for people to paint walls and hold babies, but that wasn’t what I was called to do.

In 2007, our District Superintendent Peter Moore, who was our district director of Global Partners at the time, contacted me about going on a short-term trip to West Africa. Ghana and Sierra Leone to be precise.

I turned him down and expressed my aversion to painting walls and holding babies. And he said, “No, I want you to come to preach and teach pastors.”

He knew exactly what would reflect my calling and my giftings. He knew what would scratch my itch and float my boat.

And over the past twenty years, I have made trips to Ghana, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Egypt and Bangladesh, fulfilling what God has called me and gifted me to do, preaching and teaching pastors.

And as I was preparing this, I realized that if I hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have been so passionate about clean water and our village partnership.

Could I have gone and painted walls and held babies? Sure, I’ve done both of those things before, but others can do it so much better than me, and it’s not what I was called to do.

I know you will find this hard to believe, but after more than 45 years in ministry, I’ve disappointed people by not doing what they thought I should be doing.

But I’ve learned that I can’t make every decision based on whether everyone will be happy with me.

Because the other thing I’ve learned is, I can’t make everyone happy, and when I try, it becomes a disaster for me.

It was probably 40 years ago that I discovered that ultimately, I’m playing to an audience of one, and while you might want it to be you, it’s God.

My responsibility is to seek God’s direction, listen to wise counsel, and be faithful to what He has entrusted me to do.

Sometimes people will disagree with those decisions, and sometimes they may even be right. But I cannot allow the fear of disappointing people to become the thing that determines my priorities.

I had a lady tell me in a previous church, “I know you feel that you don’t have to please us all the time, but once in a while would be nice.”

I’m sorry she felt that way, but what she was saying was that she was disappointed that I wasn’t pleasing her, all the time.

As I was preparing the message, I thought this would be a good place to talk about Stephen Covey’s rock illustration from his book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. 

We all have a jar of life, and we have big rocks, pebbles and sand to fill the jar with. If we put the sand and pebbles in first, then there is no room for the big rocks.

The better way is to put the big rocks in first, then the pebble and then the sand, and they all fit.

The question is, what are your big rocks.

Let’s be careful here. As Christians they might not be what the world identifies as the big rocks, or even what we value the most.  These are the things that ought to have priority in light of our calling to follow Christ.

They might include:

– Your relationship with God.

– Your responsibilities to family.

– Your calling.

– The work and relationships God has entrusted to you.

– And we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Time for Rest and renewal.

The first point of the message reminds us that prayer will help us figure out what those big rocks ought to be.

My second point is a reminder that the bottle is a fixed size. We all have a finite amount of time in our lives.

And here you will decide what rocks you are going to put in the jar.

This isn’t a time-management message. I’m not trying to tell you that there are only certain ways that you can use your time as a Christ follower.

I’m just challenging you to talk to God about where His grace will lead you in this journey.

This isn’t about squeezing more activity into our schedules or feeling guilty because we haven’t done enough. It’s about asking God to shape our priorities.

We all have different responsibilities, different gifts, and different seasons of life.

But all of us can ask, “Am I making room for the things God is calling me to do? And is there something good that I need to set aside to make room for something more important?”

Then we need to trust God’s grace to help us live out the answers.