Who's Your Time Lord? The Stewardship of Time (Luke 12:35-48)

Controlling time

Imagine a man who has made it his life's mission to conquer time itself. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur now in his late 40s, has poured millions of dollars into his "Blueprint" project — an obsessive, data-driven war against aging. He tracks everything: sleep down to the minute, every supplement, every biomarker, workouts calibrated like a professional athlete, even aiming to make his organs biologically as young as an 18-year-old's.

But it was just a few weeks ago that Bryan Johnson was diagnoses with an immune disease that is incurable. Johnson has been pouring even more money into trying to find a cure. His mantra is “Don’t Die.” Johnson is doing what all of us want to do… we’re all fascinated by the thought.. what if we could beat death? We want to control time.

We Americans are obsessed with time — we treat it like a commodity we can master, optimize, and control. We pack our calendars until they bleed, chase productivity hacks, wear smartwatches that nag us about every heartbeat and step and sleep, and build entire industries around anti-aging, life-extension, and "hacking" our biology. We even birth "clock Nazis" — those rigid enforcers of schedules who act as if punctuality is next to godliness and any deviation from the timeline is a moral failure. We buy watches that cost more than cars. every second of the day is accounted for, logged, optimized.

And if we're honest? We all do this in smaller ways. We clutch our minutes like misers. We rage against interruptions, delays, and seasons we didn't plan. We measure our worth by output and efficiency. Yet the harder we grasp, the more time slips through our fingers — a quiet reminder that time was never ours to own. I mean… you ask most people what they're short on and they won't say money. They'll say time.

We binge shows about time travel and time loops and doctors who pilot boxes through centuries, and somewhere underneath the fun of it is a real ache: what if I could just get some of it back? What if I could slow it down, speed it up, rewind it, control it? A man made headlines not long ago spending a fortune trying to reverse his own aging, chasing the one thing money has never actually been able to buy. We are, all of us, a little bit like that — desperate to run the clock ourselves, convinced that if we could just manage our hours well enough, tightly enough, we'd finally get ahead of the one thing none of us can outrun.

Do Overs and time

There’s also another question we could ask about time: how many of you wish you could have a do-over with time? What would you do differently if you could do it all over again? This is the premise behind Dr. Who and Dr. Strange and all of the time travel shows… we get to do it differently. We’ve all had the fantasy of going back to high school with our current wisdom, saying the perfect comeback to the bully, acing the test we failed, dating the person we were too scared to approach. And we imagine that in this do-over, we’d be confident and kind and successful. But the truth is, we’d just be sinners with better intel. The pride that made us miserable then would find new ways to make us miserable now. The insecurity would attach itself to different targets. The selfishness would refine its tactics. We wouldn’t be saints. We’d be older sinners in younger bodies, squandering a second grace the way we squandered the first.

The great lie of the reborn story is that sin is a series of correctable mistakes rather than a condition of the heart. Get the sequence right, marry the right billionaire, expose the right villain, and all will be well. But the heart remains the same brooding, grasping, fearful factory of idols it always was. It will find something new to envy. It will manufacture a fresh grievance. It will, eventually, face a death it cannot strategize its way out of. We live as though time belongs to us, as if by sheer will, discipline, or technology we can wring more life out of it, delay the inevitable, and stay in the driver's seat.

Open Hands: Living the Stewarded Life

We’re talking about stewardship and time this morning in our series on stewardship… Open Hands: Living the Stewarded Life. And it would be very easy to come up with 3 great steps on mastering our time… making sure we don’t waste time for Jesus. If we start there, all we’ve done is come up with a more Christian hack than our fitness watches and life hacks. In fact, peruse the Amazon bookstore on Christians and time and you’ll get dozens of books on how to be a better time lord. How many of you have one of those books? I have a few. LOL And most of them come across as super spiritual… “here’s how to make every second count for Jesus.” Because we all know that Jesus loves promptness and timeliness and ordered lives around our watches.

Did you know that Jesus doesn’t start his discussion about time there? In fact, he doesn’t even go there. Just like everything else… how we handle our time begins with Jesus and the Gospel. Here’s what Jesus says before he even talks about time:

"Don't be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32)

Your Father delights to give you the kingdom. We could park all day there on what that means. But know this… the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, all the things that the Bible says about God’s kingdom… he has given to you. Straight up. The kingdom isn't a prize dangled at the far end of enough faithfulness. It's already been given, out of the Father's own delight, before a single instruction in this whole passage gets issued.

The kingdom is a gift. And the work of the kingdom has been entrusted to us. Not might consider giving. Not will give, eventually, if you manage well. Delights. The same kind of pleasure the Father takes in the Son at his baptism — that same delight, aimed at ordinary people, handing over a kingdom before anyone in the room has done a single thing to deserve it.

Everything Jesus came to do — every bit of what it means for him to be king — has already been handed to his people, as gift. You didn't earn a share in his reign. You were given one. Made his kingdom people, before you were ever asked to do anything about it. That’s where the entire question of “time” starts… you’ve been given a gift. You’ve been given the kingdom. You’ve been given Jesus himself.

And that, then, leads to the question… now what? If the kingdom isn't a wage, if it's already given, what's left? What do kingdom people actually do with a kingdom they didn't earn?

Be ready

Jesus answers that question immediately, in verse 35:

Luke 12:35 ““Be ready for service and have your lamps lit.”

This literally means, be dressed and ready to go. It’s an echo of the language from the night of the Exodus in the Old Testament, when God told Israel that they were to be ready to flee Egypt in an instant. That’s the context for this entire section. The readiness here isn't generic alertness — it's the posture of a people expecting God to act, decisively, in an ordinary night that turns out not to be ordinary at all. Nobody knows when the master is going to walk back through the door. Be dressed and ready to go. Keep the lamps burning. Be ready. Be ready for the king who has already given you the kingdom.

Jesus says more about being alert and being ready… but then Peter, good ole Peter has a question… Jesus tells a parable about being ready and time… Jesus says we need to be ready… and Peter does what Peter does. He raises his hand.

Luke 12:41"Lord, are you telling this parable to us, or to everyone?"

It's a fair question on the surface. It's also, if you listen closely, a question with an exit built into it. Peter isn't asking for clarification. Peter is asking for a category. Which one of us is this actually about? Because if Jesus says "for everyone," Peter can relax a little — surely the warning is aimed more at the crowd, the ones who wander in and out, not at the Twelve who left their nets on the shore. And if Jesus says "for us," well — Peter's already following, already in, already ahead of the wandering crowd on this one. Either way, Peter's found himself an exit.

The entire text this morning swings on Peter’s question. Who’s supposed to be ready? Who’s supposed to be alert?

And Jesus doesn't give him one. He answers with a question of his own — he does this constantly in Luke, question answered with question — and the question he asks is bigger than the one he was handed.

Luke 12:42 "Who then is the faithful and sensible manager his master will put in charge of his household servants?"

No name gets supplied. Jesus’ answer leaves the blank open. And here's the thing about a question like that — once you refuse to hand out categories, once the question applies to anyone, you've actually raised the bar higher than a category ever could. Because if it's open to everyone, then whoever fits the description perfectly is going to be very hard to find. We'll come back to that.

Mythbusting “Be Ready”

All of this talk about being ready… and who Jesus is talking to… leads to the natural question… what does “be ready” mean? What does “be alert” mean? And there are all sorts of ways people answer that question. In fact, we have popular notions in evangelicalism that claim to be the answer to the question and aren’t.

Every altar call I ever sat through as a kid used this text to mean one thing: make sure you said the sinner’s prayer. Get saved now, because the rapture could happen tonight, and if you're not ready — if you haven't prayed the right words — you get left behind. That's not what this text is doing.

Notice what "being ready" actually looks like in the parable. Not a decision made once, at an altar, years ago, and then filed away for safekeeping. Found doing his job — an ongoing, unglamorous, repeated task, discovered in progress, not a transaction completed in the past. And notice where this whole unit started: the kingdom was already given, back in verse 32, before anybody was told to be ready for anything. "Be ready" was never the price of admission. The admission already happened.

Left Behind wants you afraid you missed your moment. Luke isn’t interested in that at all. Jesus doesn’t want us anxious about a decision you made or didn't make, but present, faithful, doing what's yours to do, in a kingdom that has already been given to you.

And what is that?

Luke 12:43 “Blessed is that servant whom the master finds doing his job when he comes.”

And what’s the “job” here?

Luke 12:42: "giving household servants their allotted food at the proper time" (12:42).

That's it. That's the whole job description. Not something dramatic. Not something that makes the evening news. Certainly not saying the sinner’s prayer. This is another example of making sure that the text itself is telling us just what “be ready” is… and here… being ready means… doing your job… and the job isn’t anything about getting saved. It’s about meal. It’s about food. That's what happens every week at this Table, before it's ever asked of us — we're fed, at the proper time, whether we've earned a place there or not. The steward's whole job is just an extension of what he's already received.

And that extension goes further than a Sunday morning. It's the meal you actually bring over the week someone's in the hospital — not three weeks later when things have settled down and it's easier for you. It's checking on the widow in your pew before she has to ask. It's noticing the new couple sitting alone and walking over now, not filing away a good intention for someday. It's answering the phone when your brother in Christ calls at an inconvenient hour, because his hour of need doesn't wait for your calendar to clear. None of that requires more hours in your week. It requires being present enough, awake enough, to actually see what this moment is asking of you — and then doing the ordinary thing, at the time it's needed, instead of the impressive thing at your own convenience.

That's what "at the proper time" means. Not "eventually, when I get around to it." Not "someday, when I have more margin." Now — because someone's actually hungry now, not later. “Being ready” is simply doing the work of the kingdom with the time that we are given. Where we live, learn, work, and play.

Mythbusting Christianized Time Management

The premise of the parable is that the master delays his coming. And certainly that is a reference to the time we live in… waiting for the return of Jesus. But living in the time of his delayed coming isn’t primarily about managing our time better. In a sense, it is about managing time… but it’s not a checklist. It’s not four steps to a more disciplined calendar. Get up earlier. Guard your hours. And look — none of that is bad advice. But if that's where this sermon ends up, we've actually just handed you a new version of exactly what this text is diagnosing. Because "managing your time better" and "my master is delaying, so I'll spend this how I like" aren't as far apart as they look. Both of them assume the same thing: that time is mine to run.

Some of you know this in your bones better than I do. In a former life in radio, I spent almost thirty years in a world where we all lived and died — professionally — by the second hand on a clock. One second late and the news misses the top of the hour. One segment runs long and the whole day is shot. That's real discipline, and it matters. But that's not what "being found ready" means in this text, and if we preach it that way, we've just replaced one form of time-control with another — swapped out bad time management for a productivity system, and then we call it “faithfulness.”

Here's the deeper version of the same trap: even "time spent at church" can become its own kind of performance. How many hours did I put in. How many services did I attend. That's still counting. That's still treating time as a currency you accumulate to prove something. The text never gives you a number. It never says "found doing his job for this many hours." It says found — doing the ordinary, recurring, appointed task, at the proper time. That's not a quantity. That's an orientation.

Being ready is simply being faithful to whatever God has called you to do in the place where he has called you.

We’ve been given a kingdom. Stewarding our time simply means carrying out our kingdom work on behalf of the king. That looks differently for all of us. Does that involve good time management principles? Oh sure. But all of this is given meaning in orienting our time in ways that are sensible in light of Christ’s return. There’s no pressure there. Readiness isn't a discipline achieved through better effort. It's what trust in the master's character looks like from the outside. The servants who stay dressed and alert aren't performing obedience under threat of a surprise inspection — they're living as people who actually believe the master is who he said he is: the one who delights to give the kingdom (v32)Their alertness is the visible shape of that belief, not a separate achievement layered on top of it. Being ready was never about trying harder. It was about believing something true — that the one coming back is the same one who already delighted to give you everything he has.

But there’s one more thing we have to see here in answering the time question. Remember Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question?

Luke 12:41–42 ““Lord,” Peter asked, “are you telling this parable to us or to everyone?” The Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and sensible manager...?”

So who then really is the faithful and sensible manager? Jesus’ question is open ended. Peter wanted categories. Jesus ignores the category question. And here's the truth underneath all of it: there's only one person who could ever answer that question without qualification. Every one of us — however disciplined, however devoted — is still inside time, still tempted by the appearance of delay, still capable of presuming time is ours to own. There's only one who stands over time rather than merely inside it. The same lights God set in the sky "for signs and appointed times" at the very beginning of Genesis were placed there by the one who, at the completion of that same time, sent his own Son — born under the law, born at the appointed hour, never early, never presuming, never once treating an interval as his own to spend. He is not simply punctual. He authored the clock he then kept perfectly.

Only Jesus is the Time Lord. And you want to know what blows me away in this text? The One who created time has Himself made sure that he is ready for us.

Luke 12:37 “Blessed will be those servants the master finds alert when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will get ready, have them recline at the table, then come and serve them.”

Are you hearing what I’m hearing in that verse? He will get ready… have them recline at His table… then come and serve them. Jesus gets ready. FOR US. How is it that we spend so much time trying to make sure that we get all the time management principles right so that we can be alert and be ready when Jesus comes and completely miss that Jesus gets ready FOR US?

Think about what that actually means. The one who authored every appointed hour, who set the sun and moon in the sky for signs and seasons before there was anyone to keep them — that same one, when he shows up, doesn't demand you scramble to meet his standard. He ties on the apron. He seats you. He serves you a meal.

You spend your whole life trying to get ready for him. Trying to arrive prepared enough, disciplined enough, faithful enough, to be found acceptable when he shows up. And this text quietly tells you something different: he already got ready — for you. Before you ever managed to be ready for him.

That's not how we'd write this story. If we were in charge of the parable, the servants would spend the whole night proving themselves, and the master would show up at the end to grade the performance. But that's not what happens. The master gets ready. He does the serving. The very posture he commanded in verse 35 — dressed, prepared, alert — he takes up himself, and turns it toward you instead of demanding it from you.

That's who the Time Lord actually is. Not a clock you're racing to satisfy. Not a master keeping score on how well you managed your hours. The one who made time itself has already spent his own perfectly — on your behalf, ahead of you, before you ever showed up ready for anything.

That's who Jesus is describing in verse 42, even though he never says his own name. Blessed is that servant — and there is only one who was ever actually found that way, without exception, without a single hour misused. And here's the good news buried in that: whatever share we have in that blessing, whatever place we have in the kingdom already promised back in verse 32, comes from being found in him. Be ready and be alert… because the perfect time manager is ready and alert FOR YOU at His Table. That’s Jesus stewarding our time.

Let’s Pray.

The Table

Come to this Table the same way those servants were found — not scrambling to look ready, not proving you managed your hours well this week. He's already the one who got ready. He ties on the apron here, too. He seats you. This bread, this cup — it's the master serving the household before he ever asks anything of it. You didn't earn a place here by being alert enough, faithful enough, on time enough. You're here because the Time Lord already spent his own perfectly, on your behalf, and now hands it to you, at the proper time, again. Come and eat. Come and drink. Be found — not performing, just present — at the table he's already prepared.