Since Bonnie
called me to tell me that her husband Bruce had passed away, I’ve found myself
thinking about how finite and fleeting life is, and that you never know what a
day or a week may bring. One day, he’s home and looks like he’s headed back
towards healthy, and just five days later, he’s gone.
And it’s made
me think about how fragile this life really is. We live in a comfortable
western world where we are usually insulated from swift and tragic deaths, and
for those that know him, this was a stark reminder that we are much less
insulate than we think, and we have far less time than we think we do. The
years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; says
Psalm 90, yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we
fly away. Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to
the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of
wisdom (90:10-12). Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate
are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a
breath, says Psalm 62 (62:9).
This all
leaves me with a question for those who know Christ: How are we using our
time? All too often, we waste it. We live in a celebrity, entertainment culture,
which sucks us in without us even knowing it, unless we actively fight it. I
don’t know if there has ever been a culture more given over to seeking to be
entertained than this one. The Romans famously had their bread and circus, but
that wasn’t every day. The average American watches 5 hours a day of TV, which
works out to around 35 hours a week, or 9 years of your life. And as you
get older, apparently TV viewing increases. We all bemoan the fact that the
average American youth watches 1200 hours of TV in a year, while they only go
to school for about 900 hours, but what we don’t says is that apparently, as
you get older, apparently TV viewing goes up. The average youth watches 24
hours of TV, but after that it rises steadily until people over 65 average 48
hours a week, or nearly seven hours a day.
But it’s not
just TV, at any time; we have a constant stream of entertainment running by us.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, this update on my phone calling for my attention.
And I haven’t even gotten to video games and the internet. We live in a culture
that says, in the words of Nirvana “here I am now, entertain me”.
And it’s so
corrosive. Pastor and Theologian John Piper once said that “The greatest enemy
of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the
wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of
the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of
triviality we drink in every night.” He’s right. It deadens our mind and
softens our heart for God, giving us a love for the world, and a desire for
comfort.
The result is
that we sit around and spend our time on the trivial and unimportant, and then
moan that we don’t have time to read our Bible and pray, and pursue the things
of God. Piper commented that “One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook
will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of
time”, ouch.
Beyond that,
there is our general pursuit of leisure. Moments of leisure are not bad in of
and of themselves. But, our culture has made leisure one of the great goals of
life. Work, so then you can then do nothing. It’s the great end of life. But
the bible says that we where created to work. Work is good. We were created to
work for the glory of God, leisure and rest is never the end, the glory of God
is.
And then
there’s our pursuit of stuff. The great ability of advertisers is to create an
ever in-creasing hole of desire that can never be filled, and so we chase this
trinket and that thing, because we’ve been told that if we have that,
everything will be complete. And so we run and run on the treadmill chasing
things that do not matter. Bubbles and status symbols, things that we think we
have to have to fit in, but will one day populate a landfill, because they have
been replaced by a newer version.
We have 168
hours in a week. That's it. What are you doing with them? If we truly believe
the gospel, we should reprioritize how we spend our time. Is prayer and
scripture near the top of our agenda? Do we prioritize sharing the gospel? Are
we prioritizing reading things that build our mind and give us a distinctively
Christian worldview and approach to life, or are we taking in drivel? Are we
actively dreaming and scheming about how to spread the gospel, or dreaming and
scheming about the next movie we’re going to watch? Are you building
relationships that you allow for the spread of the gospel, or building your
Candy Crush score (if you don’t know what Candy Crush
is, that’s a good thing). Don’t waste your life. Desire that your life count
for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Don’t
coast through life without a passion, being entertained along the way.
Someday
you will stand be-fore God, and give an account of how you used your time, and
so I say again, don’t waste it. It is better to lose your life than to waste
it. Young, old, especially those of you that are retired, may you use your time
well, because life is too short, precarious, and painful to waste it on entertainment
or chasing baubles that will fill landfills. Heaven is to great, in the
words of piper, hell is too horrible; eternity is too long that we should
putter around on the porch of eternity. It is better to lose your life than
to waste it. May you use your time wisely, may it count for eternity, and may
you be able to say with great joy, “I
have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith
(2Tim. 4:7)”, rather than, I have no idea where the time went.
TV Stats
came from: Staticbrain, and the NY daily News.
