No Time is Wasted — June 30, 2024
June 30, 2024
Exodus 16:1-15
No Time is Wasted
Rev. Terry Carty
The theme of our sermon series is “On Purpose.” In the past few weeks, Pastor Craig has been helping us to think about our identity, God’s purpose and our purpose. Today I want to consider the times in-between when we do not do things on purpose. We seem to waste a lot of time!
If you’re in a hurry, don’t take a bus. A bus stops at every stop and it doesn’t necessarily follow the most direct or quicker route. It pauses where people often need to come aboard. If you stay onboard, you eventually get there. (expand to Greyhound bus experiences of traveling to/from college.) Wasted time?
Now I think about two of my grandsons who ride the bus to Grassland Elementary and Middle Schools. They are the last house in Williamson County and at the end of the school bus route. So in the mornings they are the last to be picked up and have an ‘express’ ride to school. But in the afternoons, they have to ride through the neighborhoods and endure every stop until they are the last to be dropped off. Do they make the best of their time by doing homework? No. I figure that they spend their time creating ways to get in trouble. Wasted time?
We do a lot of things that could be considered wasting time. We spend a lot of time browsing Facetime, Instagram, LinkedIn or playing games on our phones. I, personally, find myself mindlessly looking up things on Amazon that I really don’t need. And then there are 24 hour cable and streaming TV news or binge-watching Andy Griffith or other shows. How many hours do we spend doing things that are not ‘on purpose?’
Well you get what I’m talking about: wasting time.
Until recently I thought of the Israelite people wandering in the wilderness as a huge waste of time. You heard the beginning of the 16th chapter of Exodus read about God providing food for the people in the middle of a barren desert. Pastor Craig talked about it last week. At the end of the story, verse 35 tells us, “The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a habitable land; they ate manna, until they came to the border of the land of Canaan.”
40 years in the wilderness. Very small area to cover between Egypt and Canaan, but it took 40 years for the Israelite’s journey from the hopelessness of enslavement to the future of freedom. If we looked at a map of their 40 year journey, it might look like a bus route? Some people would say that they wasted a lot of time wandering around without obvious direction.
Physically, the Israelites spent a long time covering a short distance. But as a people, God led them on a journey that started in Egypt with a hopeless mindset based upon human survival in a hostile environment. They were simply existing as work animals for a Pharaoh’s benefit. They did what they needed to get from one day to the next. These people had never even thought of living any way except under the rule of Pharaoh. When they looked at that barren wilderness without any visible means of food and water, they were still hopeless. Freedom from the ways of Pharaoh seemed like a death sentence.
In the wilderness, God taught them that they could depend upon God for their essence of life. God gave them their freedom, but God also miraculously provided water, food, protection from the elements, and taught them to live together as interdependent people. After 40 years, they finally exited their journey as a cohesive people free from slavery to Pharaoh and totally dependent on God as their defender and sustainer.
Wasted time? Not by any means. As they experienced three generations of life in the wilderness, they were transformed and prepared to live as free people in God’s kingdom. They finally knew that God is more powerful than a Pharaoh.
God transformed their time seemingly wasted into preparation for their next “on purpose.”
Those seemingly wasted hours riding that Greyhound to and from Cookeville? I can still remember interesting things I saw. I learned more about the way rural people live, rhythms of farm life. I knew the names and locations of towns that many Tennesseans never heard of. I thought about stuff. What? You know, stuff. For an 18 year old in those days, that was important time…but I never really thought of it that way. I just felt it was wasted time.
I now know that God uses our wasted time to prepare us. Sometimes giving us needed rest, sometimes giving us needed reflections, sometimes freeing us from our Pharaohs, sometimes giving us new gifts for living our life in God’s kingdom. I now know that no time is wasted with God.
My wife’s cousin recently sent her an email that had a useful quotation from Alfred D’Souza. “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, or a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
How can I help God with doing whatever God is doing in my life? What can I be doing?
- Become aware of your ‘time wasters’ and take time to give thanks to God for whatever God is doing.
- Add “walk-about” times to break up your ‘time wasters.’ You don’t need to walk across a desert, but you might as well get healthier as God is working on you.
- Set a regular time to ponder what purpose God may be leading you toward.
- Don’t obsess or worry if God is still at work. Let go and let God.
- If you are beginning to sense a purpose, start asking God more specific questions when you pray. Also replace some ‘time wasters’ with some research. The Holy Spirit works in strange and mysterious ways.
Thinking about wasted time brought to mind a line from an Eagles song (Wasted Time, Don Henley & Glenn Frye from Hotel California, 1976). Although it is about a broken relationship, it can certainly hold true for our faith journey.
“So you can get on with your search, (baby,)
And I can get on with mine
And maybe someday we will find
That it wasn't really wasted time”
God redeems our wasted time to shape us…on purpose.