Use your time wisely
Notes
Transcript
What do you get from a pampered cow? Spoiled Milk
What do you get from a pampered cow? Spoiled Milk
How did the momma duck break her back? Her son stepped on a quack.
ME
ME
Story about midlife crisis. Wanting life to be meaningful amount to something more.
WE
WE
Maybe when you think about your time, you see the good you have done. Maybe you are like me you wish you had done more.
But Today we are going to see in the death of Lazarus Jesus teaching us to use our time wisely.
EXPOSITION
EXPOSITION
Read Jn 11:6
6 So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
What we are going to see is that Jesus has waited for him to die… he sat around and made sure that Lazarus was dead before he left. This is so important in this story and we talked about that a little last week… and this is the important chain in todays lesson.
7 Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.”
Notice, he doesn’t say Bethany, he is about to make a point here by saying Judea, and not the name or the city.
8 The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?”
9 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world.
10 But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”
11 After saying these things, he said to them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.”
12 The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.”
And I really love this, all of a sudden all of the disciples have become some doctors, and they are like, Jesus, lets not go and wake him up… everyone knows that all you need is a little bit of campbells soup and a nap and it helps you recover from the sickness….
And if Jesus was me he would have rolled his eyes in these next couple verses
13 Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep.
14 Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus has died,
15 and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”
And Jesus hears them, and I think he wants to make sure that his mission is about to be accomplished in the way the father intended it to be accomplished, and so he wants to make sure there is no doubt at all about what is going on. So, he looks at them and I love that the word tells us He tells them plainly The parables are gone, the hidden meaning is gone, and he just lays it out there…He’s like okay dudes… he’s dead. Now are you getting the picture… and he says He is GLAD that he died… why…we talked about it last week… so that you may believe… and this is so huge. We completely miss it sometimes, and i wont go back into it since we went into it last week… but sometimes the blessings are in there…
But what we often miss as we run through these verses and look at Jesus and his relationship with this family and his intense love for them, is that Jesus is really showing us how we should be using our time and what we are to do with it… If you are taking notes there are three main ideas he is teaching us about time, there are some under pinnings to those things, but the first of those things Jesus wants us to know is :
God has given us a certain amount of time to use in this life for eternity.
Look at how he said this in John 11:9-10
9 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world.
10 But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”
And it is important to note as we look at this the Jews divided the day into two sectors. Each of twelve hours…and he is talking about walking in the the light of day… and this reckons back to what we heard at the beginning of the Gospel…
Quote John 1:1-5 from memory
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
And he is about to point some things out to them… he is telling them there is only so much time in each day… and this is prudent to the whole of today’s message… we only have so much time for this life that we are living in and there is only so much we can do… and when we think about this we can see that Jesus told us all about this back in John 9:4 that there is a time coming that we will no longer be able to do anything else…
4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.
So with that in mind, there are four things to remember about us only having a finite amount of time in this life
In Gods eyes we cannot lengthen or shorten the time that he has given us to live this life.
Look at what David tells us in Psalm 139:16
16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
And so even if we wanted to, we couldn’t make our lives longer. There is no fountain of youth that will give us a longer life. God has appointed all the days of our life. And for some of us that can give us a great deal of comfort. He has appointed our time to live and our time to die. But for some people this thought can lead to a wild side, but what we see is the second point.
We have to be sensible with our time.
There are some, not any of you who think… if I have an appointed time I can do whatever I want and not worry I can be a dare devil and it doesn’t mean that God will take me right now. Unless, in all of his glory he knew that you were going to be extremely stupid on this day and that was the day he appointed you.
And we see this in the story of Jesus… he had just left Judea because he knew they were trying to kill them, and he didn’t want to die at that moment. So he left and went to do ministry in a place that was safer. Its not that he was afraid of death or dying, but he knew it wasn’t the moment, so he walked away from danger and returned in the moment that would most glorify God. You also see this in the life of Paul. There were times when he would leave to get out of the way of danger and then there were times when he would risk his life for the gospel. We must realize there are times for both in our lives.
And this tells us and leads us to the third idea about our finite amount of time God has given us
He has given us the time we need to accomplish the work he has set before us.
I love the way I have heard preachers say it for all of my life…if you’re still living God’s not done with you… and you can see in Jesus’ life with the way he lived. He was able at the end of his life to say John 17:4
4 I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.
Which leads to the fourth point on our finite time:
We must use our time with eternity in mind
We can see in John 17:4 Jesus is putting an emphasis on making sure he does the work of the Father
In our lives we can make the mistake of living just like the world, we must use our lives to glorify God and do what he has called us to do and share his mission on this earth.
We cannot live just like the world and be CHristian atheist just piling up accomplishments for ourselves and making sure we have a normal american life. We have to live in a way that accomplishes the ministry that God has called us to do here.
And we can see in the story that there was a time, even though there were some in Judea who were looking to kill him that he knew he had to return to the place and do the work of the Father.
Much the same, there comes a point in our lives when we realize we cannot side step our neighbor any longer. We cannot hold on to the truth of the gospel and keep it to ourselves anymore, we must take the step and get out of our comfort zone and share with those people. Though its not on the same level as this with Jesus… the moment when the lady at the concert asked what I did… I felt the Lord urging me… and it was a great situation… At the other concert I went to… it wouldn’t have went well
The second truth he is telling us about using our time is
We must make wise decisions when using our time…
And it turns out that we have to set our priorities in the right order to make sure we are using our time correctly, and we can see Just in this short verses how Jesus was and was not making his decisions
He did NOT make decisions based on the pressure of his friends.
8 The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?”
Bro, what do you mean? Remember back to Jn 10:40
40 He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained.
We talked about this two weeks ago, when we were talking about Jesus’ claim as the great shepherd, but He had left because they were trying to stone him at the end of the Chapter because his claim that he was God. They didn’t like it, and we aren’t exactly sure how much time has elapsed at this point in the narrative from just 8 verses ago, but what we are seeing here is that it hasn’t been long enough for the disciples to feel like the heat has died down, and they are questioning him again. Are you sure dude… this seems like a really bad play Jesus… we are walking into a death trap, are you sure you want this…
And there is this pressure on Jesus, and like many of us we would probably want to just be like you are right, and make decisions based on the pressure of our friends… but Jesus is certain that what he is supposed to do is Go, so that God can be glorified and that people can believe… he didn’t allow the friends to change his mind
And we have to do the same. We have to do what God is calling us to do, even if friends think we are crazy. That may mean leaving the group to give the homeless guy on the corner some money…
Not only did he not make decisions based on peer pressure but he also didn’t
make decisions based on Emotion
One of the things we tend to do is make decisions based on how we feel. When things get out of whack and we are stressed we often make a rash decision in our anger… or in our overwhelmed state. This is when I talk about sometimes when someone wrongs you or makes you mad online or something its almost best to just type out what you are thinking and get the whole thing out there and then take a deep breath and make a decision to delete the entire thing.
We could easily see this in two different ways in the story today. First, Jesus didn’t move immediately to go to the sisters the moment they showed up… and as we discussed last week, Jesus really loved that family. The easy deal would have been for him to go immediately… thats what we would do for the people we love we would run to the bedside… but Jesus had other purposes and he didn’t let them rule him… God had a plan that he needed to complete… which leads us to the other way he didn’t make decisions…
based on the threat of his enemies… the obviously wanted to kill him… you and I dont typically have enemies like this that want to kill us, but we do have people that don’t like us and Jesus wouldn’t allow that to sway him or keep him from God’s plan… let me also say this doesn’t mean you make decisions to “stick it” to someone you aren’t getting along with… this is just to say we do what God wanted us to do without fear of threat.
So what all of this amounts to is Jesus made decisions Purely on what would glorify God.
So that leads us to the last lesson about our time this morning…
We must completely surrender our time to the will of God
We see Jesus will in this story is to do God’s will… in fact we saw him tell that to the disciples in Jn 4:34 when they were trying to get him to eat.. Jn 4:34
34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.
It was important… and it should be for us… Look at what Paul tells us in Romans12:1-2
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
We must be using our time so we can do THE WILL OF GOD.
And from this scripture we see again the will of God in Jesus and our life is eternally focused… look at the end of verse 15 Jn 11:15
15 and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”
That you may believe… and ultimately that is what God wants for everyone… we need help othersi n their belief…. because when we do we see people who respond like Thomas
16 So Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
And he gets a bad wrap… Here he was ready to go to death… and he is mindful of the stoning… but his belief in Jesus is so strong he says… lets go… Im ready to die with him…
YOU
YOU
How are you using your time? Are you laying up time for yourself. For your desires? OR are you much like Thomas ready to die with Jesus… and remember he was dying for the will of God… not his own stupidity… he was going to d what was called of him.
WE
WE
Can you imagine what could happen if we all decided we were going to use our time for the glory of god…. how much of a difference we could make here in our community… if we were deciding to glorify him in all that we do…
