The Press of Time 1977

I want to read from Matthew 25, the first 13 verses, the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins. Then the kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise.

For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, behold the bridegroom, come out to meet him.

Then all those maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out. But the wise replied, perhaps there will not be enough for us and you.

Go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves. And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut. Afterward the other maidens came also saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.

But he replied, truly I say to you, I do not know you. Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. When we first enter the kingdom of God, usually, we're given a few weeks or perhaps a few months and in a few cases maybe even a couple years, when we're so saturated by the Spirit of God with the atmosphere of heaven that the ordinary pressures of life are held in suspension for a while.

And it's like being on a holiday. Just like the, um, when the prodigal son came back and they had a banquet for him. You know, they filled the platypus and it was celebration and constant eating and drinking and making merry and really having a wonderful time.

So, we have a time where it's celebration. You know, uh, it's just all the time you'll get up in the morning and you're happy and, and all those pressures that you normally seem to feel have been removed. And the problem that some of us have is that we think that's the way it's supposed to go all the time.

You know, and as soon as the dinner is over and it's getting down to business, we're all shook up. Now, when the prodigal son came home, there was a banquet and they killed the fatted calf and they ate and they drank and they sang and they danced and there was music. But after a while, dinner ended.

It didn't go on eating forever. And the prodigal son then takes his place on the farm and gets down to business. Likewise, when the honeymoon of God comes to an end, as it does, you then have to begin to learn how to take the glory of God and bring it down into real life.

And you have to learn to apply the majesty and glory of God, which you've begun to experience in three areas. You have to learn to bring the glory of God into your relationship with other people, two, into your handling of money and things, and three, into the way you cope with the press of time. Now, every believer understands that you have to take the mercy of God and translate it into a merciful walk in your relationship with other people.

And every believer surely understands that you have to take your faith and apply it in the use of mammon, money and things. If you haven't been found faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches? But not every believer seems to understand that if you're serious about following the Lord, it's going to have a radical changing effect on the way you cope with the pressure of time. In fact, if you don't learn some effective way of coping with the pressure of time, time alone will be your undoing, and it will destroy you.

These virgins who went out to meet the bridegroom would have gone in with him to the marriage feast if he had come when they expected him. But he was delayed. Time was their undoing.

They could not hold out. When the book of the revelation was written, it contained addresses, letters to seven churches that were alive and strong in what is now the territory of Turkey. Turkey.

Where are those churches today? Long since gone, long before the coming of Islam, they had already begun to dry up, no doubt. Why? People are still there. See, but these churches crumble under the weight of time.

They sank under the pressure of the advancing years. Now, in the natural world, this is understandable. Our bodies get older.

We start to wrinkle. And some of you young people, also younger ones, will begin to wear bifocals. Your eye muscles will weaken.

Your hearing gets a little duller. Your joints get stiff. That happens to everybody.

Nobody's exempt from this. And it's wonderful. But in the realm of the kingdom of God, you go from strength to strength.

You don't get tired and weak, Paul says. My outer man is wasting away, but my inner man is being renewed day by day. That's to be the normal thing in the kingdom of God.

And Paul could do that because he had learned how to cope with the pressure of time. Now, the press of time affects us in different ways. For the prisoner, the invalid, the person lying on a sickbed, many times the weight of those days is just the heaviness, the dullness of these days that just drag on.

And, you know, the desire is, if only the years would pass and I could get out of this prison, get out of this pain-wracked body and have some freedom. For others, it's that there just is not enough time to get done what I have to do. How in the world am I going to accomplish all these things that have to be done if only I had more time? And we become demoralized in that way.

But whether the flow of time for us seems to be too fast or too slow, the temptations that come with the pressure of time are common to us all. For instance, there is the temptation to slothfulness. You know, the householder has gone into a far country to take for himself a kingdom, and he's not going to be back for a long time.

So I'm going to take this talent he gave me. I'm going to bury it. And I'm going to put my feet up, but I'm going to take it easy.

You know, the day of reckoning is so far off. Why even think about it? Then there's the temptation of anxiety. It seems as if we're being rushed along this stream going down toward the ocean of God.

And sometimes it dashes us on rocks, and sometimes it takes us over waterfalls. We never know what's going to happen next. And we're so anxious about what the evil of tomorrow is going to be that we can't even think straight today.

You know, what's going to happen? Will I get sick? Will I lose my job? Will the few friends I have left also forsake me? And then there's a temptation to vain ambition. Under the pressure of time, I begin to think, here it is. You know, I'm getting older, and I still haven't made my mark in the world.

I have to do something. I have to accomplish something. Time is flying by, and I haven't made it yet.

I haven't tasted success. And many times this vain ambition goes on under the guise of deep piety, spirituality. And so, you know, I want to achieve some kind of spiritual status in my fellowship.

Or I want to make sure that the church I belong to, the movement I'm in, is the greatest, and proves itself to be right while all the other ones are wrong. Then time also brings with it the temptation to become really trivial. You know, the master, the householder, is so far away, and who knows when he's coming back.

And now I begin to pick around, you know, with things that really don't amount to any more than the win. What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Wherewithal shall we be clothed? Who's going to win the Rose Bowl? What am I ever going to do if my team loses? Now, Jesus lived in the midst of all those things. He lived in the pressure cooker that you and I live in.

Yet he never succumbed to the temptation of anxiety, or vanity, or slothfulness, or triviality. His feet were on the ground, and yet he was down to business. Somehow he caused this flow of time to become sanctified.

As he moved with it, he made every moment count, and he was always conscious of time. People often think, oh yes, back in Bible days, they didn't have clocks. They didn't have to worry about things like that.

But notice how often Jesus mentions time, one way or another. After John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee and said that time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe the gospel. I have come to spread fire on earth, and would that were already kindled. I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how I am constrained until it is accomplished.

We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. The night comes when nobody can work. Are there not 12 hours in the day? He who walks in the day doesn't stumble.

Conscious as he was of the pressure of time, how was it then that we never see Jesus in a hurry, and we never see him dawdle? Every moment is filled with peace, and every moment counts. One way we can explain this really remarkable coping with the pressure of time that we see in our Lord is to say that he took hold of time and sanctified it. He'd somehow changed every day into a Sabbath.

He was down in the middle of the pressure cooker just like we are, and yet in the midst of this, he's out of the pressure cooker, and he's dwelling no longer under the pressure of time as we see it, but he's living in what could be called the realm of sanctified time. And so instead of time pressing down on him, demoralizing him, and trying to crush him, time becomes the stream that carries him right along in God's will. Are there not 12 hours in the day? Let's fill it.

Let's work the works of him who sent me while it is day. Let's get some oil in our vessels with our lamps. Let's worship God in spirit and in truth, and if we let him, Jesus will teach us also to come out of the pressure cooker even while we live in this world and dwell in the realm continuously of sanctified time.

For instance, we need to let Jesus teach us how to enter the realm of sanctified time through daily prayer. Okay, somebody says, oh, here we go again, prayer, but listen. How do you deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow him? Through daily prayer.

Give us this day our daily bread. What does this mean? A time set aside to really get alone with God and pray. And somebody says, ah, but you don't understand.

I mean, I'm busy. I'm not like you Christian fanatics. I have things I got to do.

I'm so tired when I get to bed at night and I just can't find the time, you know, and in the afternoon, if I stop, I fall asleep. You will never have time and you will always be under pressure until you learn to come out of the pressure cooker and enter the realm of sanctified time through prayer. Luther is reputed to have said one time, I have so much to do today that I spend less than three hours in prayer.

Go to that place where you will see time touched by the spirit, washed in the blood, flooded with peace. And the place where this is, is that you come into your room and you shut the door and ask God to help you to deal with the pressure. And he will.

Second, we need to let the Lord bring us into the realm of sanctified time through continuous watchfulness. But at that day or at that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the father. Take heed, watch for you do not know when the time will come.

It is like a man going on a journey when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work and commands the doorkeeper to be on watch. Watch therefore, for you do not know when the master of the house will come in the evening or at midnight or at cockcrow or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you, I say to all, watch.

And that watching is not just for Jesus' return in glory, but it's also a watching for his coming through the spirit all the time at any moment. In other words, let's say I had plans for today. These are the things I believe I am to do.

That's good. You know, if you don't make some kind of a plan, if you don't budget your time like you do your money, you get nothing done. But Jesus may just come along and change my plans for today.

And I have to be alert enough to recognize this as a visitation of the Lord, causing me to change things around. And if I do, I'm walking in the realm of sanctified time. On the other hand, if I insist on going right on this plan that I made for myself with no bending, you know, I'm going to be living under pressure.

On the other hand, I need to be watchful also because the enemy, the father of life, Satan himself is going to also come and try to make me change my plans. And I have to be careful that I don't get sucked into some sidetrack issue that he might throw my way. I have to be watchful so that I don't sink into a mood of self-pity or so that we don't give, you know, to an attitude of grudging and resenting or escape the pressures by walking off into the realm of fantasy as we so often do.

See, if I'm watchful, alert, with my heart and mind clear, you know, then my emotions are going to be in touch with reality and the flow of time in my life is going to be holy. Finally, we need to let Jesus teach us how to enter into the realm of sanctified time through labor. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.

The night comes when no one can work. Work, steady, deliberate, thoughtful, well-done work will put us into the realm of sanctified time. And there are those, perhaps among us now, who need to be doing something.

You know, anybody who wants to can get by in this age without working at all. You know, you may even work for a big corporation and still get by without ever really applying yourself. Or, you know, and there are ways in which you can be supported and there are people who need to be supported, but there are people who ought not to be supported.

I mean, who ought not to let themselves be supported. Take that bucket and go down Verner Highway and wash windows free of charge, rather than sit around and do nothing. You know, when people give in to laziness, you know, it's not always, oh, I'm so bored, I don't know what to do.

Many times when we give in to laziness, we feel even more pressure from time. Oh, I'll never get it all done. You're not doing anything.

How many times when we feel, oh, I'm not going to get it all done, the minute you pick up the work right under your nose and begin to do it, your head clears. You have some peace, because by picking up some labor to God's honor and glory, whatever it is in the vineyard, it's in the vineyard, you know, whether you're washing windows of Verner Highway or shining shoes or, you know, weeding the garden in the summertime or shoveling the snow or doing something, by this, you leave the pressure cooker and you enter into the realm of sanctified time. But at midnight there was a cry, behold the bridegroom, go out to meet him.

Then all those maidens rose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out. But the wise replied, perhaps there will not be enough for us and you.

Go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves. And when they went to buy, the bridegroom came and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut. Time alone will destroy those believers who had lamps burning and who are waiting for the bridegroom, but who are not taking the trouble to get oil, to enter into the realm of sanctified time, God's time, God's peace, God's work, God's atmosphere.

We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. The night comes when no one can work. At this moment, the daylight of God is closer to us than our breath.

God help us to enter into that daylight and stay there, that when the night comes, when no man can work and it will, our lamps may still be burning and take us right on in to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Lord, we're just asking that today and in the days ahead, you would teach us how to handle the pressure of time in our lives and enable us to leave the realm of being continuously harassed and distracted for the realm of your alertness and your purpose and your wisdom and your peace. And we pray that you would just help us to touch every area of our daily activity with the atmosphere of your holiness.

We ask it in Jesus name. Amen.