Bible Verses – Ephesians 5:15-20
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Ephesians 5:15-20
We’re going to read some Scripture. And this is Ephesians chapter 5, verses 15 through 20. Here’s part of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
He says, Be very careful, then, how you live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery.
Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms and hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But so, we want to think about this morning and we want to think about what can we do with those 525,600 minutes? And how can we invest our time and make wise use of that time? And certainly, the suggestion, the seasons of love is a biblical suggestion. John 1:34, and 35, by this all men will know that we’re just disciples by how we love one another. But this morning we want to think about making the most of our 525,600 minutes.
So, here’s our main truth, and then we’re going to detail this. Here’s what we want to think about this morning from Scripture. It’s going to give us some guidance here.
Main Truth
Because life is brief, we must make the most of every opportunity that God gives us. Because life is brief, we must make the most of every season or opportunity that God gives us. There’s a lot of Scripture verses that back that up.
I think of Psalm 90. We studied Psalm 90 about three months ago, a Psalm of Moses. It’s the oldest Psalm written during the wilderness wanderings when Moses and the Israelites were surrounded by death every day.
And Moses writes Psalm 90, and he reminds us in verse 10, our days may come to 70 years or 80 if our strength endures, yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass and fly away. Now, if you’re over 40 this morning, you know the truth of that, that life goes by so very, very fast. Life is brief.
In fact, James says, what is our life? It’s a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. So, James compares our life here on planet earth to like that exhale of breath that comes out on a cold winter morning. It’s there for a moment, and then it’s gone.
And so, life is short, and life is brief. And because of that, God wants us to make the most of every opportunity. That’s what Ephesians 5, the Scripture passage that we read this morning as our Scripture reading.
Be very careful how you live, not as unwise but as wise. What’s wise living look like? The King James Version says, redeem the time. The NIV gives a more accurate translation, making the most of every opportunity.
The word there for time or opportunity is not the Greek word Chronos. That is chronological time, it’s the word Kairos, which means a season or an opportunity in your life, a window of opportunity. And Paul says we need to make the most of every opportunity.
And so, Moses in his Psalm 90 at the end of his psalm makes a prayer. Because life is short, Moses prays, Lord, teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Lord, teach us to know that life is short and help us to live wisely.
Someone has paraphrased that to say, Lord, help us to count our days so we can make our days count. So, this morning we want to think about how we can do that. I’m not going to talk about New Year’s resolutions.
I don’t know if you make New Year’s resolutions. I don’t. The studies say most New Year’s resolutions last about six weeks.
But I also think it is important in times in our life, and certainly the end of the year, the beginning of a new year, is a good opportunity what to take some inventory in our lives, and to think about what are our priorities, and to think about how we can make a difference in our lives. Paul wrote to Timothy, most New Year’s resolutions have to do with exercise and eating well, and that’s good. That’s great.
We need to do that. But I’m reminded of what Paul wrote to Timothy. This is 2nd Timothy chapter 4 verse 7. He says, train yourself to be godly.
The word there for train is the Greek word gymnós. We get our word gymnasium from that. And so, Paul says, I want you to focus on godliness, because there is value in physical exercise, and Paul acknowledges that.
But he says godliness is good not only for this life, but for the life to come. And so, if you have to choose between a physical workout and spending some time in godliness, and training, and Bible reading, and he says we need to choose, to train ourselves to be godly. So, this morning, I’m going to make three suggestions.
3 key area to make the most of our 525,600 minutes
They’re really spiritual disciplines that we can focus on in the coming year that will help us use our 525,600 minutes well. And to no surprise, they all start with the letter P. So, let’s think of the first one. The first one’s this, the priority of prayer.
i. The priority of prayer
The priority of prayer. Now, if you read the Bible, this is very, very clear that prayer needs to be a priority in our lives. It’s simply a matter of obedience.
All through Scripture, we’re commanded to what? To pray. Matthew 7:7, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says, ask and it shall be given. Seek and you will find.
Knock and the door will be opened to you. The tense of those verbs is keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking. The end of that passage says just as moms and dads like to give good gifts to their children, God the Father likes to give good gifts to you and I. And so, this whole matter of prayer.
1st Thessalonians 5:17, pray without ceasing. Ephesians 6:18, keep on praying always for all of God’s people, all the saints. 1st Timothy chapter 2, Paul writes to his son in the faith, Timothy, and he writes these words, I urge you then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in godliness and holiness.
When you go to the New Testament, the early church in the first century, Acts 2:42, they devoted themselves to four things. They devoted themselves to the apostle’s doctrine, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, the communion table, and they devoted themselves to prayer. So, I don’t know about you, but as I take inventory of my own prayer life, I find it lacking.
And God wants us to communicate with, God wants us, Revelation 3:20 says, Jesus says, I stand at the door and knock. If anybody’s hear my voice and open the door, I’ll come in and have fellowship with them. It’s a picture of saying that Jesus wants to have fellowship with you.
And so, we need to make prayer a priority and it needs to be consistent and it needs to be daily and it needs to be pointed and purposeful and passionate. It doesn’t describe my prayer life. It’s lacking in all those things.
And so, as I would suggest, one area that we can focus on individually and collectively as a church is prayer. Now there’s some roadblocks to why we don’t pray, and some of it is misunderstanding of prayer. And so, here’s three of them.
Number one, we misunderstand the purpose of prayer. Someone has said, prayer is not about getting our will done in heaven, but God’s will done on earth. That’s the purpose of prayer.
Jesus, when His disciples asked Him, teach us to pray, gave us the Lord’s prayer. Part of that prayer is, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, I want your will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
And so, the purpose of prayer is not us twisting God’s arm to get our desires, but it’s to get God’s will accomplished on earth as it is in heaven. And so, we misunderstand the purpose of prayer. In fact, James mentions that in James chapter four.
These words, you do not have because you do not ask God, and when you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. James says, a lot of times our prayers are selfish prayers. I remember as a teenager and got together with a couple of guys and took a verse out of context in the New Testament that said, if two or three in agreement on something, God will give it to you.
And so, we got together and said, let’s pray for a million dollars. And so, we’re praying that God’s going to somehow give us all this money. And well, God did answer that one.
He said, no. And we misunderstand the purpose of prayer. Also, we misunderstand the importance of purity in prayer.
The little acrostic, A-C-T-S, is a great way to pray. Adoration, start out by giving God thanks and praise for the character of God, for who He is. He’s holy, he’s just, he’s merciful, he’s loving.
C is confession, confess our sins. T is thanksgiving, and S is supplication, our requests. And so, the book of Psalms, in Psalm 66:18, the psalmist says, if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.
And so sometimes we feel like our prayers are just kind of like bouncing off the ceiling and not doing anything. And one reason might be is that God wants us to look at our own lives. And when we’re living continuously in sin or rebellion to Him, we need to take care of that.
And so, we misunderstand that God wants us to, as David prayed, Lord, create in me a clean heart, God. 1st John 1:9, if we confess our sins, agree with God about sin in our life, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And so, we misunderstand the purity of prayer.
Thirdly, we don’t really believe in the power of prayer. James 5, verse 16, says, the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Oftentimes we don’t pray because we really don’t believe in the power of prayer.
Does prayer make a difference? It does. God uses our prayers to accomplish His purposes. And so, one area that we could all probably grow in is in the priority of prayer.
Now I found in life that if you want to get something done, you have to plan it. You have to put it on a schedule. And prayer can be a constant conversation with God all day.
That’s great. But I think we also need those concentrated times of spending time with God in prayer, whether it’s in the morning, whether we’re an evening person in the evening, whether you have a long drive to work and you just pray on your drive to work.
But we need to make prayer a priority. So, I’d challenge you, this won’t sound like much of a challenge, but hey, schedule 15 minutes in prayer. That doesn’t sound like much, but I timed myself this week and I prayed and I thought like, that had to be like 20 or 25 minutes, it was seven and a half.
So that’s a good place to start and just pour your heart out to God and spend some time worshiping Him and praying. And anybody said, what do you pray for? Well, the Bible is full of things to pray for. I think a good place to start is our family.
That was what Job did in Job chapter 1. It’s a picture of intercessory prayer. He was offering sacrifices daily. He says, perhaps my children have sinned.
He was interceding on behalf of his own children. And certainly, where does prayer start? It starts in praying for your own family, your kids and your grandkids and your extended family. We need to pray as Paul wrote in 2nd Timothy 2 for those in leadership positions.
We had some of our church leaders up here this morning. We need to pray for them. We need to pray for our church.
We need to pray for the lost. We need to pray for our country. We need to pray for those that are sick.
We need to pray for missionaries that are connected to our church. For lasting smiles, Uganda. There are many, many suggestions, commands really in the Bible of what to pray for.
ii. Purposeful parenting and discipleship
So that’s the first P. But here’s the second one, purposeful parenting and discipleship. Purposeful parenting, I had to kind of make a little stretch here to get my P in, but I want to talk first of all to parents. But if your kids have grown, don’t tune out because the Bible calls us all to make disciples, and that’s really spiritual parenting.
Paul had a son in the faith, Timothy, that he poured his life into. And so even perhaps our kids are gone and out of the nest, boy, God’s called us to make disciples, and there’s opportunities to do that right here in our own church. So, to focus on parenting, we talked about how quickly time passes.
Years ago, someone talked to me about the 216 principle. I’m like, what’s the 216 principle? He said, well, between birth and 18 years, there’s 216 months with your kids. Not that you can’t influence on them after 18, but between birth and 18 years, it’s 216 months.
And if there’s one area where we need to be focused and intentional, it’s in parenting and the spiritual discipleship of our own children. What is the goal of parenting for a Christian? Quite frankly, when we had our three kids, it was probably like to get through the day. I understand that.
But there’s got to be a bigger picture. The old saying, if you aim at nothing, you’re sure to hit it. And so about 20 years ago, maybe a little longer than that, I came across a series by Chip Ingram called Effective Parenting in a Defective World.
And it was like a six-part series. And for the first time, I heard a definition of parenting that kind of like, I think he’s on target. Here’s how he defines the goal in parenting.
Success in parenting is when my child transfers his or her primary love, submission, and obedience from me to Jesus Christ. Let me read that again. Success in parenting is when my child transfers his or her primary love, submission, and obedience from me to Jesus Christ.
Because guess what? We’re not going to be there after they’re gone. And we need to train them to transfer their ultimate obedience and love from, their primary obedience and love from us as a parent to Jesus Christ. And that takes a lot of time.
It takes a lot of purposeful energy. You’ve heard of the 5-13 window? Research says 85% of people come to faith in Christ between the ages of 5 and 13. Not that it can’t be done a little earlier, not that a person can’t come to Christ later, but most people come to faith in Jesus between the ages of 5 and 13.
And so, we need to be purposeful in parenting and discipling our kids and those that God has given us in our own church family. I say, well, when do you start the spiritual training of children? And that’s an interesting question. The AWANA program that we have here, we start out with Cubbies.
That’s ages three to five. They do have an earlier program called Puggles. I looked up the Puggles program, and it’s for two-year-olds to three-year-olds.
I call it the Puddles rather than Puggles, but there is a program for those really young ones. But if you look to Paul’s writing to Timothy, his son in the faith in 2nd Timothy 3:14, and 15, here’s what he says to Timothy. Timothy, from infancy, you have known the Holy Scriptures.
From a young baby, you’ve been exposed to the Scriptures. And we know that Timothy had a godly grandmother and mother, Eunice and Lois, that built God’s truth into him. And so, it’s never too early to start exposing our kids to God’s truth and discipling them.
There’s a couple of great passages in the Bible about it. Probably the key passage in all of Scripture is in Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 4 through 9. It’s called the Shema. This is what the Jewish people recited at the beginning of this section of Scripture every day.
It begins, “‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.'” And so, where does this begin? First of all, begins with us as parents having a passionate love for. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this person or this conference, but a fellow by the name of Louie Giglio has a passion conference every…I don’t know if it’s every year or every other year, but it’s at the beginning of the year. So, it was in Dallas, Texas.
It just finished up. It was January 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, where 46,000 young people ages for 18 and 25 came together in a football stadium and for three days heard God’s truth proclaimed and worshiped Him. What a great, great thing.
So, it needs to be in our heart and life, and then it goes on to say, “‘These commands that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Pass them on to your children.'” And I say, well, how do you do that? Well, the next part of the verse tells us a formula for doing that or a pattern, four key teachable moments.
Talk about God’s truth when you sit at home, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you get up. So, right there for parents, there’s four key teachable moments in life. The first one, when you sit at home, mealtime is a great time to have some spiritual conversations.
And I know this has to be age-related, depending on the ages of your kids. Today’s life is so busy that most families don’t spend a lot of time around the dinner table. We did in our home growing up, my dad was a pastor, and we had this little wooden box in the shape of a loaf of bread.
Kind of based on our daily bread. And inside that box were just Scripture verses, and we would just pick out Scripture verses, and one person would read it, and the other person, my dad would try to explain it, and then would pray. Just very, very simple.
But we spent time discussing God’s Word together. When you sit at home, when you walk by the road, that’s travel time. So, when you got your kids in the car, what a great opportunity to spend some time with them and build God’s truth into them and have some discussions.
It goes on to say, when you lie down for bedtime, it’s key time, to check in with your kids and to make sure to listen to them and maybe to pray together. And then the fourth key moment talks about when you get up and morning time and sending them off to school. And so, those are four key, key times.
But what we found successful the most for us was an organization out of Grand Rapids called Keys for Kids. And they got these booklets, I think they’re free, if you go to keysforkids.org, they give a very simple age-graded devotional. You read it, there’s one key principle, talk about it, pray together.
And I’ve got samples of them on the back table there if you’re interested in what these things look like, but that is extremely, extremely important. Spiritual, purposeful, parenting, and discipleship. And this goes beyond having, when our kids are raised, it’s a matter of also looking for others in the church to connect with and to pass on God’s truth.
iii. The priority of proselytizing
Well, here’s the third P, to make wise use of our 525,600 minutes, focusing on the priority of prayer, of being intentional and purposeful in parenting and discipling others. Number three is the priority of proselytizing. That’s just a big word that means sharing God’s truth, witnessing the good news. Angels to the shepherds, Luke chapter 2, I bring you good news that shall be for all people.
What’s the good news? Today in the town of David, the Savior has been born to you. He’s Messiah, the Lord. And again, this is another imperative, isn’t it? This is not something that’s optional for us.
I have the great commission, going to all the world and make disciples, teaching them, training them, baptizing them. That’s the command given to the church, Acts chapter 1 verse 8, you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. Second Corinthians 5, Paul writes to the Corinthian believers, and he reminds them of this truth in 2nd Corinthians 5:19, God has committed to us the message of reconciliation, salvation.
We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors. As though God were making His appeal through us, we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. And then here’s maybe my favorite verse in all the Bible.
God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become, what? The righteousness of God. That’s the great exchange. Our filthy, horrible sin, when we put our faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior and payment for that sin and repent of our sin, He gives us what? The righteousness of Christ.
And so, the question is, how good do you have to be to get into heaven? The answer is perfect, because God’s holy, therefore we have a problem. Nobody’s perfect, except one person, Jesus, who became our sacrifice and paid our sin. Sin must be paid for.
Either we’re going to trust Jesus, what He did on the cross, and have Him pay for it, or we’re going to pay for our sin, an eternal separation from God. And so, this is the message that God has given to us, the message of reconciliation. Greg Laurie, in his book, Tell Someone, You Can Share the Good News, writes this, there’s one thing that Christians and non-Christians both have in common.
They are both nervous and uptight about evangelism. That’s true. Maybe that’s why statistics indicate that 95% of all Christians have never led another person to Christ.
And so, the priority of proselytizing, of witnessing, the importance of sharing the good news of the gospel.
Now, years ago, 1967, there was a film called The Gospel Blimp. I don’t know if anybody even knows anything about that Christian video that came out. Here’s what it was about, a satirical story about a group of who, after a social gathering, decided to use a blimp to reach their non-Christian neighbors.
They arranged for the blimp to fly over their neighborhood and drop hundreds of gospel tracts on their neighborhood. They also had a loud public address system so everybody would hear the good news. You can imagine that wasn’t very well received.
Effective sharing begins with caring. It is true, people don’t care what you know until they know that you care. And so, relational evangelism, we need to be intentional in sharing the good news of the gospel in our sphere of influence.
So, I love the little chorus that’s in our hymn book, we’re not going to sing it this morning, but it’s, Lord, lay some soul upon my heart and love that soul through me, and may I nobly do my part to win that soul for thee. I want you to give some thought, maybe this afternoon, of who is it in your sphere of influence that doesn’t know Jesus. How can I build a relational bridge to them and care about them and love them and earn the right to share the greatest news in all the world with them? And that would be a great, great way to make wise use of 525,600 minutes.
How do you measure a year? This morning, I think we need to be intentional about making wise use of that time. So, what I just want to challenge you in the area of your prayer life is to discipline yourself and plan just to spend some time talking with God and praying, having that wonderful time of communion with Him, in purposeful parenting and discipling those that God has blessed us with in our kids and our grandkids and those in our church family. And ask God to put someone on your heart that you can share the good news with.
We had about 60 of those Steps to Peace with God tracts over the holidays. I think about 50 of them were taken at various services and Christmas Eve and Awana family celebration. We’ve got a few left.
Tried to order some more, and they’re kind of on back order until March, but don’t let that stop you from thinking and praying about how you can share the good news of Jesus with other people. And as we do that, I think God will be blessed, we’ll grow, our church will grow, and God will be honored.