Living in God’s Kairos Time– Sermon Audio 2611

Jesus said in Matthew 28:19, Go, therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Welcome to Go Teach all nations, bringing you Christ's teachings through Australian and international speakers. And here is today's presenter, Bruce Novelly. SPEAKER B Sometimes we love it, sometimes we hate it, sometimes it flies, sometimes it crawls. We mark it, we save it, we waste it, we lose it, we find it. We race against it, but we can't stop it. We measure it incessantly and with a passion and with precision that borders on the fanatical. We are obsessed with it and we never seem to have enough of it. And yet scientists don't even know how to explain it. When a philosopher was asked to describe it, he said, "If anyone asks me, then I know what it is. But if anyone wants— asks me to describe it, I can't do it." What am I talking about? Talking about time. Someone has written, "I only have a minute, only 60 seconds in it. Didn't seek it, didn't choose it, but it's up to me to use it. I will suffer if I lose it, give account if I abuse it. Just a little minute, but eternity is in it." Never before in the history of the world has time been so important, so valuable, and so precisely measured as it is today. Think about this: in the early 1800s, less than 10% of people had a clock of any kind in their homes, and the vast majority of those had no minute hand. Alarm clocks and wristwatches were unknown until the beginning of the 1900s. There was a dock worker in England who hated his alarm clock Every working day for 47 years, its bell jangled and jarred him awake, and every day he longed to just lie there and ignore it. And you may be able to relate to that. Finally, however, he got his revenge. On the day that he retired, he took his alarm clock down to the dockyards. He placed it under an 80-ton hydraulic press and then with great delight, he pushed the button with that great press coming down on his clock. It was totally flattened. What a wonderful feeling, he said. We all have this love-hate relationship with alarm clocks, wristwatches, and timepieces. And for many years during my working life, I had to wear a watch. But now that I have retired, it's no longer necessary, and so now I wear a smartphone. But even if we are to spend the rest of our lives destroying our timepieces to express our irritation with the pressure of time, we would not escape the persistent swinging of the pendulum or the tick of the clock. Or the quartz movement of registered time. Today our computers, communication satellites, global positioning receivers and telephone switching systems need a precision beyond anything conceivable even 50 years ago. On your computer and the computer in my study at home is a unique clock. It is tuned to an atomic clock that calibrates the exact time. In a concrete building in America sit 28 atomic clocks, 4 of them holding atoms of hydrogen and the remaining clocks holding cesium. When these atoms are hit by lasers and microwaves, they begin to dance with a vibration that is monitored by computers. Once every second, the calibrations of these computers are fed into a master clock, and the results from this clock are then sent to the International Bureau of weights and measures outside of Paris, and they are accurate to 1 billionth of a second. It is possible for us to experience an hour, a minute of time, a second of time, and even a tenth of a second. However, the speed of the computers that we work with today are measured in nanoseconds, which is a time frame beyond human perception. Each nanosecond is 1 billionth of a second. To put that in perspective, I want you to just Click your fingers like that. Just— yeah, that's good. I can hear that. Doing that took 500 million nanoseconds. In other words, though you can conceive in your mind of a nanosecond, you cannot experience it. Never before has time been organized at a speed beyond the realm of consciousness. Yet even with this type of astonishing and microscopic accuracy, the most accurate clock in the world cannot answer the question of what it is measuring. It can't answer the question, "What is time?" Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said, "Do you love life? Then do not squander time, because that's the stuff that life is made of." The concept of time that is so often mentioned in the Bible usually falls into two categories. The first category is described by the word chronos, from which we get the word chronology. Some people wear a chronograph on their, on their wrist. The second category is the word kairos, Chronos describes the time that is solely measured by the ticking of the clock. This type of time is best expressed by the words repetitious and monotonous. Each second is exactly like the one that went before it. Recently, I had a friend of mine remark that he was just marking time at work. Chronos is empty time, meaningless time, monotonous, repetitious time. It is a void that must be filled. And I remember once killing time as we waited in an airport to get on a plane to head back home. Couldn't do anything, couldn't go anywhere. It was empty time, something that had to be endured. Chronos. However, the other biblical example for time, thankfully, is kairos time. Kairos time represents those rich, extra-special, significant, Dramatic moments in life that are packed full with meaning. Those moments that stand out and stay with us for a lifetime, forever inspiring and instructing. Kairos time is full, rich, vital, fulfilling. God's time. Those moments when you and God are sharing undisturbed personal time together. It's Charis time. The Bible records for us in Galatians 4:4 that when Jesus was born, it was in the fullness of time. It was not just that Mary was now ready to give birth, but that all the ancient time prophecies were now to be fulfilled in Kairos time. A great example of Kronos and Kairos time can be found in the story of Luke chapter 10 and verses 38 to 42. And they are both represented in the biblical characters of Mary and Martha. We all know the Bible story of Mary and Martha and the special time that Jesus came to visit with them. Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to his every word. Martha, on the other hand, was clattering around the kitchen doing what needed to be done when an unexpected guest turns up and will probably stay for dinner. The meaning, the meeting between Mary and Jesus became a kairos time for her. It was something, it was almost unthinkable for Mary and Martha, women without any male escort, to have invited a man into their house in the first place. And it was even more revolutionary for Jesus, a rabbi, to be teaching mere women about the ways of God. The Pharisaic laws of those days said women could not speak to scholars even on the street. And moreover, their law said, "May the words of the Torah be burned if they are handled by a woman." Once again, as so often happened in the New Testament, Jesus was breaking with the conventional religious wisdom and thinking of his time. He was bringing a kairos moment into a chronos world. He did this in order to bring life and hope to those desperate conditions. Inside the house of Mary and Martha, something startling and strange was taking place. Jesus was treating Mary with a dignity and an honour that was unknown at that time in the life of Israel. However, Martha missed out completely on this special occasion. She was so bogged down in the normal chronos routine that this special moment passed her by. She had failed to choose the rich, extra-special, significant, important moment of chronos time. Does that sound familiar? I know it is that way with me at times. How many life-changing moments do we lose? Because we are too busy fretting about what is happening around us or what might happen in the future? Do we also put God aside and miss out on our special spiritual activities because we are too busy? Are we also too busy making a living that we fail to nurture and cultivate a Christian lifestyle that is in harmony with the Word of God? How often does the possibility of a God-shaped kairos moment slip by in our preoccupation with the monotonous, repetitive chronos activities of our life. Martha was anxious and she was fretful that Mary was spending time with Jesus. She was busy with cooking the meal, folding the napkins and setting the table, and she became upset that Mary was not helping her with all the things that needed to be done. I'm convinced that the greatest problem that we face today is not that we are purposefully errant or intentionally bad. It is often that we are just too busy. We become so busy that we block God out of our lives and out of any kairos times that can nurture and instruct us in discerning God's will for us in our journey of life. I want to share 3 insights for your consideration as we open this new calendar year. If you had a bank that credited your account every morning with $86,400 and that carried over no balance from one day to the next and allowed you to keep no cash in your account and every evening cancelled out whatever part of that amount that you had failed to use during that day, what would you do? I know what I would do. I would draw out every cent. And of course, well, you do have a bank and its name is time. Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. And every night it rules off as lost whatever seconds that you have failed to invest in good purpose. It carries over no balances and allows no overdrafts. This suggests that the way in which you and I deal with time will affect how much we have at our disposal. If you greet each new day as a treasure house to be invested wisely, the journey from Sunday through to Sabbath will turn into an exciting and exhilarating experience. By the same token, if you do not use time, it will end up using you. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you do, life is impacted most dramatically by what you do with time and what it does with you. A wise old man once asked— was asked, if you had only 20, 48 hours in which to live, 'How would you spend them?' And he replied, 'One at a time.' Such is the reality of time. Every day gives us 86,400 seconds and we must use every one of them as they come, for they will not be seen again. But there is also another side to this crucial issue of time for each of us. There is an altogether different dimension of time which only people of faith can ever know. There is a time which no wristwatch can measure, but which itself measures how much abundance people find in life. Beyond the world's time, there is God's time, and there is a difference between God's time and ours. The simple truth is in learning how to tell one type of time from the other. We must know when to wait on him and when to move forward with him. Only when we are connected to God will we know the difference. Let me say that time is God's gift to us, and we should rejoice in it fully. But our time is limited, so we need to use it wisely. Our Sabbath School studies for this quarter have reminded us that we are all finite beings. We all have a beginning and we will all have an end in this life. The time that we have between those two points is the gift of life that God has given us., and it is with this gift that we will all choose our destiny. An awareness of time should cause us to place a proper value on the use of, of our time. We must be careful to choose what we are going to do because time does not allow us to do everything. We do not have 25 hours in each day. Nourish and nurture the part of you that believes and trades chronos time for kairos time. This alone will open your life to a new perspective, new attitudes, and a deeper source of power. A number of years ago, a Christian author wrote these words, and it applies equally to women as it just does to men. A passionate man and woman for Christ is a person with only one main focus in mind. They will only centre on one thing, only care about one thing, only live for one thing, to be swallowed up in only one thing, and that one thing is to live in kairos time with God. Whether they live or whether they die, whether they have good health or bad, whether they are rich or whether they are poor does not count. They live for only one thing, and that one thing is to live in God's kairos time, to advance his kingdom. Their joy is full if this one thing consumes their whole life, for they have done the work to which God has assigned them. It was Paul in Philippians 3 in verses 13 and 14, who said, my whole focus and my one and only resolve is to forget all those things which are now behind me and that may have been holding me back 2022. My goal now is to reach out for those things which are ahead of me with renewed energy and enthusiasm. My one and only wish now is to press forward with all my strength toward my appointed goal, and that is to win the heavenly prize that God is calling me to receive through Jesus Christ. Jesus said to Martha, Mary has chosen the best use of her time, which shall not be taken away from her. Martha's idea of what needed to be done was quite different to Christ's. She meant well, she loved the Lord, and she thought that she was serving him, but her chronos priority was depriving Christ of what he most wished for her and was depriving her of what was most necessary. Only one thing was necessary. Martha was worried about the menu and the mundane while Jesus wanted to share important kairos time with her. This insight clearly teaches us that whatever is not connected to the worship and to the praise of God will wind up being a distraction rather than part of our devotion to Christ. It will be monotonous, chronos, drudgery. Rather than a delight. The shape of time that God provides invites us to spend time with him every seventh day. This speaks to us of the Sabbath. God spent 6 days working for us, and then in the seventh, He rested with us. For us to cease our work one day in seven is to be resting with God. He doesn't suggest a Sabbath. It is decreed as one of the original Ten Commandments. Our Sabbath is to be the seventh day of the week that He that he created. One-seventh of our time each week should be reserved for worship and time with our God. This will mean for each of us that moment by moment, hour by hour, our day will be living, working, socialising, and doing whatever we do All in God's time. I heard about a little boy that came into the kitchen with his glove and his ball in hand and he said, "Mum, can I go out to play catch before dinner?" And she said, "Sure, but who are you going to play catch with?" And he said, "God." And she asked, "How do you play catch with God?" "Oh," he said, "I do it all the time. I go out in the backyard and I throw the ball up to heaven and God always, always throws it back." Even in an act of gravity, that little boy recognized the presence of God in his life. When we recognize that we are living in the presence of God, what we gain in that time is lasting. It can never be taken from us. The relationship that we build in that special time will equip us to face every situation that comes our way calmly and unafraid. And for those of us who have found that our days are dominated by the signal of some man-made atomic clock that leaves us with not enough nanoseconds in the day, it is imperative that we live our lives in God's time, or we will find that we are living our lives with no defining balance. When we are living in God's time, whatever secular activities we undertake become sacred when done for him. When our activities are done with him in mind, they become acts of worship. The actions we perform, the things that we say, the places we go, our very thoughts will reveal whether we are practicing kairos time. A man came home from a long day's work and he was totally exhausted. He entered into his son's bedroom to say, to tell him goodnight, and he was greatly irritated when the little boy began to badger him about money. The little boy said, "Dad, how much money do you make?" And the father grunted, "Ugh, enough." Well, the little boy pressed further and said, "I mean, how much 'How much do you make in an hour?' The bar father was not in the mood for any games, and so he gave the young fellow a lecture and said, 'They pay me $25 an hour.' The young boy then said, 'Can I borrow $10?' The father yelled back at him, 'No! Now go to sleep!' Well, the following morning, the young boy's father felt very guilty about the way that he had treated his son, and so he apologised to him and gave him a $10 note. The little lad was absolutely delighted and ran off to his room. He soon came back with his little piggy bank and spilled its contents out onto the kitchen table. The man watched curiously as his son excitedly pushed all his 5-cent pieces and his 10-cent pieces and his 20-cent pieces toward his dad. The little boy then reached into his pocket for the $10 note and said, "Dad, here's $25." "Can I spend an hour with you?" The little boy wanted to spend kairos time with his father so badly that he was willing to pay for it. Well, our heavenly Father wants to spend kairos time with us so badly that he has literally paid for it as well. He loved His rebellious creation so much that He gave His only begotten Son to remove every barrier, tear down every wall, bridge every gulf, unlock every door, that we might not perish but have full, abundant breathtaking, extraordinary, and exciting kairos time with Him forever. And so as I wrap this up this morning, I have spoken about seconds, nanoseconds, but all we can live for is today. Tomorrow is not ours. It is today that we need to live a life of victory over self. It is today that we are to live a life of prayer. Today we are to fight the good fight of faith. It is today that God blesses us. It's just about it. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your love for each one of us, a love that caused you to set aside your royal robes and your kingly crown to come down here to be one of us, to die for us on Calvary. And so as we step out of this place, guide and direct in all our activities. May we remember you and honor you in everything. May we live in the hollow of your hand as we seek to do your will. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. SPEAKER A This message was made available by the Bunbury Seventh-day Adventist Church. For more resources like this, visit their YouTube page, Bunbury SDA. SPEAKER B It's been a pleasure bringing you this program here on 3ABN Australia Radio.