What Time Reveals
James 4:13-17, Luke 10:38-42
Last week, we started a new teaching series called Something to Give because we believe everyone has something to give. You may feel like you don’t have anything to give, but everyone is giving their life to something. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore different aspects of life that we give and how we can steward them well.
Here’s a riddle to see if you can figure out what it is that we’re going to be learning about today that we have to give.
"This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.” - J.R.R. Tolkien (Gollum)
If you’re a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien or The Hobbit, then you may know the answer is time.
In this riddle, Gollum presents time almost as an enemy we fight, and life can often feel that way. If that is the case, then we are all losing the battle. Time does wear us down; however, because it is limited and fleeting, it is also highly valuable. Like money, there never seems to be enough of it, but there is no way to earn more or save a portion for later. Because of that, many of us find it easier to give away our money than to give our time. There’s just no extra.
We spend a lot of time managing our calendars, watching the clock, and trying to fit everything into our days. But what if our biggest problem isn't that we don't have any more time to give? What if it's that we try too hard to hold on to it? What if the way we spend our time reveals something about our hearts? Our schedules reveal what we value, what we trust, and what we believe we cannot live without. Time isn't just a resource to manage. It's a spiritual issue.
The Big Idea for today is: Your time reveals your heart.
I want to give you three takeaways for how to handle your time in a way that reveals a heart that’s alive rather than barely hanging on.
Let’s start by turning in the Bible to James 4. James was written by the brother of Jesus, and it is a short book packed full of practical wisdom. Chapter 4 addresses the proud heart and the need to be humble before God. We’re going to pick up in verse 13, where James turns to the issue of time.
James 4:13-17
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” 14 Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.
15 Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
The pride or arrogance James is addressing here is about how we view our time, and this is something that we can all relate to. We make plans. In our house, there are a lot of moving parts, and we have to sit down and look at what we have this week. Where is everyone going to be? A lot of you are planning or have already planned your holiday travel for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We plan our work week, where to fit meetings and calls and travel.
All that is ok. We can’t just live life on the fly… that wouldn’t be good either. Notice James doesn’t say you shouldn’t make plans for tomorrow; he says it’s about how you make those plans. Here’s the first takeaway:
1. Steward today instead of trying to control tomorrow.
We can’t talk about giving our time until we give up control of our time. In order to use your time well, you have to humbly submit yourself to God and his authority over time, or you run the risk of trying to play God. You have to be willing to admit that your time is in his hands, not yours.
Just this week, I experienced the reality of this. I dealt with some really unexpected things…some really good, and some really hard. Both threw me for a loop. It was not how I planned my week.
In this passage, James is pointing out how easy it is to formulate a plan without ever asking God what he wants to happen. On paper, everything can make sense. It all fits together, but the reality is we don’t hold the paper.
That’s good news! You know the pressure of trying to control what happens tomorrow? I know that, and it’s a lot to handle. But this is not just about recognizing who’s in control of tomorrow; it’s really about who you want to be in control of tomorrow.
James says we should say, “If the Lord wills, we will do this or that.” That goes back to how Jesus taught us to pray, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done…” Sometimes we’re afraid to pray for God’s will to be done, because if our desires don’t match his, then we might be disappointed when things don’t go according to our plans. We don’t just need to let go of our plans; we need to let go of our desires. We need to trust that God knows and wants what is best for us, which allows us to steward the time that’s given to us today and to stop trying to control what happens tomorrow.
What does this look like practically? It can start by saying, “God, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I want to make the most of today…of this moment. Show me how I can do that.” One thing I’ve tried to implement when I first sit at my desk in the morning is to stop and ask God to help me accomplish the work he wants me to do that day and to not get distracted by all the other tasks.
What if, as you were making your plans, you stopped and asked God what he wants for you this week, or in the next 3 months, 6 months? Would you be willing to make changes to your calendar… to add or, more likely, take away, even if it goes against what you originally were planning?
Another way to look at this is to ask: what are you trying to get from your time that you should be receiving from God? Sometimes we have a hard time surrendering because it feels like letting go of our time is letting go of our identity.
Maybe you overwork because you want to feel needed; you obsess over your calendar because you are afraid of uncertainty; you fill every moment because you don’t want to face what’s going on in your heart; maybe you even serve at church because you want to feel good about yourself or feel important. Your desire to control time may be revealing a misplaced identity. Your calendar speaks to what you believe about God and what you believe about yourself. Your time reveals your heart.
All those fears, worries, and beliefs about time are unhealthy, and they end up making us slaves to it. When we think we can control our time, it ends up controlling us.
Charles Hummel was an author and scholar who wrote an article entitled “Tyranny of the Urgent.” In it he says,
“Many of us have experienced Christ’s deliverance from the penalty and power of sin in our lives. Are we also letting him free us from the tyranny of the urgent? “ - Charles Hummel
His point is that Jesus died on the cross, paying the price to free us from sin and death, but he also rose from the dead to give us new life. That life means that we can be free from the need to be controlled by our calendars because we are secure in him and not bound to the demands of this world. The gospel is not just escape from hell; it’s a way of life. If we let him direct our hearts, then we can view time as a gift and not an enemy. Life on this earth is a speck on the timeline of eternity, but we feel the pressure to fit so much into this short timeframe. It often causes us to get overloaded with all the demands and options, and we don’t stop to discern what’s good…what is from God. Even if we believe we should let go of our time, we make all the excuses as to why we can’t.
This leads us to the last verse in James 4.
17 So it is sin to know the good and yet not do it.
Here is where things get difficult. We can agree that we need to steward today instead of trying to control tomorrow, and I think that every one of us would admit that we can’t dictate what happens in the future… no matter how badly we want to take control of our destiny…If you’re a Christian and you’ve been around the church even a little in the past decade, then you’ve probably heard something about the importance of slowing down, resisting the hustle mentality, practicing a Sabbath, and trusting God with your schedule…It is a prominent message inside and even outside the Church, and I personally don’t know anyone who disagrees.
However, agreeing and doing are two different things. It's one thing to acknowledge that God is in control of tomorrow. It's another thing to obey Him with what He's given us today. We can agree that we need to trust God, but James doesn't let us stop at agreement. He says that when we know the good we ought to do and fail to do it, that is sin. That word sin means to be off course. It means it’s wrong. Or more specifically, that it’s not from God.
Here’s the second takeaway: Do the good you know you ought to do (or do the good you know you should).
We often only think about sin as the things we shouldn’t do… lying, gossiping, acting in anger, etc. Those are sins of commission. But sins of omission are things we should do, but we don’t. We just saw this a couple of weeks ago in Nehemiah when the people stopped keeping the Sabbath, stopped reading the Scriptures…They were omitting the things they were supposed to be doing.
In the context of this message and this passage in James 4, the good would have been to trust God with their time and business, but these businessmen tried to operate on their own terms. In the same article, “Tyranny of the Urgent,” I mentioned earlier, Charles Hummel says,
“The root of all sin is self-sufficiency - independence from the rule of God.”
It is a sin to try to be self-sufficient, but so often our calendars reveal that we’ve stopped believing that God is enough for us. A lot of yeses give us an excuse to neglect dependence on God because there’s no time for it. But James says that’s a sin.
Think about that familiar illustration of the jar, the big rocks, and the pebbles. If you put the pebbles in first, you may not have room for the big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, the smaller things can fit around them.
We understand the principle. The problem is that we don't always know what the big rocks should be. And even when we know what matters, we can still struggle to give it the right place in our lives.
So how do we decide? How do we know what God wants us to make room for in this season?
This is where James brings us back to humility. We have to stop assuming that we already know exactly how our time should be spent and start asking God.
“God, what do you want my life to look like? What deserves my time and attention in this season? What needs to change?”
What if God wants you to change something? What if He wants you to say no to something good so you can say yes to something more important in this season? What if following Him means rearranging your priorities in a way that doesn't make sense to you at first?
That's why we have to pray. We have to be willing to let God direct our time, even when it means changing the plans we've made. He's not asking us to stop enjoying life or to live like monks. He's asking us to trust Him with our lives because He knows what is good for us.
I've had to learn this the hard way, and I'm still learning it. There were years in my marriage and family when I put my work and the church ahead of my family because I thought I needed to be involved in everything and maintain control over what was happening. Those were some of the hardest years of my marriage.
I was doing things that mattered. My work mattered. The church mattered. But I hadn't stopped to ask whether I was giving those things the right place in my life. Even good things can become a problem when we try to manage them on our own instead of submitting them to God. I wasn't just struggling to manage my time. I was struggling to trust God enough to let go of things I thought I needed to control. That was sinful. I wasn’t trusting God like I knew that I should, even though my calendar was filled with seemingly good things.
And that's where we can misunderstand the problem. We tend to think that if we can just get our priorities in the right order, everything will work. We'll put the big rocks in first and fit the smaller things around them. And that's a helpful place to start. But the problem isn't just about what we prioritize, but about what…or more specifically, who we give our lives to.
Our goal is to become people who trust Jesus enough to surrender our plans, obey his leading, and give him our attention…because we believe he is worthy.
We don’t need to merely see Jesus as our highest priority. We need to make him Lord over every priority. We don’t just need to make room for him and give him time in the day; we need to learn to live every part of our lives in relationship with him.
And that's what we see in the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10.
Luke 10:38-42
While they were traveling, he entered a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39 She had a sister named Mary, who also sat at the Lord’s feet and was listening to what he said. 40 But Martha was distracted by her many tasks, and she came up and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to serve alone? So tell her to give me a hand.”
41 The Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but one thing is necessary. Mary has made the right choice, and it will not be taken away from her.”
About half of us - including me - get uncomfortable with this passage because we immediately identify with Martha. Brittany and I love having people at our house, cooking and hosting dinners; it’s something we’ve always enjoyed. However, I have a hard time not tending to all things when I should be more engaged relationally. If you’re here early on Sunday mornings, you may have observed this from me, also. It’s a blessing and a curse. There are always things that need to be done…good, important things, but they often distract me from the best thing.
This is the third takeaway I want to give you: Don’t let good things crowd out the best thing.
In this case, Martha wanted to be a good host, but it distracted her from being with Jesus. Martha didn’t even have a cell phone. She wasn’t on Pinterest looking for charcuterie board ideas, but she still let her busyness create anxiety. And right there is where every one of us can relate to Martha… even if you aren’t Type A. We all get distracted from being with Jesus, and our hearts quickly turn anxious. For us, all the small pebbles in the jar can pull our time and attention away from Jesus. Sometimes, it can even be the big rocks that distract us…good things like work and church. That’s why I said earlier, we can’t limit this to a priority list that we go through and check off. When we hold on to our time and try to manage it ourselves and keep up with all the demands, it pulls us away from Jesus, and the further we get from Jesus the more stress and anxiety we feel. We are either trying so hard to control life, but we end up being controlled by life. Or we are trying so hard to do all the right things, but we end up burnt out and resentful… which is what happened to Martha. Her anxiety came from trying to serve Jesus. We need to learn what not to do from Martha, and we need to learn what to do from Mary.
Mary sat and listened to Jesus. That’s harder than it sounds. Listening takes time. It takes focus. Most importantly, it takes desire. To stop and listen, you have to want to. Mary wanted to hear what Jesus had to say. She wanted to learn from him. She wanted to be with him. She believed he was worth her time and attention, even if that meant letting other things go.
Martha was worried about doing all the things. But Jesus corrected her by saying, “You’re allowing all these other things to distract you from the one thing that is necessary.”
Let’s think about this. If there is one necessary thing, where does that one thing fall on the list of priorities? It’s not on the list! Jesus is showing Martha that the most important thing in her life cannot simply be another item on her list. Perhaps our biggest problem when we think about our time and our priorities is that we try to put Jesus on the list with all the other things we need or want to do. When we take that approach, we end up with a small portion of time to give God. Even if we try to put him first on the list, there are a lot of other things to fit into the calendar.
But if Jesus isn't just another item on our priority list, then how should we think about our relationship with him?
It all comes back to the Gospel. Martha represents the belief that we have to do all the right things to please God. Like every other religion in the world, there is a list of things we have to get just right in order to earn God’s love and acceptance. But Mary represents faith in Jesus, the Son of God, who said, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened… you will find rest for your souls.” Mary shows us what it looks like to put our trust in Jesus and to rest at his feet. She shows us what it looks like to believe that Jesus is all we need; that he is enough for us. Not only did he live, die, and rise again for the forgiveness of our sins, but he promised to give us abundant, eternal life. She shows us what it looks like to be desperate for the Savior, who is that source of life, and who can’t be compartmentalized to one portion of the day. I hope you see that all of this is about our dependence on Jesus.
Paul tells us in Acts 17 that in God we live and move and have our being. We don't have a separate life that we occasionally bring to God. Our entire lives are lived before him and sustained by him.
Instead of the first priority among many, we learn to see him as the very air we breathe. Air is the one necessary thing for survival. You don’t check your daily air intake off on a list. You live, and move, and exist constantly breathing in and breathing out the air around you. That's what it means to see Jesus as the one thing that is necessary.
We can also consider Psalm 150:6.
“Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.”
Ask the Psalmist: which one of our breaths should we use to praise the Lord? Or how many breaths per day? The idea is to see every breath that we breathe as a moment God has given us and that we trust him with. So, we breathe in God’s grace and breathe out his praise.
When we get up in the morning - we breathe grace, and breathe out praise for the day
When we’re driving to work - breathe in Jesus, give him the day
Going into a meeting - breathe him in
Checking emails
Eating lunch
Driving back home
Dinner with the family
On the couch with your spouse
Don’t put Jesus on a list….Let him become the air you breathe. Don’t just give him a portion of your time; let him be Lord over all of your time. Earlier in James 4:8, it says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” That’s a constant pursuit and surrender to the God who loves us and wants to walk with us.
This series is called Something to Give, and it would be easy for me to stand here and tell you to give more time to the church and to serving your neighbors, and to reading your Bible, or playing with your kids. We could lay out a rule of life and talk about how to schedule your day. And maybe you do need help in those things. There is a very real and practical side to this. But what I want you to understand is that giving your time is not about adding something else to your calendar. It’s not even about taking something away. Maybe you need to do neither; maybe you need to do both. The goal isn't just to get your schedule in order. The goal is to love Jesus so deeply that your schedule begins to reflect what you love…that when people look at your life, they don’t see a frantic and anxious Martha, but a trusting and restful Mary, who is living at the feet of Jesus. That’s why the big idea of the message is: Your time reveals your heart.
Your time tells a story. It reveals what you trust, what you love, and what you believe matters most.
Maybe your time reveals that you've been trying to control a future you cannot control. Surrender it to God.
Maybe it reveals that you've been neglecting something good that God has put before you. Take the next step of obedience. Do what you know you should.
Maybe you've filled your life with so many good things that you've lost sight of the one thing necessary. Come sit at the feet of Jesus again.
When we live that way, our calendars will fall into place. The list will work itself out as we learn to walk and listen to Jesus…finding our hope and identity in him and not all the other things.
And remember, Jesus doesn't invite you to give your time so you can earn His love. He invites you because He loves you. John 3:16 says, “For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” He gave Himself for you, and you can trust Him with your time, your plans, and your life.
