CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
FACING NEW DAYS CONFIDENTLY
Time. What is it? The seconds, minutes or hours on your wrist watch? For the ancients was time just the shadow on their sun dial? Is time the gauging of the midnight hour on your old grandfather clock? Is it the grains of sand seeping through the hour glass?
Tolstoy, in “War and Peace,” said: “Time is infinite movement without one moment of rest.” Sometimes I say YES to that! J.A. Van Horn, in “Physics Today,” said: “To the philosopher, time is one of the fundamental quantities. To the average man, time has something to do with dinner.” Longfellow wrote in “Hyperion,” “Time is the life of the soul.” That definition gets a little closer to the truth! Plato put it like this: “Time is the image of eternity.”
Considering all of the prior attempts at defining time, I believe a better explanation would be, “Time is the moment for a life, with the brush of faith, to stroke on the canvas of one’s being the masterpiece of the presence of God, the reflection of the eternal, through repentance, reconciliation, and redemption.”
Look with me at Ecclesiastes 3:1-9. “There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven – a time to give birth, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing. A Time to search, and a time to give up as lost; a time to keep, and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; a time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. What profit is there to the worker from that in which he toils?”
And verse 9 brings us to the moment of divine confrontation, “What eternal profit is there in the daily investment of my life?”
In “A Psalm of Life,” Longfellow wrote: “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sand of time.” Leah Richmond said, “There is a time to be born and a time to die, says Solomon, and it is the momento of a truly wise man; but there is an interval between these two times of infinite importance.”
In Galatians 4:10,11, Paul is talking to a church who saw only the “surface” and had not yet majored on the “substance.” “You observe days and months and seasons and years. I fear for you, that perhaps I have labored over you in vain.”
Jesus spoke to the multitude in Luke 12:54-56, “And He was also saying to the multitude, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming,’ and so it turns out. And when you see a south wind blowing, you say, ‘It will be a hot day,’ and it turns out that way. You hypocrites! You know how to analyze the appearance of the earth and the sky, but why do you not analyze this present time?”
The Psalmist had a discerning of the days when in Psalm 39:4-7 he said, “Lord, make me to know my end, and what is the extent of my days, let me know how transient I am. Behold, You have made my days as handbreaths, and my lifetime as nothing in Your sight, surely every man at his best is a mere breath. Surely every man walks about as a phantom; surely they make an uproar for nothing; he amasses riches, and does not know who will gather them. And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in You.”
I want us to study what we must possess in order to face new days confidently. FIRST, WE MUST KNOW THE DAYS ARE DIVINELY ORDAINED.
Psalm 31:15 says, “My times are in God’s hand…” Do you believe that, or is each day just an accident of the ages? Ecclesiastes 8:15 speaks of “the days of [a man’s] life which God gives him under the sun.” Are the days of my life gifts of His grace? Is He in control of those seconds, minutes, hours, days on the clock of my life?
Psalm 118:24 says, “This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” How awesome when we see it!
I believe without a doubt that multitudes never come into confident living in their hour because they’ve never seen themselves as a piece of the puzzle that God is putting together. I believe that many never come into confident living in their marriages because they have never really seen their marriages as an interpretation to the world of what Christ and His bride are like. I believe that far too many businessmen have missed eternal blessings because they’ve built, they think, businesses as a reward of their own diligence and not a tool to honor God and expand His kingdom.
Frederick William Faber: “The surest method of arriving at a knowledge of God’s eternal purposes about us is to be found in the right use of the present moment. Each hour comes with some little fagot of God’s will fastened upon its back.” I would only add, “…not some little fagot of God’s will, but the full assurance of divine intent fastened to your heart!”
Paul, in Acts 17:26-28, said to the aimless Athenians, “And He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist…”
Isaiah 49:5 says, “And now the Lord says, Who formed ME from the womb to be His servant…” And because I know my days and times are ordained of God, according to Psalm 62:8, I will “Trust in Him at all times…” In verse 5 the Psalmist said, “My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation (or hope) is from Him.”
And because I know my days and times are ordained of God, according to Psalm 34:1, “I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall continually be in my mouth…” And because I know my days and times are ordained of God, I’ll not see change as a disaster, but as a blessing! Daniel 2:20-22 says, “Daniel answered and said, let the name of the Lord be blessed forever and ever, for wisdom and power belong to Him. And it is He who changes the times and epochs; He removes kings and establishes kings; He gives wisdom to wise men, and knowledge to men of understanding. It is He who reveals the profound and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with Him.”
In Robert Wise’s book, “When The Night Is Too Long,” he quotes a poem written by Ruth Harms Calkin entitled “Once For All.” The poem was found in the belongings of a friend, Jan Wolfard, who had helped him with typing over the years. Jan had suffered from a serious mental illness, he says, “triggered by the failure of her marriage.” But with God’s help and Robert Wise’s, she’d climbed back. At the age of 38, she died. In her belongings they came across Ruth Calkin’s poem: “Lord, may I settle it once and for all that I am dealing directly with You. You need never apologize for any plan You ordain for me since nothing but good can come from Your hand. You are sufficient for every changing circumstance in my God-planned life, for every unchanging circumstance as well.”
Do you sense divine ordination over your life? In Jeremiah 1:9,10, Jeremiah says, “Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me, ‘Behold, I have put My words in your mouth. See, I have appointed you this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”
Is God’s divine ordination written on your mind and heart yet? Look with me at Psalm 139:16, “Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your Book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.”
WE MUST SEE THE DAYS AS DAYS OF DIVINE OPPORTUNITY. In Ephesians 1:5,6, Paul said, “having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will – to the praise of the glory of His grace.” Verse 12 goes on to say, “that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.” And verse 14 reiterates, “to the praise of His glory.”
Days of divine opportunity are to be days of magnifying Him! 2 Corinthians 5:18 says, “Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”
To the Galatians, Paul put it like this: “but when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace…to reveal His Son in me!”
Robert Wise, in “When The Night Is Too Long,” tells an awesome story of Christ-like ministry and response as we walk life’s paths of opportunity:
“Kitty Hart is an amazingly energetic woman with great drive. An x-ray technician, she has also raised two out-standing sons. Perhaps the most remarkable quality one discovers as Kitty talks is her energetic buoyancy and zest for living. Considering the extraordinary pain that has filled her life, her optimism is confounding. The fact that she is alive is itself something of a miracle.
As a teenage Jewish girl, Kitty and her family were torn apart by the Nazi assault that ripped her world to pieces. As her family struggled to survive annihilation, they were separated. She and her mother were shipped to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland. Her father and her brother disappeared.
Kitty discovered quickly that survival depended on doing daily jobs too nauseating to describe. Such tasks as carrying out buckets of human waste from latrines provided minimal shelter to keep winter ice storms from devouring her. Removing jewelry and other items from bodies being prepared for crematoriums gave her precious trinkets with which to bargain for bits of food. Being on a detail that spent the days throwing bodies onto wagons kept her out of the endless flow of human traffic toward the crematoriums. Kitty’s adolescence was spent in pursuit of an existence that seems worse than death.
The horror of the murder of six million Jews is so overwhelming that statistics have persuaded many that people are essentially only animals. The Hitlers, Himmlers, Eichmanns, and Mengelas seem to prove the hypothesis that humanity is no more than the most cunning and dangerous of all species. The death camps suggest that survival of the fittest is a fact and the only measure of right in this universe. So the experience of Kitty Hart poses an unavoidable question for us. Can people really be a reflection of a God of love?
As the years dragged on, Kitty was subjected to horrors that only increased with time. During one period she worked in the infirmary. As the sick poured in, Kitty found old friends and relatives among the multitude. Reunions were a singular source of joy when she was able to smuggle in a crumb of bread or an article of clothing to help someone survive. On one of those bleak winter mornings, the commandant appeared, demanding that the entire infirmary be emptied into waiting trucks. Instantly everyone knew that must mean death.
The influx of more and more Jews had produced an overload of sick people. The Nazi solution for the crowding was to exterminate the present population. Since none would survive anyway, recovering patients were only marking time until they disappeared.
Kitty knew there was no alternative but to comply with the orders, which soldiers stood ready to enforce with club and bayonet. One by one she helped her friends out of the cold, shabby sick bay on their way to death. At such moments the terror and horror that mingled with overwhelming anger created a single desire. Should she survive, the day would come when she would avenge the butchery. Hate kept Kitty alive.
Even though the end of the war was at hand and the defeat of the Nazis had become imminent, Kitty and her mother were sent on a death march to another camp. All that kept her bleeding feet moving was the burning intention to get her hands on her German captors. Germans of any shape or size. Germans who would bleed and die as her people had. Germans who could be strangled.
On the final day of their imprisonment, Kitty and her mother noticed that men in strange uniforms were walking outside the barbed wire. Then an SS guard appeared and announced surrender to the Allies. Immediately the prisoners turned on him, tearing his uniform from his body. As the other inmates beat him, Kitty saw his dagger fall to the ground. Instantly she grabbed the knife and ran for the gate out of the camp. Surging together, the prisoners rampaged into the town seeking food. Kitty clutched at the dagger with one thought in mind. Somewhere she would find a German to try to even a score that had never been settled.
Breaking down the door to one of the village houses they poured in seeking food. The house appeared empty until a prisoner noticed a door that went down to the basement. Quickly Kitty descended the stairs with the knife in the air, poised for attack. From out of the shadows the forms of people began to emerge. There they were. Germans who were trapped just as Kitty and her friends had been for all those years.
“Throw it!” someone yelled in her ear. “Stick them!” As one man stepped from the group, Kitty drew her arm over her head ready to plunge the knife into his chest.
“Throw it!” the man behind her screamed. With the blade overhead, a most contrary impulse surged up from her soul. An almost lost emotion touched her intention. Deep within the recesses of her mind, compassion arose. Unexpected goodness froze the knife in the air. Her obsession with revenge gave way to thoughts of forgiveness. To Kitty’s amazement, her own hand turned, hurling the knife against a wall where it fell harmlessly to the floor.
“I realized that if I killed the man, the Nazis would have succeeded in making me like them,” she now reflects. By bearing humiliation and degradation with forgiveness, Kitty demonstrated that the inhumanity of the Nazis was only a momentary perversion of true humanity. Kitty is living proof that the image of God can be obscured, but not destroyed. The worst life offers produced in her a transcendent quality of character.
Kitty found that she was changed by her decision. By exchanging benevolence for bestiality, she profited the most.
How can the effect of years filled with hate be revised in a few moments of forgiveness? Nothing compares with the power of love. No cleansing agent, no scouring powder, no catharsis can accomplish what a few moments of absolution will do for the soul. The darkest depths of hate reveal most fully the highest possibilities of love.” WOW! DAYS OF OPPORTUNITY – days of ministry to reveal Christ!
WE MUST SEE THE DAYS AS DAYS OF OCCUPATION! Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 says, “I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything beautiful in its time.”
Luke 10:13 makes a similar point: “So he called ten of his servants, delivered to them ten minas, and said to them, ‘Occupy (or do business) till I come.” Do you remember young Jesus’ response to His parents when they came back to Jerusalem to find him? Luke 2:49, “Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?”
George Macdonald, in the “Marquis of Losaie”, wrote, “I find the doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.”
** DAYS OF OCCUPATION ARE DAYS OF DECISIONS – Ephesians 1:1 says, “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the will of God…” What is the will of God for your life? I Corinthians 2:2 says, “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Ephesians 6:6 says, “servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart…”
**DAYS OF OCCUPATION ARE DAYS OF DETERMINATION – Look with me at 2 Samuel 23:10-12, “He arose and struck the Philistines until his hand was weary and clung to the sword, and the Lord brought about a great victory that day; and the people returned after him only to strip the slain. Now after him was Shammah the son of Agee a Hazarite. And the Philistines were gathered into a troop, where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the people fled from the Philistines. But he took his stand in the midst of the plot, defended it and struck the Philistines; and the Lord brought about a great victory.”
Henry Parry Liddon says, “Nothing is really lost by sacrifice; everything is lost by failure to obey God’s call.” John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “In simple trust like theirs who heard beside the Syrian Sea the gracious calling of the Lord, let us, like them, without a word rise up and follow God.”
Hebrews 12:2-3 says, “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary and lose heart.”
** DAYS OF OCCUPATION ARE DAYS OF DISCIPLINE – Look carefully at I Corinthians 9:23-27 and ask yourself, “Is my walk with Christ disciplined?” “And I do all things for the sake of the gospel, that I may become a fellow partaker of it. Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win. And everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air; but I buffet my body, and make it my slave, lest possibly, after I have preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.”
As Paul came near the end of his life, he wrote in 2 Timothy 4:7, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
WE MUST SEE THE DAYS AS DAYS OF ORDER: Do you remember “good King Hezekiah?” In 2 Kings 20:1-2 Hezekiah was sick and near death and Isaiah the prophet went to him and said to him, “Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you shall die and not live.” In Amos 4:2 God said, “Prepare to meet your God!!” Set your house in order! Days of order are days of preparation, examination, devotedness and readiness.
In Luke 16:2 Jesus speaks of the rich man’s steward when he called him to himself and said, “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship…”
To the church at Corinth Paul said, “It is required in stewards that one be found faithful.” Set your house in order.
Matthew 25:10 speaks of those five foolish virgins: “And while the five foolish virgins went to buy, the bridegroom, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding. And the door was shut.” Set your house in order!
Revelation 19:7 also speaks of a wedding. “Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and HIS WIFE HAS MADE HERSELF READY.” Set your house in order!
Oswald Chambers, in “My Utmost For His Highest” wrote, “The great need for the Christian worker is to be ready to face Jesus Christ at any and every turn. This is not easy, no matter what our experience is. The battle is not against sin or difficulties or circumstances, but against being so absorbed in work that we are not ready to face Jesus Christ at every turn. That is the one great need, not the facing of our belief, or our creed, the question whether we are of any use, but to face Him…Jesus rarely comes where we expect Him; He appears where we least expect Him; He appears where we least expect Him, and always in the most illogical connections. The only way a worker can keep true to God is by being ready for the Lord’s surprise visits. It is not service that matters, but intense spiritual reality, expecting Jesus Christ at every turn…If you are ‘looking off unto Jesus’ avoiding the call of the religious age you live in, and setting your heart on what He wants, on thinking on His line, you will be the only one who is ready. Trust no one, not even the finest saint who ever walked this earth, ignore him, if he hinders your sight of Jesus Christ.” SET YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER!
WE MUST LIVE THE DAYS WITH THE PROMISE OF OVERCOMING! I John 5:4 says, “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that overcomes the world – our faith!”
In I Corinthians 15:57 we read, “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Is it so? Then…”These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace; In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” 2 Corinthians 2:14 says, “Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place.”
We are not called to Christ to be men and women filled with pessimistic fear, but men and women empowered by a powerful faith of “Victory In Jesus.” We are not called to Christ to be disciples clouded by doubts, but disciples who are gloriously certain of our conquest because of the unconquerable majesty of Christ. We are not called to Christ to be His servants bathed in the foul smell of failure and short coming, but servants flooded with the heavenly perfume of Christ’s joy, His triumphant victory, and His overcoming life.
We don’t walk despondently toward heaven’s gates, we ride the chariot of faith radiant in the triumphant procession of oneness with Christ. We don’t walk toward heaven’s gates hoping that at least some of our time we are triumphant in Christ, the Word says God “always” leads us in triumph in Christ! We walk toward heaven’s gates because we willfully chained ourselves to Christ, responding to the unfathomable love of the Victor!
George Matheson wrote the text to the hymn, “O Love That Will Not Let Me God.” Those four verses say: “O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee; I give Thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.
O Light that follows all my way, I yield my flickering torch to Thee; my heart restores its borrowed ray, that in Thy sunshine’s blaze, its day may brighter, fairer be.
O joy that seeks me through pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee; I trace this rainbow through the rain, and feel the promise is not vain, that many shall tearless be.
O grace that lifts up my head, I dare not ask to fly from Thee; I lay in dust life’s glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be.”