What Shall We Make Of Time?
CENTRAL TEXT: Ecclesiastes 3:1-15
Eccl. 3:9. What gain has the worker from his toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.
Eccl. 3:14. I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. 15 That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away
CALL TO WORSHIP: Psalm 115:1-3
LEADER: Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to your name give glory,
ALL: for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!
OT & NT READINGS: Matthew 6:25-27, 34; James 4:13-15
LEADER: Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?. . . . “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
BENEDICTION: 1 Timothy 6:13-16
LEADER: I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion..
ALL: Amen!
Related Scriptures:
Matthew 6:25-34
Discussion Questions:
- What’s been one of your best investments of time? Now, upon reflection, what have you spent far more time on than it’s worth?What prompted the devotion in both?
- The first part of the passage might be summarized in the notion of timing is everything. Can you point to decisions, large or small, in which the moment called for something, which a prior or later moment would’ve been…untimely?
- What went into the decision of making that choice?
- You hear again what you heard last week in terms of the Preacher’s sense of what our absence of control over time (or anything) means for us: we must, to borrow Bobby Jamieson’s phrase: “be present to the Present’s presents.” How might that (need to) apply to you right now?
- How do you see Christ taking into account the moment he was in as in part determining
- What’s something before you that is, so to speak, asking what this moment calls for? What’s your approach to gaining insight into “what time it is”?
- What would “redeem the time” in your life right now? What’s one small (or large!) change that would honor the time you have as the gift that it is?