If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thank you for being here with us in person. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. I am excited for this Sunday morning. I was probably more excited about this particular sermon in this series than any of the others, because this morning, this big rock is on a topic that I've invested a lot of time and energy thinking about, actually. We're going to be talking about time, and we should spend our time and how we should prioritize our time. And I will confess to you that I have nerded out on this subject. I've listened to podcasts and read books about productivity. If something comes across my news feed about this new study about how to be productive and how to maximize our time in the workplace and all that stuff, I will listen to it. I eat all of that stuff up. Now, it hasn't translated to actual productivity in my workplace, but I'm hoping that if I can just keep learning more things, like for instance, when you're in, when you're just, when you're locked in and you're focused, you're in the groove and you're doing the thing you need to do, you're maximum productive, you're being creative, you're knocking out emails, whatever it is. When you get interrupted, somebody texts you, somebody sticks their head in your office. Kyle starts to talk to someone in the office next to you if you happen to work next to Kyle. When you get interrupted, do you know how long it takes you to regain maximum focus? 26 minutes. Like it takes 26 minutes to regain maximum focus. I could do a whole sermon just telling you stuff like that. That wouldn't be much of a sermon. That would more be like a productivity seminar. So we're going to avoid that. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about time. Because of that, there are myriad directions we could go this morning as we think about the topic of time under the umbrella of God's authority. How would God have us spend our time? What would His priorities for our schedules and our calendars look like? We all know that if you really want to know what a person cares about, look at their calendar and look at their checkbook. And that will tell you what's really, really important to that individual. So we could talk about how to properly prioritize it. We could talk about how much time to make for God. We could talk about how would Jesus have us spend our time. We could do all of those things. And there's a bunch of different directions to go. And when I started out, the way that I write a sermon is I just write down everything I think about that topic, everything I know, all the Bible verses I'm aware of, every time the scriptures address it. And for this particular sermon, I had a big long list. And so the difficulty was on what do we focus on as we think about time? And I really landed on one sentence in the Bible. The first part of one verse that we find in Psalms. And we're going to spend the rest of the morning thinking about the idea of time through the lens of this one sentence that we find in Psalms chapter 46, verse 10. Many of you know this verse. It simply says, be still and know that I am God. Be still, God says, and know that I am God. It's this idea of at some point during your day, during your week, during your month, in your life, at some point, slow down. Be still. Quit doing all the things. Quit going to all the places. Quit stressing out about all the stuff. Quit being distracted by all the different things that can distract you. Be still. Stop moving. Stop going. Right now, I have a five-and-a-half-year-old who cannot be still. She cannot be still. When she's in trouble, I'll tell her, you sit on the stairs, and you sit there, and you do not move, and you do not make a noise. She cannot do it. It's impossible. And for many of us, with our schedules and with our temperaments, it's impossible for us to be still, to just slow down and be still and know that he is God, to focus on God, to focus on what Jesus has done for us, to remind ourselves of the gospel, to remind ourselves of God's goodness in our life. I think many of us struggle mightily to obey this simple psalm, to simply have regular times in our life where we are still and we know that he is God. This is why, incidentally, I think church attendance and involvement is so important. Because even if we're not prioritizing it at any other time in our week, even if our weeks just get away from us and it's just busy, busy, busy, and we're running 90 to nothing and we come into church on two wheels with our hair on fire, at least, hopefully, for an hour, we will slow down. We will be still. We will do our best to put aside all the other things that we've been thinking about that have been stressing us out all week long. And we will, in this service, collectively as a body, know that He is God. It's why I think the rhythm of church is an important one in the life of an individual and a marriage and a family. And so I want to talk about this idea of being still. And I want to talk specifically about why it feels like such a challenge for us sometimes. I think that there are really two camps of people. There's really two divisions of people as we think about how we spend our time and what kind of stops us from being still in the way that we need to be still. I think there's really two camps of people. And I'm not saying that you're all one or you're all the other. This is a sliding scale, but I would bet that everybody in this room has a lean. There are those who fill their days with nothing and those who fill their days with everything. There are those who with their margins, they fill it with nothing, just a bunch of nothingness. And then there's those who fill it with everything. And we're going to talk about what that means. But as we think about how we fill our time with nothing or everything, I want to be clear that I'm talking about the margins of our time. We all have roles in life to play that require time from us, right? Most of us in this room, we have to get up, we have to work every day. That's something that's required of your time. If you don't have to work every day, hopefully you're getting up and being productive. If you're a stay-at-home parent, you've got to get up and gosh, you definitely have to work every day. And so there's some things that we don't have an option. We've got to go to work. We've got to take care of the kids. We've got to run the house. We've got to do the things. There's some things where we just don't have a choice. But around those ways that we spend our time is our discretionary time. And it's that time that I'm talking about that we fill with nothing or with everything. The time when we wake up in the morning. Whether you realize it or not, I don't want to step on too many toes here, everyone has two or three hours of discretionary time in the morning. If you choose to fill that time with sleep, that's your business. But everybody can get up two or three hours just about before we really have anything that life requires of us. So most of us have discretionary time in the morning before our time is demanded of us. Most of us have a lunch break. We've got to drive to work, drive home from work. We have time in the car where we can choose what we're going to listen to and choose what we're going to do and choose what we're going to consume. We have time when we come home. I don't know what the rhythm of your house is. Maybe you have some dead space before dinner. Maybe it's just a mad rush to get the kids to bed and sit down and take a breath. And then you've got from then until whenever you go to bed as your own discretionary time when your parents have young kids to regain your sanity. You've got the weekends, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, where there's probably not much of a demand on your time. So now we've got this discretionary time, these times in the margins. We're trying to decide what to do with it. And my contention is that we tend towards either filling that time with nothing or filling it with everything. I would love to say I'm an everything guy. I'm really more of a nothing guy. So what I'm about to say, I'm saying to me too. But when we fill our time with nothing, we just jump from one thing that doesn't matter to the next thing that doesn't matter. We wake up in the morning, first thing we do is we grab our phone and we start to scroll. We check Instagram, we check Twitter, and we check Facebook, and we check our email, and we check our news outlets, and whatever it is. And we just lay in bed, and and instead of getting up and being productive doing something that we would probably be wiser to do, we just scroll on our phones, right? We come home, we turn on the TV. Kids go to bed, we zone out. We binge watch The Office again. We're in the car, we have some time that we could use to fill ourselves with some Jesus, and instead we just put on something mindless. We listen to music that just kind of puts us in a good mood or whatever it is that it does, or we listen to like sports talk or political talk or whatever it is that women listen to in the car that's talk. I don't know what you guys listen to. But we just, every gap that we have, we just fill it with more nothing. How many of you, don't raise your hand, can't sit at a traffic light without looking at your phone? I think that maybe, this is just a side note, maybe the most damaging thing about cell phones is how incapable we are of not being entertained for just five stinking seconds. If the line's too long at Jersey Mike's, well, let's see what's going on in the news. And we just jump from nothing to nothing. Our time's required of us. We're focused on this. Now I can do whatever I want. What nothing can I fill this with? How can I entertain myself? What's the next drama that's going to happen? What's on Yahoo News front page? What's the next thing going on? And then political stuff happens. So I mean, I was doom scrolling Twitter a lot in December and January. We were all locked into that stuff. And we just wake up in the morning and we waste a little time. We go to work. We have lunch and we engage in a little bit more nothing and we come home and we get the kids. We take care of the kids and we do whatever it is we're going to do. We eat dinner and then we engage in a little bit more nothing. Watch a little bit more trash TV and then we go to bed. And we sleep in and we do the same thing the next day. And it's just a day filled with nothing. As I was doing research for this, I came across a sermon by a guy named Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards is one of the great American pastors and theologians. He was a key figure in the Great Awakening in the late 1700s. One of the smartest, best theologians that's ever lived. And he did a sermon on time. And he noted within that sermon the unique scarcity of time. It is a uniquely limited resource that we cannot get back in ways that we can recover other resources. And about time, Jonathan Edwards says, there is nothing more precious and yet nothing of which men are more wasteful. There is nothing more precious than time because we can never get it back, and yet there is nothing of which men are more wasteful. I think, if we're honest, that we tend to waste our time like NBA players waste their money. I heard a story this last week as I was in the car listening to the sports talk radio show that I like to listen to, which incidentally was not a waste of time this week because I'm using it in a sermon. So how about that? And there was this author who wrote a book. She wrote a book on Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is the, he is the MVP of the Milwaukee Bucks. They just won the NBA finals. He is a phenomenal athlete and he is like, he's a gem of a person. If you could, if you could create an athlete in a mold, it would be this guy. He's a really neat guy. And he grew up really poor in Greece. And they would sell, he and his family would sell trinkets on the beach to rich tourists. And it was not a very easy upbringing. And so when he came over to the United States, he was drafted in the first round of the draft. He's playing for the Bucs. He has money for the first time in his life. He doesn't know what to do with it. And so he still brings over these sensibilities and he's very conservative. And this author said that he relayed some stories to her about how he was blown away about how some of these guys spent their money. And she said, well, give me some examples. And she said, well, one guy, one guy gave me $500 for a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He just, the dude was a veteran. He said, Giannis, go give me a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He did. And the veteran gave him 500 bucks. That's wasteful. Other guys, he had two guys on his team who liked playing PlayStation 4, but they didn't like to be encumbered with like packing it. So they would literally on a road trip, they would go into a new city, buy a PlayStation 4 and the games they wanted to play, and then leave it in the hotel room and buy another one in the next city. Just appalling waste of money. I just saw a financial planner shake his head like just, oh my gosh. Just an appalling waste of money. But I waste my time like that sometimes. I look at my weeks and know that I've just doled out my time as if it's $500 for a Mountain Dew in the way that I invest it and spend it. And if you think that's ridiculous, if you think I'm overstating that, what's your screen time report at the end of your week? I don't know what Android phones do, but Apple phones, every weekend you get a screen time report. You average this many hours per day, it is up or down this percentage from last week. You ever see that and feel good about yourself? It always brings deep, deep conviction. It should send us straight into prayer and confession when that screen time report comes up. I think we waste time like some people like to waste money by just jumping from one numbing entertainment to the next thing without ever considering what's important. And then I think on the opposite end of the spectrum are those of us who fill our days with everything. It's just one thing after the next, just a deluge of activities, one after the other. A workaholic could fit here because there's hours that your job requires of you, and I'm all about going above and beyond. I don't want to decry working hard to get ahead and to provide and to be successful and all that stuff, but I do want us to realize that when we get to work before we're supposed to, that's a choice, and when we stay longer than we have to, that's a choice. It's a way that we're choosing to fill our schedule. When we volunteer for something, that's a choice. We all know people, and some of us are people, who volunteer for everything and say no to nothing and then just do and do and do and do all day long. We just run around with our hair on fire. I am convinced that the busiest time of anyone's life is families, particularly if families have two working spouses with children from ages 8 to 18. I don't think you can ever be busier than that season. It's crazy. And kids have stuff and we have stuff and we fill every single iota of our calendar with something that we're supposed to do. We'll come up with projects on the weekend and disappear and do those. And we allocate our time to this and our time to that. We have no way to pause. We run around frantically and we just do and we do and we do and we jump from one activity to the next activity without ever stopping to be still and know that he is God because our schedules are so full that we feel like we don't have space for anything else. And to those people, I would just say gently, is it possible that the rhythms of our homes are so frantic that we've effectively scheduled God out of our lives? Is it possible that we've allowed some of us, that we've allowed ourselves to become so busy that we have effectively scheduled God and scheduled Jesus right out of our life? Somebody told me one time, and this is, it's deeply convicting. It's probably not all the way fair, but it's mostly fair. If we aren't spending time with God on a daily basis, then we're simply telling him that he didn't make our 24-hour priority list that day. Good luck tomorrow, God. I think sometimes the rhythms of our homes get so frantic that we effectively just schedule them right out of our lives. And what I really want us to see this morning is that wherever we are on the spectrum, whether we fill our days with just nothing, just jumping from entertainment to entertainment, from nothing to nothing, or from activity to activity. That nothing and everything are simply distractions from the right thing. All that entertainment, all that pulling out the phone, all that screen time, all that binge watching, all that late night stuff, all that sleeping in, and then all the busyness, all the activities can sometimes simply be distractions from the right thing. I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. I think one of the greatest tricks of the enemy, one of the greatest guises of Satan is to trick us into wasting our time, is to distract us with nothing, is to distract us with our phones and with TV and with information and with nothingness and stuff that is frivolous and doesn't matter. And listen, that stuff has its place. You need to veg out and watch something that makes you laugh, that gives you an escape. We need to do that. But when it becomes too much, when it takes over everything, when it's just nothing to nothing to nothing, the enemy has us distracted. When it's activity to activity to activity that fills us with our own sense of self-importance, yet the activities that we're doing have no eternal consequences. The enemy simply has us distracted. See, I think for many of us in the room, it's one of my favorite verses these days in my life is Ephesians 2.10. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And it carries with it this idea that God made you, he gifted you, he designed you, and he purposed you. Each one of us. I think some of us walk through life feeling like we couldn't possibly have a purpose. I'm too small for that. And I would say, bupkis, God created you. He designed you in Christ for good works that you might walk in them. And in those good works, we know from other passages, we find the fullness of Christ. We walk with Jesus. Our hearts beat with him. We develop a passion for our Savior. I believe that we find Jesus in his work. So as we do the good works that we were designed to do, we grow more vibrant in our relationship with Jesus. We grow more passionate in our desire to serve God. And we live a fuller life that's filled with more joy because we are walking so closely with Jesus. And the enemy does not want you to experience that. He wants to rip you away from our Father's hands. And the deal is, for many of us sitting in this room, he's probably not going to rip us away with some addiction. There are some of us that he might be able to rip away with some sort of shadow life or sin going on, but for the vast majority of us in this room, it's not going to be some crippling addiction that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's not going to be some secret shadow life that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's simply going to be tricking you into spending your days on nothing or everything, day after day after day, until you look back on the month of the year and you go, what did I do? How much more of the work of Jesus for which we were designed could we do if we didn't allow the enemy to distract us with nothing or everything. I believe it's one of his greatest ploys. And I want to do everything I can to call it out whenever I can so that we can be, so that we can walk in the good works for which we were created. And it's why I landed on this one sentence in regards to time this morning, that we should be still and know that he is God. Because I firmly believe that being still is the first true step in the path to knowing God. I absolutely believe that this habit of being still is the first true step that we can take in the path to knowing God, in the path to our hearts beating like Jesus' heart. And I've said this in a bunch of different ways. I've said this phrase over and over and over again, and I will continue to beat this drum until God says this isn't my stage anymore. But as long as it is, I will continue to repeat, there is no greater habit anyone can develop in their life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. No greater habit. And that's what being still is. And I say that it's the first true step to really knowing God because we can come to church and we can hear about God and we can serve and we can do his work and we can go to small group and we can have conversations, but until it becomes personal, until it becomes intimate, until it becomes a habit to wake up and let scripture speak to us, not me speaking to you about what I think scripture says from my quiet times. Let that supplement what God has been saying to you all week in your quiet times. Until we wake up every day and we spend time in God's word and then we pursue him in prayer. For some reason, for some people, that looks like going on a hike and just allowing God to be with us in nature. For some people, that means contemplative practices or meditative practices. For some people, that means listening prayer. For some people, that means getting on our knees and speaking prayer. For some people, it's reading a spiritual book and supplement to the Word of God. But until our pursuit of the Father becomes an intentional, personal one, it can never become an intimate one. So this instruction in Psalm to be still and know that he is God is, to me, the first fundamental step in actually knowing him. And I believe this to be true because I have seen this in my own life. I have seen in the ebbs and flows of my own spiritual health. That when I am consistent in this practice, I'm a better husband. I'm more patient with my children. I'm even more patient with Ruby when I'm having quiet times. That's my dog that I don't like. I even like pet her and invite her over sometimes when I'm praying and reading the Bible and inviting God into every moment of my life. I'm a better pastor. In those seasons where Jesus is enriching my soul and my spirit every day, I can't wait for Sunday to share with you what I have to share with you. In the seasons where I'm not doing that, in the seasons where I feel like I'm running on empty because I've been filling my days with nothing or everything, just to be honest with you, there are Sundays I don't want to preach to you. I want to get done with the sermon so I can go do whatever it is I really want to do that day. And it's because I haven't been filling my days with Jesus. It's because I've been filling them with nothing or everything. And I'm forgetting to be still. And we could talk about how you should spend the rest of your time and what you should volunteer for and what we shouldn't volunteer for and what really is important and what really isn't. And we can talk about God's priorities for your schedule, but I would just simply say, man, if you'll make it a habit every day to be still before the Father and let Him breathe life into your soul, you're a grown-up. You'll figure the rest of it out yourself. You don't need a sermon about that. If we'll do this, if we'll simply be still, God will breathe into our life in such a way that our heart will begin to beat like Jesus' heart and suddenly all the things, all the nothing and all the everything that we use to fill as a simple distraction from what's actually important, those things will become less important to us and we will pursue more Jesus. I've seen it happen over and over and over again in the lives of others and in my own life. So my encouragement to you this morning is to be still and know that he is God. My encouragement to you this morning is don't let this, what I say, be the only source of God and Jesus in your life. Because I am broken and I am fallible and I am often wrong. Pursue him on your own. Let him breathe life into you every day. This will be the first true step that we can take in our path to knowing God. And so I would say to you this morning, how still should I be? Just a little bit more than you are. Take that step. If you have no habit or pattern of waking up and spending time in God's word and letting Jesus refresh your soul there and in prayer, then just give it a week. Do it for seven days and get to the end of seven days and tell me that that was a waste of your time. Just do it for a week. If you're already in that habit, God bless you for being in that habit. You know that I'm speaking truth. Pick another time too. Do it in the evening. End your day with prayer. Let's all just step up our stillness just a little bit and stop and let God wash over us and fill us up and so breathe life into us that we can be his workmanship and do the good works in which we were created to walk in. However still or not you've been in your life, be just a little bit more still this week and see how God breathes life into you in that stillness. As we close, I have a quote. It's a long quote, but I think it's worth it. Growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, was one of my heroes, and he still is. He passed away right as I came up here to take this job, and it is one of my great sadnesses that I can't talk about being a pastor with Buddy. And every now and again, I'll go back and I'll listen to some of his sermons. They have them all archived all the way back to the 80s. And when I listen to them, it's like going home. I feel like a 12-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid sitting in church, just taking it all in. I really like listening to Buddy's sermons. Five or six years ago, I was listening to one. Actually, it was a little over four years ago because it was in my parents' basement when I was waiting for you guys to hire me so we could move up here. I was listening to one of his sermons and he was preaching on time. And Buddy spoke pretty extemporaneously, but this I could tell was prepared. He was reading off of a sheet of paper. He wrote it very intentionally and it was so good to me and so profound that I stopped and I typed it out. I would listen to a sentence and pause it and type it and listen and pause and type. And I've just kind of been sitting on it wondering when the best time was to share it with anybody at all. And it just feels very appropriate this morning to end with these words that have impacted me over the years so much. So I want to share them with you. And when I finish, we're going to have a chance to reflect and worship together. This is what Buddy says. Are we possessed with an inescapable passion to live in an intimate knowledge of God? The problem is not that we are engaged in actively evil. The problem is that we are just too active. It's not that we are criminally engaged. We are just inattentive to the voice of God. It's not that we're heretics. Most people I know are just hectic in their activities of mind-numbing nothingness. It should make sense to anyone that minds empty of God will be empty of meaning. Our hunger for God is numbered by our addictions to substitutes and stimulants that hide our starving souls. We are spiritual anorexics. We've morphed to a point where we don't even recognize what is the spiritual norm. Today's lifestyle is lived at a pace that makes contemplations all but impossible, and most people cannot imagine a life like Jesus lived. We can't imagine a life without constant informational connectivity. We live in a noisy world where there are a lot of things competing for our attention, TV, phones, Facebook, emails. But the unintended consequence of constant informational connectivity is divine disconnection. We are so distracted with inconsequential information, our brains and our hearts are overloaded with timely data, leaving no space for timeless deity. We're called to live with a preoccupation with God who is worthy to be pursued at all costs and is pursuing us. We find ourselves in an age that has pushed the knowledge of God into the margins. We arrogantly assume that God should be grateful for the crumbs of our overcrowded schedule. We call it efficient. But God has not called us first to be efficient. He has called us to be passionate. We are spiritually diseased. Never have we had more to eat and found ourselves more famished. Never have we had more stuff and been less satisfied. It is time we made time for the timeless.
If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thank you for being here with us in person. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. I am excited for this Sunday morning. I was probably more excited about this particular sermon in this series than any of the others, because this morning, this big rock is on a topic that I've invested a lot of time and energy thinking about, actually. We're going to be talking about time, and we should spend our time and how we should prioritize our time. And I will confess to you that I have nerded out on this subject. I've listened to podcasts and read books about productivity. If something comes across my news feed about this new study about how to be productive and how to maximize our time in the workplace and all that stuff, I will listen to it. I eat all of that stuff up. Now, it hasn't translated to actual productivity in my workplace, but I'm hoping that if I can just keep learning more things, like for instance, when you're in, when you're just, when you're locked in and you're focused, you're in the groove and you're doing the thing you need to do, you're maximum productive, you're being creative, you're knocking out emails, whatever it is. When you get interrupted, somebody texts you, somebody sticks their head in your office. Kyle starts to talk to someone in the office next to you if you happen to work next to Kyle. When you get interrupted, do you know how long it takes you to regain maximum focus? 26 minutes. Like it takes 26 minutes to regain maximum focus. I could do a whole sermon just telling you stuff like that. That wouldn't be much of a sermon. That would more be like a productivity seminar. So we're going to avoid that. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about time. Because of that, there are myriad directions we could go this morning as we think about the topic of time under the umbrella of God's authority. How would God have us spend our time? What would His priorities for our schedules and our calendars look like? We all know that if you really want to know what a person cares about, look at their calendar and look at their checkbook. And that will tell you what's really, really important to that individual. So we could talk about how to properly prioritize it. We could talk about how much time to make for God. We could talk about how would Jesus have us spend our time. We could do all of those things. And there's a bunch of different directions to go. And when I started out, the way that I write a sermon is I just write down everything I think about that topic, everything I know, all the Bible verses I'm aware of, every time the scriptures address it. And for this particular sermon, I had a big long list. And so the difficulty was on what do we focus on as we think about time? And I really landed on one sentence in the Bible. The first part of one verse that we find in Psalms. And we're going to spend the rest of the morning thinking about the idea of time through the lens of this one sentence that we find in Psalms chapter 46, verse 10. Many of you know this verse. It simply says, be still and know that I am God. Be still, God says, and know that I am God. It's this idea of at some point during your day, during your week, during your month, in your life, at some point, slow down. Be still. Quit doing all the things. Quit going to all the places. Quit stressing out about all the stuff. Quit being distracted by all the different things that can distract you. Be still. Stop moving. Stop going. Right now, I have a five-and-a-half-year-old who cannot be still. She cannot be still. When she's in trouble, I'll tell her, you sit on the stairs, and you sit there, and you do not move, and you do not make a noise. She cannot do it. It's impossible. And for many of us, with our schedules and with our temperaments, it's impossible for us to be still, to just slow down and be still and know that he is God, to focus on God, to focus on what Jesus has done for us, to remind ourselves of the gospel, to remind ourselves of God's goodness in our life. I think many of us struggle mightily to obey this simple psalm, to simply have regular times in our life where we are still and we know that he is God. This is why, incidentally, I think church attendance and involvement is so important. Because even if we're not prioritizing it at any other time in our week, even if our weeks just get away from us and it's just busy, busy, busy, and we're running 90 to nothing and we come into church on two wheels with our hair on fire, at least, hopefully, for an hour, we will slow down. We will be still. We will do our best to put aside all the other things that we've been thinking about that have been stressing us out all week long. And we will, in this service, collectively as a body, know that He is God. It's why I think the rhythm of church is an important one in the life of an individual and a marriage and a family. And so I want to talk about this idea of being still. And I want to talk specifically about why it feels like such a challenge for us sometimes. I think that there are really two camps of people. There's really two divisions of people as we think about how we spend our time and what kind of stops us from being still in the way that we need to be still. I think there's really two camps of people. And I'm not saying that you're all one or you're all the other. This is a sliding scale, but I would bet that everybody in this room has a lean. There are those who fill their days with nothing and those who fill their days with everything. There are those who with their margins, they fill it with nothing, just a bunch of nothingness. And then there's those who fill it with everything. And we're going to talk about what that means. But as we think about how we fill our time with nothing or everything, I want to be clear that I'm talking about the margins of our time. We all have roles in life to play that require time from us, right? Most of us in this room, we have to get up, we have to work every day. That's something that's required of your time. If you don't have to work every day, hopefully you're getting up and being productive. If you're a stay-at-home parent, you've got to get up and gosh, you definitely have to work every day. And so there's some things that we don't have an option. We've got to go to work. We've got to take care of the kids. We've got to run the house. We've got to do the things. There's some things where we just don't have a choice. But around those ways that we spend our time is our discretionary time. And it's that time that I'm talking about that we fill with nothing or with everything. The time when we wake up in the morning. Whether you realize it or not, I don't want to step on too many toes here, everyone has two or three hours of discretionary time in the morning. If you choose to fill that time with sleep, that's your business. But everybody can get up two or three hours just about before we really have anything that life requires of us. So most of us have discretionary time in the morning before our time is demanded of us. Most of us have a lunch break. We've got to drive to work, drive home from work. We have time in the car where we can choose what we're going to listen to and choose what we're going to do and choose what we're going to consume. We have time when we come home. I don't know what the rhythm of your house is. Maybe you have some dead space before dinner. Maybe it's just a mad rush to get the kids to bed and sit down and take a breath. And then you've got from then until whenever you go to bed as your own discretionary time when your parents have young kids to regain your sanity. You've got the weekends, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, where there's probably not much of a demand on your time. So now we've got this discretionary time, these times in the margins. We're trying to decide what to do with it. And my contention is that we tend towards either filling that time with nothing or filling it with everything. I would love to say I'm an everything guy. I'm really more of a nothing guy. So what I'm about to say, I'm saying to me too. But when we fill our time with nothing, we just jump from one thing that doesn't matter to the next thing that doesn't matter. We wake up in the morning, first thing we do is we grab our phone and we start to scroll. We check Instagram, we check Twitter, and we check Facebook, and we check our email, and we check our news outlets, and whatever it is. And we just lay in bed, and and instead of getting up and being productive doing something that we would probably be wiser to do, we just scroll on our phones, right? We come home, we turn on the TV. Kids go to bed, we zone out. We binge watch The Office again. We're in the car, we have some time that we could use to fill ourselves with some Jesus, and instead we just put on something mindless. We listen to music that just kind of puts us in a good mood or whatever it is that it does, or we listen to like sports talk or political talk or whatever it is that women listen to in the car that's talk. I don't know what you guys listen to. But we just, every gap that we have, we just fill it with more nothing. How many of you, don't raise your hand, can't sit at a traffic light without looking at your phone? I think that maybe, this is just a side note, maybe the most damaging thing about cell phones is how incapable we are of not being entertained for just five stinking seconds. If the line's too long at Jersey Mike's, well, let's see what's going on in the news. And we just jump from nothing to nothing. Our time's required of us. We're focused on this. Now I can do whatever I want. What nothing can I fill this with? How can I entertain myself? What's the next drama that's going to happen? What's on Yahoo News front page? What's the next thing going on? And then political stuff happens. So I mean, I was doom scrolling Twitter a lot in December and January. We were all locked into that stuff. And we just wake up in the morning and we waste a little time. We go to work. We have lunch and we engage in a little bit more nothing and we come home and we get the kids. We take care of the kids and we do whatever it is we're going to do. We eat dinner and then we engage in a little bit more nothing. Watch a little bit more trash TV and then we go to bed. And we sleep in and we do the same thing the next day. And it's just a day filled with nothing. As I was doing research for this, I came across a sermon by a guy named Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards is one of the great American pastors and theologians. He was a key figure in the Great Awakening in the late 1700s. One of the smartest, best theologians that's ever lived. And he did a sermon on time. And he noted within that sermon the unique scarcity of time. It is a uniquely limited resource that we cannot get back in ways that we can recover other resources. And about time, Jonathan Edwards says, there is nothing more precious and yet nothing of which men are more wasteful. There is nothing more precious than time because we can never get it back, and yet there is nothing of which men are more wasteful. I think, if we're honest, that we tend to waste our time like NBA players waste their money. I heard a story this last week as I was in the car listening to the sports talk radio show that I like to listen to, which incidentally was not a waste of time this week because I'm using it in a sermon. So how about that? And there was this author who wrote a book. She wrote a book on Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is the, he is the MVP of the Milwaukee Bucks. They just won the NBA finals. He is a phenomenal athlete and he is like, he's a gem of a person. If you could, if you could create an athlete in a mold, it would be this guy. He's a really neat guy. And he grew up really poor in Greece. And they would sell, he and his family would sell trinkets on the beach to rich tourists. And it was not a very easy upbringing. And so when he came over to the United States, he was drafted in the first round of the draft. He's playing for the Bucs. He has money for the first time in his life. He doesn't know what to do with it. And so he still brings over these sensibilities and he's very conservative. And this author said that he relayed some stories to her about how he was blown away about how some of these guys spent their money. And she said, well, give me some examples. And she said, well, one guy, one guy gave me $500 for a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He just, the dude was a veteran. He said, Giannis, go give me a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He did. And the veteran gave him 500 bucks. That's wasteful. Other guys, he had two guys on his team who liked playing PlayStation 4, but they didn't like to be encumbered with like packing it. So they would literally on a road trip, they would go into a new city, buy a PlayStation 4 and the games they wanted to play, and then leave it in the hotel room and buy another one in the next city. Just appalling waste of money. I just saw a financial planner shake his head like just, oh my gosh. Just an appalling waste of money. But I waste my time like that sometimes. I look at my weeks and know that I've just doled out my time as if it's $500 for a Mountain Dew in the way that I invest it and spend it. And if you think that's ridiculous, if you think I'm overstating that, what's your screen time report at the end of your week? I don't know what Android phones do, but Apple phones, every weekend you get a screen time report. You average this many hours per day, it is up or down this percentage from last week. You ever see that and feel good about yourself? It always brings deep, deep conviction. It should send us straight into prayer and confession when that screen time report comes up. I think we waste time like some people like to waste money by just jumping from one numbing entertainment to the next thing without ever considering what's important. And then I think on the opposite end of the spectrum are those of us who fill our days with everything. It's just one thing after the next, just a deluge of activities, one after the other. A workaholic could fit here because there's hours that your job requires of you, and I'm all about going above and beyond. I don't want to decry working hard to get ahead and to provide and to be successful and all that stuff, but I do want us to realize that when we get to work before we're supposed to, that's a choice, and when we stay longer than we have to, that's a choice. It's a way that we're choosing to fill our schedule. When we volunteer for something, that's a choice. We all know people, and some of us are people, who volunteer for everything and say no to nothing and then just do and do and do and do all day long. We just run around with our hair on fire. I am convinced that the busiest time of anyone's life is families, particularly if families have two working spouses with children from ages 8 to 18. I don't think you can ever be busier than that season. It's crazy. And kids have stuff and we have stuff and we fill every single iota of our calendar with something that we're supposed to do. We'll come up with projects on the weekend and disappear and do those. And we allocate our time to this and our time to that. We have no way to pause. We run around frantically and we just do and we do and we do and we jump from one activity to the next activity without ever stopping to be still and know that he is God because our schedules are so full that we feel like we don't have space for anything else. And to those people, I would just say gently, is it possible that the rhythms of our homes are so frantic that we've effectively scheduled God out of our lives? Is it possible that we've allowed some of us, that we've allowed ourselves to become so busy that we have effectively scheduled God and scheduled Jesus right out of our life? Somebody told me one time, and this is, it's deeply convicting. It's probably not all the way fair, but it's mostly fair. If we aren't spending time with God on a daily basis, then we're simply telling him that he didn't make our 24-hour priority list that day. Good luck tomorrow, God. I think sometimes the rhythms of our homes get so frantic that we effectively just schedule them right out of our lives. And what I really want us to see this morning is that wherever we are on the spectrum, whether we fill our days with just nothing, just jumping from entertainment to entertainment, from nothing to nothing, or from activity to activity. That nothing and everything are simply distractions from the right thing. All that entertainment, all that pulling out the phone, all that screen time, all that binge watching, all that late night stuff, all that sleeping in, and then all the busyness, all the activities can sometimes simply be distractions from the right thing. I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. I think one of the greatest tricks of the enemy, one of the greatest guises of Satan is to trick us into wasting our time, is to distract us with nothing, is to distract us with our phones and with TV and with information and with nothingness and stuff that is frivolous and doesn't matter. And listen, that stuff has its place. You need to veg out and watch something that makes you laugh, that gives you an escape. We need to do that. But when it becomes too much, when it takes over everything, when it's just nothing to nothing to nothing, the enemy has us distracted. When it's activity to activity to activity that fills us with our own sense of self-importance, yet the activities that we're doing have no eternal consequences. The enemy simply has us distracted. See, I think for many of us in the room, it's one of my favorite verses these days in my life is Ephesians 2.10. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And it carries with it this idea that God made you, he gifted you, he designed you, and he purposed you. Each one of us. I think some of us walk through life feeling like we couldn't possibly have a purpose. I'm too small for that. And I would say, bupkis, God created you. He designed you in Christ for good works that you might walk in them. And in those good works, we know from other passages, we find the fullness of Christ. We walk with Jesus. Our hearts beat with him. We develop a passion for our Savior. I believe that we find Jesus in his work. So as we do the good works that we were designed to do, we grow more vibrant in our relationship with Jesus. We grow more passionate in our desire to serve God. And we live a fuller life that's filled with more joy because we are walking so closely with Jesus. And the enemy does not want you to experience that. He wants to rip you away from our Father's hands. And the deal is, for many of us sitting in this room, he's probably not going to rip us away with some addiction. There are some of us that he might be able to rip away with some sort of shadow life or sin going on, but for the vast majority of us in this room, it's not going to be some crippling addiction that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's not going to be some secret shadow life that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's simply going to be tricking you into spending your days on nothing or everything, day after day after day, until you look back on the month of the year and you go, what did I do? How much more of the work of Jesus for which we were designed could we do if we didn't allow the enemy to distract us with nothing or everything. I believe it's one of his greatest ploys. And I want to do everything I can to call it out whenever I can so that we can be, so that we can walk in the good works for which we were created. And it's why I landed on this one sentence in regards to time this morning, that we should be still and know that he is God. Because I firmly believe that being still is the first true step in the path to knowing God. I absolutely believe that this habit of being still is the first true step that we can take in the path to knowing God, in the path to our hearts beating like Jesus' heart. And I've said this in a bunch of different ways. I've said this phrase over and over and over again, and I will continue to beat this drum until God says this isn't my stage anymore. But as long as it is, I will continue to repeat, there is no greater habit anyone can develop in their life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. No greater habit. And that's what being still is. And I say that it's the first true step to really knowing God because we can come to church and we can hear about God and we can serve and we can do his work and we can go to small group and we can have conversations, but until it becomes personal, until it becomes intimate, until it becomes a habit to wake up and let scripture speak to us, not me speaking to you about what I think scripture says from my quiet times. Let that supplement what God has been saying to you all week in your quiet times. Until we wake up every day and we spend time in God's word and then we pursue him in prayer. For some reason, for some people, that looks like going on a hike and just allowing God to be with us in nature. For some people, that means contemplative practices or meditative practices. For some people, that means listening prayer. For some people, that means getting on our knees and speaking prayer. For some people, it's reading a spiritual book and supplement to the Word of God. But until our pursuit of the Father becomes an intentional, personal one, it can never become an intimate one. So this instruction in Psalm to be still and know that he is God is, to me, the first fundamental step in actually knowing him. And I believe this to be true because I have seen this in my own life. I have seen in the ebbs and flows of my own spiritual health. That when I am consistent in this practice, I'm a better husband. I'm more patient with my children. I'm even more patient with Ruby when I'm having quiet times. That's my dog that I don't like. I even like pet her and invite her over sometimes when I'm praying and reading the Bible and inviting God into every moment of my life. I'm a better pastor. In those seasons where Jesus is enriching my soul and my spirit every day, I can't wait for Sunday to share with you what I have to share with you. In the seasons where I'm not doing that, in the seasons where I feel like I'm running on empty because I've been filling my days with nothing or everything, just to be honest with you, there are Sundays I don't want to preach to you. I want to get done with the sermon so I can go do whatever it is I really want to do that day. And it's because I haven't been filling my days with Jesus. It's because I've been filling them with nothing or everything. And I'm forgetting to be still. And we could talk about how you should spend the rest of your time and what you should volunteer for and what we shouldn't volunteer for and what really is important and what really isn't. And we can talk about God's priorities for your schedule, but I would just simply say, man, if you'll make it a habit every day to be still before the Father and let Him breathe life into your soul, you're a grown-up. You'll figure the rest of it out yourself. You don't need a sermon about that. If we'll do this, if we'll simply be still, God will breathe into our life in such a way that our heart will begin to beat like Jesus' heart and suddenly all the things, all the nothing and all the everything that we use to fill as a simple distraction from what's actually important, those things will become less important to us and we will pursue more Jesus. I've seen it happen over and over and over again in the lives of others and in my own life. So my encouragement to you this morning is to be still and know that he is God. My encouragement to you this morning is don't let this, what I say, be the only source of God and Jesus in your life. Because I am broken and I am fallible and I am often wrong. Pursue him on your own. Let him breathe life into you every day. This will be the first true step that we can take in our path to knowing God. And so I would say to you this morning, how still should I be? Just a little bit more than you are. Take that step. If you have no habit or pattern of waking up and spending time in God's word and letting Jesus refresh your soul there and in prayer, then just give it a week. Do it for seven days and get to the end of seven days and tell me that that was a waste of your time. Just do it for a week. If you're already in that habit, God bless you for being in that habit. You know that I'm speaking truth. Pick another time too. Do it in the evening. End your day with prayer. Let's all just step up our stillness just a little bit and stop and let God wash over us and fill us up and so breathe life into us that we can be his workmanship and do the good works in which we were created to walk in. However still or not you've been in your life, be just a little bit more still this week and see how God breathes life into you in that stillness. As we close, I have a quote. It's a long quote, but I think it's worth it. Growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, was one of my heroes, and he still is. He passed away right as I came up here to take this job, and it is one of my great sadnesses that I can't talk about being a pastor with Buddy. And every now and again, I'll go back and I'll listen to some of his sermons. They have them all archived all the way back to the 80s. And when I listen to them, it's like going home. I feel like a 12-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid sitting in church, just taking it all in. I really like listening to Buddy's sermons. Five or six years ago, I was listening to one. Actually, it was a little over four years ago because it was in my parents' basement when I was waiting for you guys to hire me so we could move up here. I was listening to one of his sermons and he was preaching on time. And Buddy spoke pretty extemporaneously, but this I could tell was prepared. He was reading off of a sheet of paper. He wrote it very intentionally and it was so good to me and so profound that I stopped and I typed it out. I would listen to a sentence and pause it and type it and listen and pause and type. And I've just kind of been sitting on it wondering when the best time was to share it with anybody at all. And it just feels very appropriate this morning to end with these words that have impacted me over the years so much. So I want to share them with you. And when I finish, we're going to have a chance to reflect and worship together. This is what Buddy says. Are we possessed with an inescapable passion to live in an intimate knowledge of God? The problem is not that we are engaged in actively evil. The problem is that we are just too active. It's not that we are criminally engaged. We are just inattentive to the voice of God. It's not that we're heretics. Most people I know are just hectic in their activities of mind-numbing nothingness. It should make sense to anyone that minds empty of God will be empty of meaning. Our hunger for God is numbered by our addictions to substitutes and stimulants that hide our starving souls. We are spiritual anorexics. We've morphed to a point where we don't even recognize what is the spiritual norm. Today's lifestyle is lived at a pace that makes contemplations all but impossible, and most people cannot imagine a life like Jesus lived. We can't imagine a life without constant informational connectivity. We live in a noisy world where there are a lot of things competing for our attention, TV, phones, Facebook, emails. But the unintended consequence of constant informational connectivity is divine disconnection. We are so distracted with inconsequential information, our brains and our hearts are overloaded with timely data, leaving no space for timeless deity. We're called to live with a preoccupation with God who is worthy to be pursued at all costs and is pursuing us. We find ourselves in an age that has pushed the knowledge of God into the margins. We arrogantly assume that God should be grateful for the crumbs of our overcrowded schedule. We call it efficient. But God has not called us first to be efficient. He has called us to be passionate. We are spiritually diseased. Never have we had more to eat and found ourselves more famished. Never have we had more stuff and been less satisfied. It is time we made time for the timeless.
