I'm often asked, what are the
three books that everyone should read? And I say, I'm going to
tell you the three books that most impacted me, but if you
read them, they may not impact you the way it impacted me because
I was at a particular place in my life at that moment, and those
books spoke directly to where I was. I think the same was true
with Michael because of where the Lord had him at that particular
moment in his life. What I had to say in that sermon
was most impactful to him. And I don't know where you are
in your life, in your walk with the Lord and in your personal
life. I do know, because this will
be from the Word of God, that it will speak directly to your
heart. And I trust that your heart will be receptive to God's
Word and can only pray that God will use it in an impactful way
in your life. The text that I have to address
you from today is John chapter 9. Now, this message is not on
political theory. It's not on economic theory.
It's not on social issues. What I have to say to you is
really but an exposition of what Jesus had to say regarding the
use of one's time that has been allotted to you. This is not
a time management type message, but it is a message that speaks
to the urgency of the hour in which each one of us find ourselves.
God has apportioned to us an amount of time and He has given
to us a work to do. And the means by which we glorify
God is accomplishing the work that He has entrusted to us to
do. He has given to us sufficient
time to carry out that work because He is all wise. He has appointed
the day of our birth and He has appointed the day of our death.
And He has foreordained good works for us to do. And we bring
honor and glory to God by actively accomplishing the work that He
has called us to do. There is great dignity in work. We have been created in the image
of God, which is multifaceted, but one key component of being
made in the image of God is that we are to be workers. God is
a working God. God is working every moment of
every day. God is not passive. God is active. And after God has created everything
out of nothing on six successive days, He has worked every moment
of every day to sustain and to uphold all His created works. Further, He is overseeing all
the affairs of providence. There is not a maverick molecule
in the entire universe, but that God holds the entire world in
His hand. And God raises up kings and He
lowers kings. And God is controlling the weather. God is controlling all circumstances. There is no such thing as good
luck or bad luck. That's a pagan myth. There is
no such thing as an accident. There is no such thing as good
karma, bad karma. We understand that God is causing.
all things to work together for good. To those who love God,
who are called according to His purpose, Romans 8, 28. In Ephesians
1, verse 11, the Bible says that God is working all things according
to the counsel of His will. So every moment of every day,
every second, God is powerfully at work in this world. And His
invisible hand of providence is bringing about His eternal
purposes. And as we are made in the image
of God, God immediately assigned work to Adam. As soon as God
created him out of the dust of the earth and breathed life into
him, God immediately commissioned Adam to oversee his creation. and to name the animals and to
be the steward of what God had created. All of this preceded
original sin. All of this preceded the curse. And to make this very personal,
God has assigned to you and to me a work to do. And as long as you are alive
and breathing, that work is not yet finished. And we are to work
to bring glory to God. And there is pleasure that we
are intended to derive from accomplishing what God has assigned us to do. So this message, I believe, struck
Michael at his heart because there is a work that God has
called him to do. There is a work that God has
called you to do and a work that God has called me to do. And
wise is the man and wise is the woman who comes to discern and
understand what is the work that God has called you to do. So, in Romans chapter 9, I want
to read just the first four verses. Our focus will be on verse 4.
I want to take verse 4 and open it up for you. In Romans chapter
9, we come to the end of our Lord's earthly ministry. What
we're reading here takes place six months before His crucifixion.
His earthly ministry was over three years. The sun is beginning
to set on his life. Night is fast approaching. And
there is a sense of urgency that our Lord felt as He approaches
the end of His life. It is the very same sense of
urgency that you and I must feel about the work that God has called
us to do. And one further thought before
I read this text. There may come a time when you
will retire from what has been your career. But you will never
retire from what God has called you to do here upon the earth. So, John 9, beginning in verse
1, As He, Jesus, passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him,
Rabbi, and that word means teacher. Jesus was repeatedly called Rabbi
in this sense that He was continually speaking the truth. And what
He will say here in a couple of verses will be very profound
truth. Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents? that he should be born blind.
Jesus answered, it was neither that this man sinned nor his
parents, but it was so that the works of God might be displayed
in him." Now, verse 4, we must work the works of Him who sent
me as long as it is day. Night is coming. when no one
can work. There are three things that I
want you to note from this one verse. And the first is the assignment
of work. There is an assignment of work
that God gave to His Son. And Jesus said, we must work
the works of Him who sent me. Here Jesus clearly states that
there is a task, there is a duty that God had assigned to Him
to do. And Jesus said earlier in John
4 verse 34, My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and
to accomplish His work. There was an inner energy, if
you will, in doing the work that God had given to the eternal
Son of God. And in Jesus' high priestly prayer
in John 17, in verse 4, as Jesus comes to the end of His life,
Jesus said, I glorified you on the earth. And we would ask the
question, how did Jesus glorify the Father while He was here
upon the earth? And the remainder of John 17
verse 4 gives the answer. I glorified you on the earth,
having accomplished the work which you have given me to do. There is great glory that is
brought to the Father when Jesus accomplished the work that He
was assigned to do, and the same is true for you and me. Please
note, Jesus said, we must work. the works of Him who sent me."
This word, must, speaks of divine necessity about this work. Jesus
did not say, I would like to, or I wish to, I hope to. Jesus said, we must do the work
of Him who sent me. Jesus was driven. Jesus was compelled. Jesus was duty-bound. to carry out the assignment that
the Father had given to Him while here upon the earth. He said
we must work, and this word work is a Greek word that means to
toil, to labor, to exercise, to expend oneself in a task to
the point of exhaustion. Jesus said we must work the works. It's in the plural. It's multifaceted. It's many works that the Father
had assigned Jesus to do, many sermons, many miracles, many
acts of kindness, and ultimately the great sacrifice upon the
cross that Jesus would give. And as He hung upon the cross
in John 19 verse 30, Jesus said, it is finished. Not I am finished,
it is finished. And the it refers to the work
that the Father had given to Him to accomplish while here
upon the earth. Not only is this for Jesus, but
the first word of this verse is of utmost importance. Jesus
said, we must work the work of Him who sent me while it is day.
Not I must work the work. We must work the work. And so
Jesus said this to the other disciples who were there. that
there was a work not only that the Father had given to Him to
do, but that there was a work that the Father had also given
to them to do as well. And by extension of the argument,
it is true of every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, it
is true of every disciple, everyone who has been born again into
the kingdom of heaven, the Father has prescripted a work to do. In Ephesians 2 and verse 10,
Paul writes and says, for we, and the we refers to all those
who were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world,
all those for whom Christ died, all those who believe in Christ,
and all those who are sealed eternally in Christ. For we are
His workmanship. created in Christ Jesus for good
works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
And the previous verses are very familiar to probably most of
us here today. For by grace you have been saved
through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of
God, not as a result of works, lest any man should boast. We
are saved by grace, through faith in Christ unto good works. We are not saved by our good
works. We are saved by the grace of
God that we would then perform good works. Our good works will
not take us to heaven, but our good works will follow us to
heaven. There is a work that God has entrusted to each and
every one of us here. So this is the first dominant
truth that I want to set before you that struck Michael's heart
over a year ago and continues to be a fire that burns within
my bones and within my heart that there is a work There is
a reason why I'm here on this earth. There is a reason why
I'm still on this earth. And there is a reason why you
are here and why you are still here. And it is that you would
work the works that the Father has assigned you to do. Before I move on, let me ask
you this question. What is that work that the Father
has assigned you to do? Why are you here? Why has He
kept you alive? How should you invest your life?
How should you be used by God to glorify Him while you are
here upon the earth? And are you certain that you
are doing what you're supposed to be doing? Because wise is
the man and wise is the woman who has a sense of divine direction
about their life and who pours themselves into the work that
God has entrusted to you to do. None of us are here to be on
vacation. And none of us are here to waste
our lives. None of us are here to be passive. And none of us are here just
to be spectators. None of us are here just to be
kicked back and to be observers or to try to do as little as
we possibly can while we're here upon the earth. What a miserable
way to live one's life. So number one, the appointment,
the assignment of work. And before I move on, let me
say this. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5 verse 10, we must all appear
before the judgment seat of Christ. that everyone will give an account
of the deeds done in their body, whether good or bad. On the last
day, even as believers in Jesus Christ, we will give an account
to God, specifically to the Lord Jesus Christ. Did we or did we
not do the work that He had called us to do? I want to have a good
answer on that last day. I want you to have a good answer
on that last day. Second, not only the assignment
of work, but number two, the allotment of time. Because there's
much that Jesus says in verse 4 that is extraordinarily profound. After He says, we must work the
works of Him who sent Me, Jesus then said, as long as it is day. There is a God-appointed work,
but there is also a God-allotted amount of time to do that work. So therefore, there must be a
sense of urgency to carry out that work. When he says, as long as it is
day... Day here is used metaphorically. A day in this verse refers to
the lifetime of the Lord Jesus Christ. The number of years,
the number of hours, the number of minutes, the number of moments
with its opportunities to carry out this work. Jesus said, as
long as it is day, we must carry out this work because night is
coming. And night refers to death. And Jesus says, I must do it
now. I cannot procrastinate. I cannot put it off. And throughout
Jesus's life, he understood he was on the clock. When He performed His first miracle
in John 2, verse 4, when He turned water into wine and His mother
appealed to Him, Jesus said, My hour has not yet come. And in John 7, verse 6, when
His brothers urged Him to go up to Jerusalem and to show Himself
to be the Messiah, Jesus said, My time is not yet here. And in John 7 verse 50, Jesus
again said, His hour had not yet come. Again in John 8 verse
20, No one sees Him, John records, because His hour had not yet
come. In John 12, verse 23, Jesus said,
"...the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified."
And by that, He's referring to His death. Jesus understood He
was on a divine schedule that had been foreordained by the
Father from before the foundation of the world. And he must press
on to the objective and the goal that the Father had set before
him. He couldn't be slack. He could
not be a sluggard. He could not be shuffling his
way through life. And in John 12 and verse 27,
he says, Now my soul has become troubled, what shall I say? Father,
save me from this hour, but for this purpose I came to this hour. There was a sense of divine sovereignty
that was over his life and under his life, moving him forward
to this hour. And in John 17, verse 1, as he
begins his great high priestly prayer, he says, Father, the
hour has come. Glorify the Son that the Son
may glorify you. And what we draw from this is
Jesus acknowledging that he has not only a specific work to do,
but he has a specific amount of time in which to do this work. So Jesus was not killing time. Jesus was not wasting time. He
was not letting the grass grow under His feet. He wasn't procrastinating. Jesus was not dragging His feet
or shuffling through life. Jesus was not unmotivated. But He must do the work that
the Father has given Him to do. I find it interesting, Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John, the emphasis that Mark makes. Each of the
four Gospels presents Christ in a unique light, Christ as
in Matthew, the King of the Jews. John, the eternal Son of God. In Luke, the perfect man. But in Mark, the perspective
of Jesus is the servant of the Lord. And the key verse is Mark
10, verse 45. For the Son of Man has come not
to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for
many. And this is why the gospel of Mark begins with Jesus at
age 30. There's no genealogy. And the
reason is, no one cares about the genealogy of a servant. All
that matters is, is can you do the work? When you hire someone
to mow your yard, you don't ask for a resume to see their lineage. All that matters is, will you
put your shoulder to the plow and will you do the work? That's
how the gospel of Mark begins. The key word in the entire book
of Mark is used over 40 times. It is the word immediately. And in the first chapter of Mark's
Gospel alone, Mark uses the word immediately nine times. In Mark 1 verse 10, immediately
coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opening, the
Spirit descending like a dove. It's as if the entire Trinity
is pushing with rapidity, immediately. Mark 1.12, immediately the Spirit
impelled Him to go into the wilderness. Mark 1.17, follow Me and I will
make you fishers of men. Immediately they left their nets
and followed Him. They had to, to keep pace with
Him. He would have left them behind.
He's moving on. This was their moment. This was
their time. And unless they immediately drop
their nets, they'll never follow Jesus. Mark 1 verse 28, immediately
he called them and they left their father. Mark 1.21, they
went into Capernaum and immediately on the Sabbath he entered and
began to teach. Mark 1.28, immediately the news
spread about him. Mark 1.29, immediately after
they came out of the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon.
Mark 1.30, immediately they spoke to Jesus about her. Mark 1.42,
immediately the leprosy left him. Everything is moving out
in the ministry of Jesus Christ as He is pressing on and pushing
ahead to accomplish the work that the Father had given Him
to do. Because if He procrastinates, if He drags His feet, He will
dishonor the Father. And He will not be able to do
and accomplish the work that the Father has given Him to do. I know this is sounding a bit
like a sermon, and I guess it is. But let me make this very personal
for you. You only have so much time and you have a big assignment. Psalm 90 verse 12, teach us to
number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom. You
have to be taught to be wise. You and I are naturally foolish.
and squander our time and squander our opportunities. We have to
ask God to teach us to be wise. Teach us to number our days. None of us knows how many days
we have. What that means is that we count every day and every
moment of every day of such eternal value that we waste not a moment of
time. God has foreordained the day
of your birth. You had nothing to do with it.
And God has already foreordained the day of your death. And I
want you to know, under the sovereignty of God, you will not live one
millisecond beyond your appointed time. And you will not live one half
of a second less than your appointed time. He holds your entire life
in His hands. And your life is like an hourglass
that's been turned upside down. And that sand is moving. And there's only so much time
that's left. And you must do what the Lord
has called you to do now. Psalm 139 verse 16, listen to
this. All of your days were written
in His book, when as yet there was not one of them. God has
already numbered every one of your days. You can't buy any more. You cannot
forfeit any less. You have an allotment of time. Job 14.5, since His days are
determined, referring to man's days, the number of His months
is with you, referring to God, And His limit you have set so
that He cannot pass." God has set the limit at the time that
you and I will be here. That is why Proverbs 27, 1 says,
do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day
may bring forth. 2 Corinthians 6, 2, behold, now
is the accepted time. Behold, today is the day of salvation. In a very real sense, tomorrow
is the devil's day, today is God's day. Ephesians 5, verse
15 says, to redeem the time. for the days are evil." So how much time do you have
left? How much time do I have left? It's a mercy of the Lord
in one sense that we do not know. Because if we knew, we would
be stressed. How good of God to not tell us
how close we are to the end of our life. But on the other side,
Every one of us should feel a divine sense of urgency today, this
moment, to be about our Father's business. Now, the last heading
I want to give you from this text, the assignment of work,
the allotment of time, the approach of death. This verse ends by
Jesus saying, Night is coming when no one can work. In fact,
night was fast approaching for the Son of Man as He had only
six months yet to live. The sun was setting on His life
and night was coming. It was unavoidable. It was inevitable. It was inescapable. It was predestined. It was fixed on God's calendar. It was foreordained. And Jesus understood that. And He understood, therefore,
what He must do, He must do now. He must do today what must be
done today. It cannot be put off for another
time. And the application for you and
me is, I believe, very clear. That death is coming. The government's come up with
a new statistic. One out of every one person dies. In fact, you are dying this very
moment. And I am, in a sense, dying.
as our bodies are decaying, as our bodies are becoming old and
older, as we are becoming tired. We now have less energy, in some
ways, to do the same amount of work. And if we put it off, we
will be tireder tomorrow and next year than we are today. to do God's work. So God's work
must be done now, today. How this relates to this conference
is as individual as each and every one of us in this room.
That is between you and God. What God has called you to do,
what God has assigned you to do here upon this earth, But
for whatever that is, for God's sake, do it. And do it now. And do not let this moment in time pass. I will conclude by simply telling
you that the greatest movement of the Spirit of God upon American
soil took place during the Great Awakening in the 1730s and it reached its
zenith in the 1740s. It began with the preaching of
Jonathan Edwards at the end of 1733 and the beginning of 1734.
And Jonathan Edwards preached a very unique message that lit
the match that ignited the beginning of the Great Awakening. After
Jonathan Edwards preached two sermons on justification by faith
in November of 1733, he followed up in December with a sermon
that had this title of all titles, The Preciousness of Time and
the Importance of Redeeming It. And God used this very subject
that we're talking about to bring about the spiritual explosion
that electrified the colonies in the 1730s. And Jonathan Edwards
took the text, Ephesians 5, verse 16, making the most of your time
or redeeming the time. He talked about why time is so
precious. Because it affects eternity.
Because it's so uncertain how much you have. Because once you
have squandered time, you can never recover it. And Edwards
talks about a man could be a wealthy man and lose his entire fortune. But he could regain it. But when
a man squanders his time, It will never be recaptured again. It is so precious. And then Edwards talks about
who wastes time, and he talks about idleness, and he talked
about wickedness, and he talked about various ways that men wasted
their time in worldly pursuits that amount to nothing. And then
he says at the end of this sermon, how to improve your time. And
I end with this. He says, consider your accountability
to God, that you will give an account to God on the last day
as a steward before His Master for how you used the time that
was allotted to you to carry out the work that He gave to
you to do. Edwards then reasoned how much
time you've already lost. You can't afford to lose any
more time. And then he says, come with me
to the deathbed. And here a man on his deathbed,
he will not talk about making more money. He will not talk
about having more land and more houses. He would give his entire
fortune to have just a little bit more time. But then Edwards
goes for the knockout punch and he says, descend with me now
into the bowels of hell and listen to the shrieks and the groans
of the damned souls in hell. What they would give for just
a moment of time, the very time that you have now, they would
give anything and everything if they had but the time and
the opportunity that you have. Now, and then Edwards ends with
an appeal to his listeners to be used by God to carry out the
purpose and the plan that God has for their life in the time
that has been given to them and not to come to the end of their
time and to have so little to show for the use of their life. That is the application for each
one of us here today. And it begins with you being
a believer in Jesus Christ. And quite frankly, if you've
never committed your life to Jesus Christ, you will spend
eternity suffering forever. You squandered, you blew your
entire life. Because you just lived for you.
And you just lived for temporal things. Some of them may be noble,
family. But you didn't live for God.
And you didn't live for Jesus Christ. And so, this really begins
with you being a true believer in Jesus Christ. And for those of us who are believers
in Christ, what a stewardship that has been
entrusted to us of talent, of treasure, but of time. And I pray that all of us will
feel a sense, a healthy, sense of the fear of God that we would
invest our time so wisely and not in what is good or even in
what is better. You don't have enough time to
live for what's good or even for what's better. You must invest
your time in that which is best. which is seeking to glorify God
and to live for Him and to carry out the work that
the Lord has given you to do while here upon the earth. How short is the time that we
have to give. We must work the works of Him
who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no man can
work.