Will We Remember Well?

Introduction

A day is 24 hours, 1440 minutes and 86,400 seconds. A well spent, or a day wasted, has the same number of hours, minutes and seconds. God gives each of us the same time to use regardless of our location on earth or moment in which we live.

Someone once said, “Our days are like identical suitcases—all the same size, but some people can pack more into them than others.”

What are you packing into your days right now? How are you using your time? How is what you are doing changing you?

How would you like to spend 2 years making phone calls to people who aren't home? Sound absurd? According to one time management study, that's how much time the average person spends trying to return calls to people who never seem to be in. Not only that, we spend 6 months waiting for the traffic light to turn green, and another 8 months reading junk mail. These unusual statistics should cause us to do time-use evaluation.

Lately…our days have been emptied of the busyness that plagued our hurried world....We have run out of excuses for doing the things we always said we had no time to do. Work in the yard, on the house, cleaning and spending time with the family. God has slowed us down

Some of us are growing a bit restless. It has been about 30 days since most of us have gone to church, sat in a restaurant, watched a ballgame, gone to a movie or just taken a trip somewhere to shop.

This is starting to feel a longer than 30 days. Many of us are starting to feel like we are enduring something unbearable. The house is growing small and the days sure feel like they are growing longer and longer.

But really, we haven’t had it so bad have we...

We have television, Netflix, the internet, social media, Facetime, Zoom or 8x8 to keep us connected. We have curbside pick up at the restaurants we like…home grocery delivery and Amazon allows to continue shopping from home for anything we might need or want.

If you are like most people you have done at least a little bit of soul searching and reevaluating of your life.

A lot of folks have had time enough to discover they were more weary than they thought they were when running the rat race of normalcy before the corona virus slowed our life down.

A lot of people are getting reacquainted with their spouse and kids in ways they never have. Some are struggling with what they are finding in these relationships they have so long neglected…others are ecstatic at the joy the current renewal brings them.

God always has a purpose for anything He causes or allows into our life. He uses all things together for our good…that we might become more like Christ and bring greater glory to Him…so we might grow, learn and be better. How is this time of slow living been used by God in your life?

“How is God changing you?” “What new priorities might you have when all of this is done?” “What is God’s purpose for you right now?”

I want to challenge you this morning that in all of the craziness of our current circumstances…maybe the primary thing God is doing right now is building our faith and increasing our dependence upon Him.

Will we remember these lessons well when the quarantine is over and our life returns to “normal?”

What Will You Do First?

What if you were inside a boat filled with animals for 364 days? Inside a boat without any of the things I just mentioned…in fact you had no air conditioning or heating either.

Oh, and the whole place reeked of filthy animals too! That is exactly what Noah and his family did when the flood hit the earth.

Noah was the lone righteous man in the world when he was told to build the ark. He had faith in God to build a giant boat in the middle of the desert. He then did what God told him to do when the time for the floods came…he gathered the animals, loaded up and got onboard.

Then came 40 days of rain…it was then 309 days until the ark was opened again…but another 55 days until Noah and the animals left the ark. That is a lot family game nights…a lot of time to gather your thoughts…a lot of time to be changed.

Noah was a man of great faith…belief in God and trust of His character, power and intentions. And that faith grew as he rode the waves for a year with the animals. We come to that conclusion because the very first thing he does when he leaves the ark is worship the Lord.

This worship involved a whole burnt offering…which indicated a person’s complete devotion to the Lord. It was evidence of his gratefulness to the Lord.

The time in the ark had grown his faith…helped him understand his dependence upon God…helped him to see God as sovereign, Lord and His source for everything.

A man can often become confused to believe things, people and even himself to be his source for life…a year on the water will change that way of thinking fast. Any lingering ideas of self-sufficient tend to be washed away in a worldwide flood in which you and your family are the lone survivors.

Noah’s heart was moved, changed and shaped during those lonely days and he emerged a more dependent and faithful man.

Worship — Is to ascribe worth to God…to reverence and respect Him. It is an act of submission and recognition of who we are and who He is.

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose -- and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.

Our original sin was to see ourselves as self-sufficient…capable of being our own god…we ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because we thought ourselves capable of being independent and equal to God.

Here is Noah…fresh off the ark and the experience of God’s purge of sinful creatures by a flood…what does he do? Well, the events gave him a new vision of humanity! He saw God for God and himself as a simple man completely dependent upon God! He was ready to worship!

“The moment seemed inopportune for worship. So many things needed prompt attention. No home for his wife and children. No shed for the cattle. So much required to be done that called for thought, plan, arrangement, effort, toil. If ever there lived a man who could plead that distracting necessities excluded the worship of God, that man was Noah. But not so with Noah. All shall be yielded to Him who is above all. He who is first shall be the first. He who is best shall have the best. The earth's first building after the judgment shall be an altar for the worship of Jehovah. Noah's first care is to bless the care which has so cared for him. His first posture is the bended knee and uplifted knife.”

When we are turned lose and our states are open again what will be most pressing? What will we do first? Will the lessons of our forced slow down be well lived in the return to normalcy? Will we worship?

This virus has shown us how small we are and how big God is. Our future isn’t in our hands…we are not self sufficient…we are not in control and never will be…no matter what we may think.

Conclusions

Dare we think of Noah as a perfect man…a few verses after the story we read today he plants a vineyard, makes some wine and gets drunk. He was still a work in progress. And all of us are…Life is a process of learning, confessing, repenting and growing.

The question is…will we remember the lessons we are learning right now and grow well?

Our generation has been a pampered one…most of us in America have been well fed and entertained for the whole of our life. We have had few true hardships and no one under the age of 90 has experienced an existential threat to his or her way of life.

The corona virus is a wake up call from God…not a true existential crisis but a reminder that our existence is at His pleasure and He is God and we are not.

The questions now are simple ones: Will we worship God? Will we remember the lessons learned here? Will we wake up? Will we stay awake? Will we worship God?

We are truly in a defining moment for our generation…everyone’s life will be divided pre and post Corona…we are about to leave the ark of our house and enter America 2.0

Will our lives be reborn to a new purpose and plan? Ephesians 2:10?

Ephesians 2:10 CSB

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.

Away up on a Canadian hillside grew a tree that had weathered the storms for many and many a long year. But the time came when it had to be felled, and put to some definite use, and with the last clean cut of an axe in the hands of a lumberjack it came to the ground. It was rolled down to the river, but later, in the "drive" it floated down stream not to the sawmill, where it would have been utilized for a specific purpose, but past the mill, on and on until it finally reached the ocean. Here the storm-tossed waves lashed it with others of its kind, until the mass became a water­logged unit, and a menace to navigation. One dark, foggy morning, the look-out on a ship plying to a distant port gave the signal "danger ahead." Engines were reversed, speed was reduced, and with every member of the crew at his post the captain rushed to the bridge for observation. One look at the thing that lay on the surface of the water was sufficient to cause him to turn away with an expression of disgust on his face as he exclaimed, "Only driftwood! Full speed ahead!" Alas, there are many living today without any definite purpose, simply floating down the stream and out toward the angry sea of dissatisfaction and unrest, there to become "driftwood."

Will we give all of ourselves to Him and live the lessons we are learning today? Will we remember well? Will we worship…depend upon Christ and live for Him in America and church 2.0?