LAW HOMILY: Stealing and the Loss of Time

Every week we go through the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say to his people and we want to understand how to obey.

We are not antinomian. We don't believe that now that we're saved we can just do whatever we want.

Now that we've punched our ticket to heaven we can live like hell. That's not how we believe. We believe that now that Christ has saved us, now we are going to be growing in obedience to him, growing to look like saved people.

So we look at the law every week. Today we are on the eighth commandment, which is two words in the

Hebrew text, you shall not steal. Also psalm 31 15 says my times are in your hand.

Matthew 28 6 says he is here for he is risen. These three passages are ones

I want to weave together this morning. And all of us came here this morning thinking about resurrection.

We came for the hallelujahs, the empty tomb, the risen king, and you have them.

Every last one of them before this hour is finished. But first we have to name the crimes that we commit.

We need to name the places that we break covenant with God. This covenant making God, this covenant rotting

God, this God that writes the covenant in his own blood is always faithful to the covenant and yet we are the ones who break fellowship with him every week.

And in that sense, most of us I would say are not petty thieves.

Most of us are not thinking about and planning our next grand theft larceny.

And most of us are not, don't have blueprints to the local bank hoping with night vision goggles to make out with a good prize.

And yet there's all different kinds of ways to steal that are much more subtler than that.

And precisely for that reason, they're far more easy to hide in the surface of our heart.

The eighth commandment is preached when it is preached around a fence around your property.

And we hear it and we nod. Great. We're not supposed to steal, but yet what else do we steal?

What else do we take? What else do we waste that God has given us?

He's given us possessions, right? And yet underneath of all of it, the very container in which every gift is held, he's given you time.

Every morning that your eyes open, he has pressed days into your hands, like a merchant pressing gold into the palm of a steward.

And he tells us to use those days for his glory. He says, my times are in your hand.

Psalm 31 15. And Moses standing at the edge of the wilderness praise with an urgency that ought to shake us, teach us to number our days because it's an important discipline for us to know our days, number our days and be accountable for our days.

But we have this catastrophic tendency to treat our days as though they're innumerable.

They're just going to keep coming. They're just so we can waste today because we have tomorrow to make it up.

We can squander this moment. Nothing really is going to be lost as though God is not watching the way that we live.

The time thief is not necessarily laziness in the way that the world imagines sloth.

It's often a busy man, a very busy man who has mastered the art of spending enormous energy on things that have no eternal value.

He steals when he scrolls for hours while his Bible gathers dust three feet away and he says, man,

I'm so busy. He steals when he gives the sharpest, clearest hours to his careers, his comfort, his appetites, and he offers

God the sleepy, distracted residue of a five a .m. morning or a 10 o 'clock at night.

He steals when he hears the voice of God calling him to change and he nods politely and he says, yes,

I'm going to do that someday, and he steals from God.

And now the most terrible thing must be said with most theft, restitution is possible, right? Zacchaeus stole.

He restored. What did he restore? He restored four times more than what he had stolen. For every dollar he stole, he gave four back.

He restituted. He made it right. So with most of our larcenies, we can restore it.

We can give back, but you can't actually pay back time, can you?

It's the one thing that you can steal that you can never pay back. I mean, tell me, how do you repay a wasted decade that happened one minute after one minute after one minute after one minute, and then all of a sudden you wake up and you're like, what have

I done? My children are grown. What have I done? All these things that I wanted to do, what have

I done? All these plans that I had, all these dreams that I have, what have I done? All these things that I said,

I want to serve God in this way, or I want to do this in that way. I want to be healed of this sin. I want to be free of this particular burden and shame or debt or whatever it is.

And then minutes become hours and hours become days and days become years and years become decades.

And we wake up and we say, what have I done? And there's no paying it back.

It's lost. The time we steal for God, from God, and then the time that we allow to be stolen from dust, from us, is not time that can be returned.

And that's convicting to me as I get older. I'm in my 40s now. I didn't think about this when

I was 20. I have all the time in the world. I'm immutable. I'm immortal. Shoot me with a 50 caliber

Desert Eagle and I will get up and punch you in your throat. That's what I thought. I was invincible.

Then I hit 30 and my brain started to work. And I started to think about life, but not like deeply.

Now I think about it all the time. I look at my children getting older. I look at, I look at all of the time that we've poured into this church.

And the things I'm asking myself is what is going to last? What's at the end of it?

When the fire test it, what's going to be left? What's going to be wood, hay and stubble?

And what's going to be gold that's worth more than anything that carries over into eternity?

Fruit that we hand over to our generations. I'm asking these questions in my 40s in a way that I didn't ask in my 30s and I can't get those back.

So my challenge to you, God has only given you so much time.

He knows exactly how many minutes you are allotted and you don't. And the only thing that you can do is use them wisely or lose them.

There is no getting them back. There is no time machine to go back and make it right again.

So brothers and sisters today, let us repent of the wasted, squandered time and let us repent of that shallow kind of repentance that makes us keep doing this over and over and over and will produce the same result next decade if we do nothing different.

And let us also repent in such a way that would cause us to be good stewards of our time so that we would invest in the things that God would have us invest in rightly so that when we stand before our

King, we are not the one who buried our talent. We're not the one that took his talent and because he was afraid did nothing.

We're the one that he says, well done, good and faithful servant. I gave you five.

Here's five more. Let us be those people. So let us repent. Amen. Lord, it's so easy to waste time in so many different ways.

There's the obvious ways where we doom scroll or we binge watch or we take our me days and do very little.

We lay in our pajamas all day. Lord, those are obvious and maybe those are things that we need to repent of.

For sure they are. Or there's also the well -intentioned wasting of time where we fill our schedules full of the wrong things and we don't do the right things.

And after decades, we look back and we say, what I invested in didn't really bear fruit. I think that one is the one,

Lord, that scares me the most because we live in a society that is addicted to productivity and progress.

We live in a society that it's still shameful to be lazy. We live in a society where everyone's calendar is filled to the brim of stuff and many of us know what it feels like to go to bed tired and to wake up tired and to think to ourselves,

I'm not wasting time. I'm squeezing everything I can out of every little minute. But Lord, I do pray that you would help us to understand it's not only how much we do, it's what we do that we're held accountable for.

We can fill our life with a million busy tasks and still have wasted a lifetime.

Lord, protect us from that, convict us of that, heal us from that, and Lord, let us be wise to use our time in ways that matter most, with our families, with our church, in the word and prayer with our

God, seeing your kingdom advance, working in such a way that the world would know

Christ. And Lord, let us be different in the way that we spend our time in the world.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. All of us have done this. There's not a single one of us who hasn't either wasted time through sloth or wasted time through overwork on the wrong things.

But we also know that God himself forgives us. Praise God for that. Every week when we talk about all of these things,

I'm like, yep, I've done that. Yep, I've done that. Yep, I've done that. And by the way, if you think that I don't struggle with it, I'm preaching to myself.

And you know what's funny about the gospel is that even though it cuts, it also heals.

The tumor that needs to be removed each week gets cut so that we can experience the sweetness and grace of the stitches of the gospel.

Listen to what Paul says in Romans 8, 35 through 39. Who will separate us from the love of Christ?

I love that statement. Do you know why? Because it doesn't just say who will separate us from Christ.

Think about what that means. Jesus died. Jesus saved us. We'll never be separated from him.

But it's better than that. It's better than just not being separated from Jesus. You can be connected to someone who's displeased with you constantly and never separated from them.

But you're not ever going to be separated from the love of Christ. It's more than just being merely connected with Jesus.

You are connected with someone who loves you, who cares for you, and who is kind and favorably disposed to you because he's forgiven you.

You will never be separated from the love of Christ. Will tribulation separate you from his love?

No. Distress? No. Persecution? No. Famine? No. Nakedness, peril, sword?

No. Not just not separated from Christ, not separated from his love. For just as it was written, for your sake, we are being put to death all day long.

We are considered a sheep to be slaughtered. But in all these things, we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any creating thing will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our

Lord. I want you to read that passage forever differently. It's not just about not being separated from Jesus.

It's not being separated from the experience of his pleasure towards you because of the forgiveness he gave to you.

He loves you dearly. His face is delighted when he looks at you. Yes, you are broken.

Yes, you have your stains. But in Jesus Christ, they're gone. And he loves you.