What Are We Doing with Our Time? A Pastoral Reflection

What are we doing with our time?

Pastor Ian Hodge

Lemon Cove Community Church, CA

I almost always feel that I am either too busy, or not busy enough. There are days that are so full of tasks and responsibilities that I despair of accomplishing them all. Then there are days (although probably fewer in this case) that seem to drone on in boredom, either without enough tasks of significance to fill them or where my (un?)natural laziness has gotten the best of me. In both cases, I am often left with the sense that my very most precious currency – that of time – is being badly mismanaged.

What is our time for? 

Is it to fill up with task after task, achievement after achievement? Is it to carve out as much leisure as possible? Is it to find the appropriate proportion of each? How will I know that I’ve spent it wisely? Have I just triggered an anxiety attack in myself and in you, dear reader?

As Christians we so often overemphasize either the urgency of our moments. We say that Jesus is coming back any moment (he is!) and therefore we must be as busy as possible; saving the lost, proclaiming the kingdom, practicing justice, and all the rest of the wonderfully good things Jesus has given to us and made us accountable for. But I ask if, in our urgency, have we ruled out time to rely on God? More pointedly, who are we actually trusting to do the work, to make time for the work? Sometimes we make ourselves so busy doing God’s work that we really have no connection to the God who commissioned the labor in the first place. Functionally, we become deists. This is no abstract musing in my own life – I resolve to begin every day of my labor as a pastor in the Word and in prayer; I resolve to begin every meeting by invoking the power and presence of God, I resolve to bathe every interaction with every person in spiritual relationship. But I also feel the pressure of the passing moments, and I check my notifications as I pray, I interrupt my Scripture reading to write an email I just remembered I’d forgotten to write, I get meetings going so we can get done and forget to pray, and I throw a Bible verse at the people I visit to sanctify the 30 minutes I spent with them. The pressure I feel to actually accomplish something is much greater than the urgency I feel to rely on God’s provision. And I keep making these same errors over and over again. I keep hoping next time will be different, but something seems to go wrong with my resolutions to do it differently.

One of the key themes of ECO’s theological document on Sabbath are all the excuses we come up with for breaking Sabbath. At this point in my thinking I’m struck particularly by the document’s observation regarding Solomon: “One king, Solomon, built a house for God to dwell among them, and conscripted the people into forced labor for the task.” For a moment, take out our modern outrage over the concept of slavery, because that’s not the issue I want to highlight. The important thing to get here is not to fund another modern crusade of outrage on a clear moral wrong (as correct as it may be in this case), but instead to realize that as God moved to bring His people into closer relationship with Himself, to give them freedom and rest from the overwhelming burden of the curse, Solomon himself employed the ways of the curse. And Solomon’s choice is eminently repeatable (and repeated). 

The way forward is not working harder. If that was the way forward we would be so much farther forward than we are today! The way forward, to greater Christ-likeness and being faithful witnesses to Christ in a world-changing way is to finally rely on God. 

Our Sabbath document continues from Solomon to exile; “Even though God had abandoned the house they had built for him, God went with them into exile.” Jeremiah famously urged the exiles to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,” and I think we struggle to understand just how radical a command this would be. After all, when the Soviets invade in Red Dawn the resistance didn’t seek the welfare of the invaders, they fought back, and who wouldn’t? Jeremiah’s advice is the aberration in this world, not the reverse. But only Jeremiah’s advice dwells in Sabbath.

The Bible gives us an example of what it means to live in exile in the prophet Daniel. While Daniel appears in the prophets in the LXX and our own Bibles, in the Hebrew ordering of the Old Testament Daniel appears in the writings, notably next to Esther. Perhaps the reason for this is precisely to do with the exile – Daniel shows us how to be faithful in Babylon, whereas Mordecai does not. And Daniel indeed seeks the welfare of the city to which he is exiled, becoming valued by kings enough to provoke jealousy among the ambitious. When these same jealous officials pass a law targeted at Daniel and his God, Daniel doesn’t go out and work (for example, work to change the law), he goes to God all the same. By rights in this world, Daniel should be dead by the lions, but by a miracle Daniel is vindicated instead. We cannot work this world to rights, but we can trust God. And that’s key to participating in Sabbath – it teaches us that God is the provider, not any human work.

I need to hear this. I need to hear this. I need to pastor out of the understanding I gain by Sabbath; that the important thing is not my work, not my getting every ounce of productivity out of my moments, but the God who provides enough. The work isn’t mine, although I am invited to participate. The work is the Lord’s, and the power and strength and wisdom and goodness must come from Him, otherwise I am only becoming Solomon all over again, enslaving myself and others in the hope that we will be set free from the curse of slavery. I need my mind and heart to be retrained to believe that the weight of the world doesn’t lie on me, the weight of redemption and forgiveness is not on my shoulders, but on the shoulders of Jesus. As Jeff Vandersteldt writes in his book Saturate, “Our job is not to be Jesus. Our job is to believe Jesus, depend on Jesus, and submit to Jesus working in and through us to accomplish his work. We are not meant to carry the weight of the world or the mission of Jesus on our shoulders. Jesus came to seek and save. He doesn’t expect us to become the saviors.” 

I need to let Sabbath change me. I need to practice it on purpose, not as a work, but as a window into the man I was created to be in Jesus. I need a place and a time to stop needing to achieve, to justify my existence and worth. I need to stop and soak in that God called me to be a witness to his work, not to do the work he already finished. Proclaim what Jesus has done in word and deed, following Jesus by standing where he stood and seeing that, “Hey, from here, it really does work! It really does make sense!”

But there’s more. As Christians we need to be reminded by Sabbath that we aren’t Jesus, but we also have a new way to tell those who haven’t met Jesus yet all about him. He is the God-man who leads us into Sabbath, who has repaired the breach, who offers us real rest and satisfying work. We’ve gotten used to what J.I. Packer called the “ABC” approach of sharing the Gospel:

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, you included;

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved;

Confess Jesus Christ as the risen Lord, and he will in due course welcome you into heaven.

Now there’s nothing untrue about the ABC method – the problem is that it’s mostly incomprehensible to most people in our culture today. But people today are searching for what will make their moments pleasant and good and meaningful. Take, for example, the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). There’s a whole movement of people, largely millennials, who are working like crazy for 10 years so they will hopefully never have to work again, and they’re doing it because they believe this will satisfy them. There is a better satisfaction in the God of Sabbath! 

Or take the various social justice programs that argue we can’t waste another minute because there are grave injustices in our world. The problem here isn’t primarily the urgency of these movements, but rather the jaded idealism that believes we will solve these problems on our own, as if our sinful nature can be truly cured by education or social structures. Think of how Sabbath promises that our six days of work matter, but God provides for the seventh day, the seventh year, and don’t forget the year of Jubilee!

Most of the people we encounter outside the church today aren’t looking for forgiveness of their sins, and they’ll probably either disdain us or ignore us if we begin there. But what if we begin with a picture of human thriving in God’s Kingdom as illustrated by the Sabbath? There’s something that meets our culture right where it is and points to the great and true promises of the Gospel.