"Supreme court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was on a train when the conductor came through collecting tickets. But the Justice couldn’t find his ticket and became very distraught. The conductor recognized him though, and trying to calm him said, “Don’t worry Mr. Holmes. We trust you. Just mail me your ticket when you find it.” The frustrated Mr. Holmes replied, “My dear man, that’s not the problem. I need my ticket to tell me where I am going.”
Like Mr. Holmes we as Christians need to know where we’re going every day of our lives. Far too many of us have lost our ticket. We don’t have a clear sense of purpose and direction. There is often no focused, guiding principle governing the way we spend our time.
We need instead to begin each day with a Bible and a planner asking God what we can do for Him that day. His answer will be your ticket to redeeming the time.
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"As my family and I travel doing seminars we often have the same conversation each night, just with different people. Since we have eight children, the oldest being 12 years old, one of the standard questions is “How do you handle having eight children?” The standard answer is, “We didn’t have eight children. We just had them one child at a time.”
God, in His wisdom, knew parents couldn’t handle children if they arrived in litters. So they generally arrive one at a time. One reason for this is to allow older children to gain skills to assist their parents with younger siblings. Our oldest daughter Sunshine, for example, recently taught her youngest sister, Joy to read. Of course my wife gave supervision, but Sunshine did much of the actual work. The result was a double blessing of the older child learning to teach while the younger child learned to read.
Remember, when you have older children training younger ones, they both benefit and you’re free to redeem the time.
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"In Ps 90 God tell us to number our days. But what does that actually mean to number our days?
There will come a point in each of our lives, if we live long enough, where we no longer think of our life in terms of how far we have come. We begin to think in terms of how far we probably have left to go. Your reference point changes from the beginning of life to the end of life. We no longer look back and think how many birthdays have I had. We look the other direction and think how many more birthdays will I likely have.
We don’t see time any longer as something we are accumulating, getting more of. We see it as something we’re using up, something we have less of with each passing day.
Numbering our days then is learning to put a number on our remaining days so we will learn to redeem the time.
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"The Gospel of Mark gives us our most compact look at the life of Jesus. In 16 chapters we are given a fast-paced summary of the key events in our Lord’s life.
One word that constantly appears to describe the ministry of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel is “straightway” or immediately. We are given a picture of Jesus completing one task and immediately moving on to the next.
It was not the nature of Jesus to linger and tarry after His work was done. He had a sense of mission and He knew He had to be about His Father’s business.
Jesus gave us an example to follow of being careful, even frugal, with the valuable time we often loose between tasks. Jesus knew that all time was precious and He never wasted a moment of it.
Today, you will likely have some discretionary time between tasks. You can mindlessly let it pass or you can follow the example of Jesus and redeem that time.
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