Family Values: Find Time

Pastor Meyer’s Sermon

Sunday, January 4, 2009

[Video Clip: “Are you ready?” “Yeah.” “Alright, 60-second spot on time. Can I have the clock in the corner?” “It’s there.” “Thank you. Roll ‘em.” “Rolling.” “Action.” “Okay, here’s the deal. We all know that life is busy. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things that we want and need to do. In fact, you’re probably thinking of all the things you need to do next week right now, wondering how you’re going to squeeze it all in. But the fact is, no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter how much is on your plate, we all have the same gift of 24 hours each day. It’s 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. All the money in the world won’t let you buy one single second more than the next guy and, once that second is gone, it’s gone forever. Look, there goes one right now. Another one gone. You’d think that we would judiciously use such a limited and valuable gift. You’d think that we would choose wisely how to spend, no, invest our time but do we really? And after taking the time for eating and sleeping and all the other basic necessities, do we really use this gift the way we should? Think of all the great things you could do in 24 hours, all the lives you could touch, all the significant changes that could be made in your life and others. The fact is you could actually make a difference in this world in 24 hours. Or not. So how are you investing your . . .” “Time.”]

86,400 seconds in a day. And each and every one of us has the same amount. No one has more and no one has less. And if you can imagine with me, this vase contains all of the time within one day, all 86,400 seconds within this vase and we can also imagine that each and every one of us carries a vase just like this. And the question becomes, “How do we handle our day?”

I don’t know about you but lately, when I look at this vase, I wish this vase was a little bigger. I wish I had just a little more time to get things done. And when you look at recent surveys that talk about how we spend our years and our lives in cumulative times, then you begin to wonder. For instance, we spend 6 months just waiting at a stop light. We spend 2 years returning phone calls. We spend 5 years waiting in line. And my favorite is we spend 6 years doing nothing but eating. I know that I’ve already kept up my 6 years.

But how do we handle time? And how do we handle our time in our lives because it seems like some people handle time better than others. How do we go about doing that? Well, the focus of our sermon series, Family Values, talks about the gift of time. Because if we truly value our family, then we truly value the gift of time that we have to give to our families. But before we can even talk about how we can carve out time with our families, before we can even talk about doing some things with our families, we first need to talk about how do we handle time in our lives?

And that’s where Mary and Martha come into the picture. Because, you see, Martha invited Jesus and presumably the 12 disciples over to her house and, understandably, she’s busy. Think about it. What would you do if you had Jesus and the 12 disciples come over to your house? I know what I would do. I would be running around making sure the chicken was cooking properly, that the rice was not sticking together, that the silverware was nice and polished, that there were enough plates for everyone and that everyone had drinks and everyone was comfortable. I would be like Martha, running around everywhere making sure everything was set.

But you know, Martha was also doing another thing and that was she was getting angry. Because what was her sister Mary doing? Her sister, Mary, was sitting at the feet of Jesus talking and listening to Jesus, not helping at all with the chores that needed to be done. And when she got angry to the point where she told Jesus, “Will you tell Mary to come in and help me,” what did Jesus say? Jesus said, “Mary is focused on one thing and that one thing will not be taken away from her.” The question I want to consider this morning is what is that one thing that Jesus is talking about?

There are some people who say, “Well, the one thing is she was in the presence of Jesus so that shouldn’t be taken away from her.” And others would say, “Oh, well, she was listening to the words of Jesus so that’s what He means.” But if you look at the chapter of Luke 10 and you see that the story prior to this story is about the good Samaritan, then you begin to realize that the one thing Jesus is talking about has to do with priorities. How do we set up our priorities in life? In other words, what are the big rocks in your life and what are the little insignificant rocks in your life? When we look at Martha, we see that Martha had taken a lot of the insignificant little rocks in her life and has filled up most of her day with that and even to the point when she was ready to go ahead and add those big rocks, those priorities that she thinks are important in her life, when she was ready to add that to her day, what happens? We see that she starts to run out of time?

Isn’t that true in our daily lives? We have those big rocks. We have those priorities in our lives and we end up running out of time in the day. The question became for Martha is that she was running around concentrating on all different kinds of things but not concentrating on the big rocks, what was important in her life. That one thing should not be taken away from Mary but what was Mary doing? Well, she had a different perspective because she was thinking, “You know, I’m not too concerned about these little things.” I’m not concerned about these. I’m going to take them out of my life because I’ve seen that, in my life, family often ends up being third or fourth or maybe even last place in the battle for time. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to put the big rocks first in my life, what’s important to me first. And then add the little rocks. So for Mary, that one thing for her, the priority for her was to have the big rocks first in her life and so here we learned from Jesus. We learned from the story of Mary and Martha that this was a call from Jesus for us to not focus on the little things that happen in our lives but to focus on the big rocks that happen in our lives.

There is an unknown author who wrote, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.” And so how do we go about checking what are our big rocks. And we see from Mary and Martha that we begin to learn three things from them. And the first one is, in order for us to identify what our big rocks are, we need to realize what is a big rock. What does it contain? What’s important to us? Because I guarantee you, what’s a big rock for you in your life might be something that’s different for me.

But I do know that scripture talks about 3 big rocks we need to have in our lives. And the first comes straight from the Ten Commandments. It’s the First Commandment, You Shall Have No Other Gods. Our big rock in our lives, our number one big rock should be God, being able to have that scheduled into your day, scheduled into your week, being able to be with God. That’s the number one big rock.

Number two, second big rock would be our family. We see in Deuteronomy 6 that not only are we to have God in our lives, having Him as the main rock in our lives but also we are to teach our children about the ways of the Lord. Our families, too, are very important in our lives. Paul picks up on that in the New Testament where he says, “Husbands, take care of your wives. Wives submit to your husbands. Fathers, do not exasperate your children but teach them, encourage them.” Families are the strings throughout the scriptures that’s an important rock.

Our third one? Our third one is our work. Paul says in the New Testament, “Those who do not work, they do not eat.” In the Old Testament, we see constantly the call to work to the glory of God, that work is important, that work is something we need to do. We need to labor for the Lord. But I have a warning here for you because sometimes, when we are looking at our rocks, sometimes we end up just focusing on one rock, just one rock in our lives, and not allowing anything else to be a part of that day and sometimes we do that with our work, where our work becomes the only focus of the day and everything else is thrown out. My encouragement for you is when you’re thinking about rocks, what are the big rocks in my life, be sure you keep them appropriate in your lives and not just focus on one individual one. In fact, the book of Ecclesiastes, I came over this, in Chapter 10 where it says, “Those who like the work too much are too stupid to find their way home.” It’s in there. Look it up, Ecclesiastes 10. But think about it. If we work too much, we’re saying yes to work and we’re saying no to our families. So keep that in mind.

But how else do we determine what are the big rocks in our lives? Well, maybe we can ask some diagnostic questions. One would be, “What would happen if I just didn’t do this, if this wasn’t part of my day? What would happen?” Maybe another diagnostic question would be, “Is there a way that I can delegate this?” Maybe you have to leave on a business trip. Is there a way you can do it via e-mail or is there a way that you can do a conference call instead of having to leave town? Is there a way that you can delegate this? So there are two good diagnostic questions to keep in mind as you’re trying to determine what are the big rocks in your lives.

But for this sermon series, we’re going to focus on one rock as a practice for the next four weeks. Now that doesn’t mean, for the next four weeks, you don’t have to worry about spending time with God because that’s not one of the rocks we’re focusing on. No, no. And it doesn’t mean that, for the next four weeks, you can take off work. I’m not suggesting that at all. No. But we’re going to be looking at how do we focus on one rock and use that as practice for the time we are together for the next four weeks.

The question we see from Mary and Martha, first we recognize there are big rocks in our lives. Secondly, we see that we need to make time for those rocks because Mary certainly made time for her big rocks. She could have said, “No, I’d like to be able to help out. I’m going to focus on the little things.” But no, she decided to go ahead and focus on Jesus. And what do we see about Jesus in the New Testament? We see Jesus hurriedly going from town to town, that He would walk through the streets and He would have crowds following Him and, every once in a while, He would say a few words of earthly and heavenly wisdom and then, finally, He would move on to the next town. Is that what we see Jesus doing? No, Jesus actually spends time. He’s on a mission to redeem the world but yet He spends time with the people in the world. He’s walking through a crowd. People are pushing up against Him and touching Him but yet, He notices there’s one touch that’s a particularly urgent touch and so He stops and looks around and He says, “Who touched me?” And it was the woman who had been dealing with bleeding for many years. And despite what His mission was to redeem the world, He took time out with this woman and said to her, “Your faith has made you well.”

We see that the disciples were all fired up, that they had a computer efficiency about them. They wanted to get going and they would be fired up about things that they didn’t even know they were fired up about. And they decided that, “Jesus doesn’t need to deal with the children,” and so they began to send the children away. But what did Jesus do? Jesus rebuked them and told them, “Bring the children to me. Let me be able to spend time with them. Let them be able to experience time with me.”

And we also see Jesus going to the cross. He spends time, even though the distractions, the little rocks that were about Him, He knew that this was a big rock for Him and He continues to go to the cross because He wanted each and every one of us to experience forgiveness and to be a child of God once again. And so making time for our rocks, we see from Jesus what His big rocks were. One of His big rocks was being able to be with children. And another big rock was His relationship with other people and another big rock was sacrifice.

So if we want to make time for the big rocks in our lives, it means that we need to sacrifice some of the little things in life. Maybe every Friday night at 9:00, you watch a particular television show. Maybe it’s time to spend that hour at 9:00 talking with your spouse or spending time with the family. We learn there is sacrifice as we decide what are our big rocks and that we concentrate on them during our lives.

Paul had a wonderful prayer for each and every one of us. We find it in Romans 15:5, “May God who gives patience, steadiness and encouragement help you to live in complete harmony with each other, each with the attitude of Jesus,” being able to sacrifice so we can concentrate on the big rocks in our lives.
The third thing we learn from Mary and Martha is that we need to learn how to say no. It could have been easy for Mary to say no to Jesus and to come in and start getting things prepared but she said yes to Jesus and no to the little rocks. It’s important for us to learn how to say no.

One of my favorite baseball players, Ken Griffey, Jr., a famous pro baseball player, a few years ago, he was invited to come to a baseball award ceremony. He was voted as the baseball player of the decade and it was a very elite award for him because he beat out people like Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds. And when he found out what day this particular event was going to be held, even though it was nationally televised, even though all of baseball had chosen him, he decided that because it was going to be offered on this day, he was not going to attend. He declined it because, on that same day, his 5-year-old son was going to play in his first baseball game. So being able to say no, if we say no to the little rocks, we say yes to what’s important, we say yes to our families.

And so this coming week, I have a challenge for you. We’re going to start practicing this and our challenge is that we’re going to encourage each of the families in the congregation to be part of a family meal, to have your family gathered together as a family in a meal. And I want you to be able to have this as a fun time, to be able to talk about things, to encourage each other, to find out how things are going, to use it as a time to get connected. And if you’re interested in what kind of recipes could you use for this particular time together, well, I have some suggestions at the Information Center. You can pick these up. There are a couple of actual recipes suggested and there are even some suggested discussion questions on the back. Now if you find yourself single or maybe you find yourself empty nesters who really don’t have any children at home and you want to be able to get connected with maybe some other couples who are empty nesters, too, or if you find that you’re just not connected with your family, I also have a sign-up sheet in the back and what we can do this week is to get you connected with a family or with others who are in similar situations so you can experience the dinner together, to get prepared for the sermon next week.

And finally, our next challenge is we have a memory verse. If you take out your Weekly Word, you see on the front page there is memory verse of the week and it’s from Hebrews 10 and I’d like to read this together right on the middle left side of the Weekly Word, let’s read this together, “Let us not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing but let us encourage one another.” Amen.

Copyright 2009 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church