Time is of the Essence
It is. Extremely. The phrase is popular in contractual language meaning that the specified time in the contract is mandatory. It implies that, “I’m really serious about this time thing…”.

How serious? How about grounds for negating the contract…?

Time is of the essence. That just SOUNDS serious. Say it. It sounds like something a protagonist might say in a movie when things are starting to get really good!

The plan we’re attempting to execute is gonna have to fall within a certain timeframe. Or we’re in trouble.

In our Christian lives… time is of the essence. I used to work in a morgue.

Take my word for it. Time is of the essence. I used to look at the toe tags and think… I wonder if they were ready for what happened yesterday?

I thought about myself… and I ultimately came to the conclusion that I didn’t have yesterday. It was gone. I don’t have tomorrow. Just a little consideration for tomorrow will bring you to the inescapable conclusion that tomorrow is just about as abstract a thought as you can have. Tomorrow never gets here. It never comes into existence.

It’s always today.

That’s what you have. Today.

That’s the time that is essential. What you do today is infinitely more important than what you did yesterday… I don’t care what you did yesterday. Unless you bought me a present then I want to know what it is (I just put that in to see if you were still reading…). But seriously, what you did yesterday… forget it. What you do today… right now is what’s important.

What you’re gonna do tomorrow? Forget it! Well maybe not forget it… but don’t place an importance on it that is equal to or greater than today. (man this is good advice… I should probably take it for myself).

Now… here we go. Ready?

How we spend our time is of the upmost importance. It easily defines who we are. It is a major source of our identity. Some people’s lives are their jobs. They eat, sleep, and tweet their careers. For some… its hobbies. For others: video games, children, charity work, an online life, etc.

We are locked in a cell our whole lives… it is a 24hour/day cell. There’s no lock on the door because there’s no door. There is no escape. We are bound to that time limit.

One day… you will give an account of how you spent your time on earth.
We are accountable to how we spend our time. What we say. What we do. What we think.

How we spend our time is gonna determine how we spend our Eternity.

2 Corinthians 6 begins with these words…

1And working together with Him, we also urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain--

2for He says,
"AT THE ACCEPTABLE TIME I LISTENED TO YOU,
AND ON THE DAY OF SALVATION I HELPED YOU."
Behold, now is "THE ACCEPTABLE TIME," behold, now is "THE DAY OF SALVATION"—

Now is the time to Obey the gospel.

Now is the time to rededicate your life.

Now is the time to let go of all excuses that hold us back.

Now is the time to find what it is that is keeping us from being closer to God than we are right now..

There is no other time. Only this time. Right now. That is why it is: of the essence.

True or False?

Truth? What is truth?

Most of you know I read comic books. I want to tell you of one in particular…. Action comics 858. It’s the story of superman… most of you may not know about Clark’s adventures as a kid… some of you may not know the story of the Legion of Superheros…

Before I get into that… I want to explain why I’m beginning my sermon with an overview of a comic book… or Konik book as little Taylor calls them…

I talk to people who don’t attend church sometimes and most of the time it gets around to some of them saying something like this… you’re gonna tell me about truth… but this church believes this… this one believes this… and this one something else… you all say you believe the same bible pray to the same God, but you can’t agree… You are going to tell ME that your way is right???!!!!

And it’s a valid argument… it is… so what is truth… ?

The Legion of superheros are a group of teenagers in the year 3009… the legion stories always take place 1000 years into the future… the legion was formed by these teenagers reading these old comic books from our time and being inspired by the heroics in the pages they read about… so they formed their own superhero group in the future. The legion of superheros. They came back to present day earth when superman was still a young boy living in Smallville and brought him into the future with them for adventures… but always brought him back in time for dinner…
And in a great ironic turn… the hero that inspired them to be heros themselves was taught how to be a hero by the legion… before he grew up. Their stories are very intertwined.

They all have special abilities and they are from all different planets and galaxies… now I said all that to get to the meat of this…

There was an emergency and they brought him to the future when he’s older… in action858… people are spreading lies about superman… they are saying that he was born in Smallville and that mother earth gave him his powers and they he was earth’s greatest defender… and that he fought for truth justice and the human way… and that he fought against the legion of superheros… aliens… and the policy is death to all aliens… the main issue is that this anti-alien way is being taught in the schools… to the kids. They are turning earth into a racist state… this is being done out of fear. Its an awesome story… and one that when I read it… I can’t escape the thought of we can’t teach God in our schools…

But what if we did and they didn’t teach it right?

What if they didn’t teach the truth? What is truth… a lot of people think it is relative… in john 18…Pilate once asked Christ was is truth… it stood before Pilate as he asked.

Truth is the basis for our foundation in Christ… quick Crete… alone it is useless… unless you just wanna make a mess… but add water to it… it can be formed into a foundation. Take the water away… nothing.

That’s what happens to us when you take the truth away. Why are we so insistent on being such sticklers for the truth??! Why do we sometimes go to ridiculous measures (by some people’s standards) to defend the truth? Because whatever you’ve built on that foundation is going to be swallowed up… the foundation is gone… its nothing more than sinking sand.

Is absolute truth a necessity or is pretty close to the truth okay.??? Leighton ford a religious leader once said… preach the gospel and don’t be so negative that you refuse to work or endorse those who belong to a different gospel than the one you preach…

But Galatians 1:8 says…But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! And we know from II Corinthians 11 that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light…

There is one truth and it is Jesus.

John 14: 6 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.

It is not complicated, but it must be read with no pretense… it says what it says and should not be taken for what we want it to say.

We have the ability to think the thoughts of God… but not without truth. When we make God’s truth our own… we can understand who he is…

John 17: 17 says…" Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. "

Sanctify is just a word that means to purify from sin…

I want to throw a scenario at you now… it involves truth… I’m gonna let you guys tell me what is true… what we can say is true… and what we can’t say is true…
Ready?

Okay… you walk in classroom on Sunday morning… lets say it is the high school class… lots of rough looking characters in there… you walk in and Taylor has a bloody nose and Sydney’s standing in front of him with a clenched fist.

Raise your hand if you know for a fact that Sydney punched Taylor in the nose…
Does it seem likely? But are you so sure you’d bet your car on it… or your house on it.? Not that we are supposed to gamble… but you get my meaning…

Now… the new scenario is that you are in the class and Taylor makes some comment about how football is better that softball… and Sydney stands up and pops him in the nose. You see it happen.

Now… raise your had if you can say for an absolute fact that Sydney punched Taylor in the nose…

Yeah… now we know what is true… We’ve gotten to the truth.

Now that we have our two scenarios… we must ask… what type of truth are we as Christians interested in? how about absolute truth? Truth that is complete and never changes. The truth of God.

Man’s ideas about what God’s truth may change, but we know that it never actually change… God’s not pushing out updates to His word every first Tuesday of every month… it needs no revision or amending… it is absolute.

And it is an absolute fact that we face the same enemy that Adam and Eve faced in the garden… Eve was told something that she took as fact… without really knowing if it was truth or not… and she paid the consequences of it. We must face the consequences of the truths we believe in life as well.

If we believe God’s truth…we’ll be pretty happy with the consequences of that… they’ll be good. God will give to every person according to what he has done…

Have you ever believed something that someone told you… completely without factually firsthand knowledge of actually being there when this thing happened?

Like Sydney punching Taylor in the nose… you hear about it a day later and you say… she did?! I can’t believe she did that! Horrible conduct!

What if it turns out a week later that it didn’t happen that way… see the danger of our own imperfect truth? Of how we appoint truth to situations that we don’t have the knowledge to do so? How do we know what happened?

We don’t. plain and simple. The only people who know are the people who were there.
This situation deals with corruptible truth or imperishable… in this… if the one who is lying never relents and confesses… it will never be known what really happened… truth will escape us.

The absolute truth of God does not escape us. We can escape from it for a time…. But in the end… it is incorruptible or imperishable. 1 Peter 1:22 and following

Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart,
23for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.
24For,
" ALL FLESH IS LIKE GRASS,
AND ALL ITS GLORY LIKE THE FLOWER OF GRASS.
THE GRASS WITHERS,
AND THE FLOWER FALLS OFF,
25BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER "

A philosopher will say that We are absolutely sure of one thing and that is that there is no absolute truth of which anyone can be sure.
We are absolutely positive about that!

The Christian should hold truth to the highest standards. To do anything else is to justify the crazy state of truth in the world today…
Imagine for a minute that we make up a bunch of shirts with these saying on them…

Truth can be found here…
Righteous judgment can be found here.
Understanding can be found here.
Compassion can be found here.
Mercy can be found here.
Forgiveness can be found here.

Would we as Christians be worthy of wearing them…? if we did… would they be truthful?
If we put this on our sign out front… would it be the truth?

The stands we take in life… are they based on truth… or what we think is truth?
Is the truth important? Look at the teen pregnancy rate… look at the prevalence of drugs in our lives… look at alcoholism… look at the murder rate… look at the rampant problem with pornography on the internet…

A World without truth… is a world that does not see God.

I'm back!!!!

God is testing you to see if you REALLY love Him…

Deuteronomy 13:3

Like it or not… you must be tested. Yeah… You. And me…

Sometimes I’m in class and I’ll be reading a scripture and I come across a passage… and it hits me… I’m talking about something that I need to work on in my OWN life… and I look up and some of the kids are smiling at me. They know it! They know me! They hear me talk about stuff like TRAFFIC!

*important driving notes: don’t cut in line… left lane fast, right lane slow… and if someone is tailgating you on the interstate> hit your windshield washer fluid and they’ll go around you*

Not just traffic… but things in life that stress you out! It affects us. Patience. I gotta get some more of that stuff.

It all comes down to passing a test. There’s no cramming at the last minute for these tests… you don’t even realize you are taking them. And they’re upon you before you know it. You don’t see it coming… But your love for God is being tested.
Someone once told me that when we sin… it’s in a moment when we don’t love God. I thought long about that… trying to make it not true. I just didn’t want to believe that I didn’t love God at anytime—but it’s true. If we are talking about the right kind of love… the CAPITOL ‘L’ love that I talk about in class. The REAL love. The love that never fails. When we sin… we fail the test. We put our own wants before God and that basically means we are at a point in life when we love something more than him—and that translates to ‘we don’t love God’. It’s basic to idolatry. He wants all of us… not part.

Love the Lord your God with HALF your heart??? Nope. Love the Lord your God on Thursdays??? Nope.

Hard pill to swallow, I know. I sin. I’m there when I do it so I can say it with authority.

In Exodus 16, God tells Moses that He’s gonna give them bread from heaven and a certain amount to gather on certain days to TEST them… to see if they do it like He wants them to.

God led the children of Israel in the wilderness for 40 years to test them…
I Corinthians 10 speaks of this… and it warns us to heed the mistakes they made… in failing their test. Think of the Red Sea as your Baptism… and the Promised Land as heaven… we are tested in between.

In our wandering through this wilderness.

If you get a minute sometime… read Exodus 15:22-27. And realize… God is testing us. Right now. On this Lord’s day (or whatever day you happen to read this on). He wants to know if we REALLY love him. God allows for our moral training. He wants us to show him that we’re not just calling out “Lord, Lord!” but that we are doing the His will.

“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God” (2 Timothy 2:15).

What could be more important than doing that…?