Redeem the Time

“See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5:15-16)

Did you miss me last week? For the first time since I started posting a weekly devotional on our website, I missed a week. That’s OK, because I missed me also. Right at the end of camp a few weeks back, I caught a bug and it kind of put me down just a little bit. I was able to hit it with some Zicam and other stuff and hold it back for a while, but eventually it caught up with me. Last Monday the freight train ran over me, and I lost a full day. I was “amongst the living” just long enough to get a quick bite to eat, but I spent at least 20 of the 24 hours curled up in the sack praying for the rapture. Monday is usually the day I work on this blog, and with a lost day, some things in my schedule had to be sacrificed.

When we lose a day like that, it throws us behind for a while, but eventually we can catch up with life through the normal flow. There are a few things we can double up on, and some others that just sort of take care of themselves and fade off the never ending “to-do list”, and life gets back to a normal dull roar. But in reality, a lost day like last Monday will never be recovered. We are bound to the constraints of time and space, and try as we might, no one has the ability to grant us more than 24 hours per day. As much as we would love to be able to stop the world so we can catch up, it is not possible. Everyone gets the same amount of time.

When a person trust Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour, the Bible says they are “born again”. It is the only true “restart” in life. We now have a spiritual nature and a relationship with God that we did not have before, and God gives us the opportunity to go back and fix some things we messed up before. Titus 3:5 says, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.” That verse uses another Bible term for salvation: “regeneration”. To generate means to bring forth anew, and when we add a “re-“ to a word, it means to do it over again. I cannot go back and recapture last Monday. But I have a new nature in Christ Jesus that is not subject to the physical laws of the Universe. Ephesians 2:6 tells me that I am seated in heavenly places in Christ. My new nature is already there; not bound by the same “space-time continuum” that the physical world is subject to. How’s that for a little science fiction? (More like a science fact.)

I lost last Monday. But I did not trust Jesus Christ as my Saviour until I was 25 years old. Even though I was alive and did some good things, I lost the first 25 years of my life because I was “dead in trespasses and sins, and alone in the world without hope and without God” according to Ephesians chapter 2. Once I got saved, I could actually go back and redeem that time. We think of redeeming the time as just simply not wasting it anymore. But the concept is much deeper. To redeem means “to buy back”. Last Monday is lost and despite our greatest desires, I can never go back and get any of those 24 hours back. My first 25 years are in the history books, and nothing I can do can change one second of it. But since they are “dead” years, I do have the ability to redeem them. By investing in the word of God and the souls of men, the past can be bought back. So many of God’s people live their lives in utter frustration and despair because of the things they did in the past. They live a life of defeat instead of victory because they are under so much conviction for things they can never change. Instead of living in the natural world, why not enter a “time warp” and begin focusing on the new man in Christ? You actually have the ability to build a huge spiritual portfolio of transformed lives by sharing the gospel and investing the word in other people. No one knows the name of the altar worker who led Billy Graham to Christ in a revival meeting years ago. But his investment of the word of God in another life still bears fruit today. Tap into the new man. You will be amazed at what God can do.