Time Cannot Help Us SIN HAS DONE FRIGHTFUL THINGS to us and its effect upon us is all the more deadly because we were born in it and are scarcely aware of what is happening to us. One thing sin has done is to confuse our values so that we can only with difficulty distinguish a friend from a foe or tell for certain what is and what is not good for us. We walk in a world of shadows where real things appear unreal and things of no consequence are sought after as eagerly as if they were made of the very gold that paves the streets of the City of God. Our ideas rarely accord with things as they are, but are distorted by a kind of moral astigmatism that throws everything out of focus. Through a multitude of errors our total philosophy is out of line, somewhat as our mathematics would be had we learned the multiplication table wrongly and not been aware of our mistake. One false concept to which we cling tenaciously is time. We think of it as being a sort of viscid substance flowing onward like a sluggish river, bearing upon its bosom nations and empires and civilizations and men. We visualize this sticky stream as an entity and ourselves as helplessly stuck in it for as long as our earthly lives endure. Or again, by a simple shift in our thinking we picture time as a revealer of the shape of things to come, as when we say “Time will tell.” Or we imagine it a benign physician and comfort ourselves with the thought that “time is a great healer.” All this is so much a part of us that it would be too much to expect that the habit of referring everything to time could ever be broken. Yet we may guard against the harm that such thinking carries with it. The most harmful mistake we make concerning time is that it has somehow a mysterious power to perfect human nature. We say of a foolish young man “Time will make him wiser,” or we see a new Christian acting like anything but a Christian and hope that time will someday turn him into a saint. The truth is that time has no more power to sanctify a man than space has. Indeed, time is only a fiction by which we account for change. It is change, not time, that turns fools into wise men and sinners into saints. Or more accurately, it is Christ who does the whole thing by means of the changes He works in the heart. Saul the Persecutor became Paul the servant of God, but time did not make the change. Christ wrought the miracle, the same Christ who once changed water into wine. One spiritual experience followed another in fairly rapid succession until the violent Saul became a gentle, God-enamored soul ready to lay down his life for the faith he once hated. It should be obvious that time had no part in the making of the man of God. My purpose in writing this little piece is not to engage in an exercise in semantics but to alert my readers to the injury they may suffer from an unfounded confidence in time. Because a Moses and a Jacob lost the impulsive, headstrong sins of their youth and in their old age became gentle, mellow saints we tend to take it for granted that time wrought the transformation. But it is not so. God, not time, makes saints. Human nature is not fixed, and for this we should thank God day and night. We are still capable of change. We can become something other than what we are. By the power of the gospel the covetous man may become generous, the egotist lowly in his own eyes. The thief may learn to steal no more, the blasphemer to fill his mouth with praises unto God. But it is Christ who does it all. Time has nothing to do with it. Many a lost man is putting off the day of salvation, vaguely hoping that time is on his side, when actually the likelihood of his ever becoming a Christian grows less day by day. And why? Because the changes taking place in him are hardening his will and making it more and more difficult for him to repent. “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” See the change-words in this text: “seek… call… forsake… return.” These all denote specific changes the returning sinner must make in himself, acts that he must perform. But this is not enough. “Have mercy… pardon”; these are the changes God makes in and for the man. To be saved the man must change and be changed. To enter the kingdom of God, our Lord explained, a man must be born again (John 3:3-7). That is, he must undergo a spiritual change. This accords completely with the preaching of John the Baptist who called upon his hearers to prepare the way of the Lord by bringing forth fruits worthy of repentance, and with the apostle Peter who reminded the early Christians that they had been made partakers of the divine nature and had escaped the corruption the world had suffered by lust. The initial change, however, is not the only one the redeemed man will know. His whole Christian life will consist of a succession of changes, moving always toward spiritual perfection. To achieve these changes the Holy Spirit uses various means, probably the most effective being the writings of the New Testament. Time can help us only if we know that it cannot help us at all. It is change we need, and only God can change us from worse to better. Excerpts from That Incredible Christian
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 00:43:49 +0000
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