In his marvelous book, Mending the Heart, John Claypool tells about a tragedy of immeasurable proportion in a church of which he was once pastor.  A young father, too full of beer and angry at his wife, backed his pickup out of the driveway one Saturday afternoon and inadvertently ran over and killed his three-year old son.  Standing in the emergency room with the family just after the doctor had delivered the grim news, Claypool was trying to minister to these people who were awash in grief, guilt and anger, and was reminded “that all grief comes back to this: we run out of time.  Something ends before we want it to (John Claypool, Mending the Heart, Cowley Publications, 1999, pp. xvi-xvii).”

Standing here this morning, everywhere I look I see people running out of time.  Time with husbands and wives, children, friends, careers, dreams.  No matter how loud we keep the background music of busy days, overfilled daytimers and over-stuffed social calendars, we never escape the incessant tick-tock of time running out.  Even our best days are seasoned with the grief of knowing that we’re running out of time.  It’s a grief that has a strange way of driving us to live as though we were prisoners of time, as though when time runs out, so do we.

Yet, reading this text makes me wonder if that’s not because we don’t know whose clock we’re on.  Paul had this way of writing that broad-brushed the story of all eternity in a few short verses.  He does that here.  “God . . . chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world,” Paul starts.  And, he finishes with defining God’s will “as a plan for the fullness of time to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and on earth.”  In twelve short verses, this text reads like a history of God’s purposes for all mankind for all time, with the bookends of eternity past and eternity future holding it all together. 

From “before the foundation of the world,” he says.  When Nancy and I visited Chimney Rock in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, we had to walk through a tunnel to get to an elevator that would take us the twenty-three stories to the top of this spectacular rock formation.  The sign says that the tunnel was cut through a rock formation that is some 500 million years old.  From before then, Paul says, God “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will . . ..”  Before the dinosaurs took their first breath, God’s family dream was already set in stone. 

On the backside, as though the will has already been read and the assets of the estate dispersed, “we have obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who . . . set our hope on Christ, might live . . ..  This is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people . . ..”  What God started, even before time could be measured, God will finish when time is no more.  When time is no more, we won’t have run out of time.  Time, for those who have, by faith, become part of God’s family, is always just beginning. 

On our clock, time is tick-tocking away, we’re running out.  If that is the operative belief in our soul, then, we’re going to live life one way and teach our children to do the same.  If we can believe that, in God’s family, time has no measure of beginning or end, we will live life another way altogether.  How would you like to live?

A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine once showed a man standing outside his car by his bent up fender and trying to explain to a policeman what happened.  The caption read, “I was at the wheel but my wife was driving (Mending the Heart, p. xii).”  You may be at the wheel, but what or who is driving your life?  Is it the fear, maybe a fear someone else keeps whispering in your ear, that time’s running out?

This past week, I was talking with one of our young adults.  He and I were discussing how easy it is to get trapped in an upwardly mobile spiral (or downward spiral, depending on your perspective) of competition for more and better and bigger until we prostitute ourselves to some materialistic dream that has absolutely nothing to do with what we claim to be our real values in our relationship with Christ.  Too often, despite our verbal confession otherwise, we’ve minimized the meaning of the Christian faith to nothing more than a pass that will get us through heaven’s security gate when we finally run out of time.  We’ve abstracted eternity to another time and place. We’re living as though the seventy or eighty years we’re physically alive now is the only reality that counts.  We live driven, overwhelmed, overworked, overstuffed lives as if there were no tomorrow. 

It’s not that we wanted a divorce.  It’s just that we woke up one too many mornings too tired to give what marriage demands.  It’s not that we meant for our children to become strangers, even before they left home, it’s just that we’ve got to get just one more rung up the ladder someone else told us was the ladder we should be climbing.  We have to, don’t we?  We’re running out of time, right? 

The reason the unbelieving world often calls us hypocrites is not because we go to church on Sunday and then live fundamentally immoral lives during the week, though that is possible.  More often, they perceive us as hypocritical because, while we’re at the wheel confessing Jesus as Lord, they can’t see any difference in what’s driving us and what’s driving them.  As far as they can tell, whatever the church means to us, it’s been impotent to change the fact that we live consumed with the fear that we better get while the getting’s good, to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.  The reason the world thinks we’re hypocrites is because we talk about Jesus being our Lord but they see us sacrificing our lives, our families, our virtues, our very souls on the same altars of materialism, greed, prominence and power they do every day, sometimes even in the church.  We preach about eternity but live as though the only time that counts is this time, right now, and it’s running out. 

A young mother who is struggling to help her children and family actually live by the eternal Christian values she confesses, emailed me this week.  In reflecting on what she wants the church to mean to her and her family, she wrote, “I always have more questions than solutions.  I do think though, that even for me, an old-fashioned show up every Sunday and Wednesday Baptist, that I want something different for my kids and for me:  a more active, hands-on spiritual life, fewer ‘have to’ rules - i.e. less guilt and more love, less power.”  Anyone here resonate with her?

She’s but one reminder that this is a marvelously multi-generational church.  People living on both ends of life’s spectrum, close to the beginning and close to the end.  This past week I was visiting one of our members in the hospital who is near 80 and who is coming near the end of her life.  Her husband took me out in the hall to tell me that the doctor’s have said that she’s running out of time.  I asked him how long they’d been married.  Fifty-six years ago, he said, in this church, Dr. Bassett tied the knot.  He went on to tell me that his wife started with this church in the cradle roll.  Now, just as this church nursed her in the cradle, we are now nursing her to the grave.  That’s one end of the spectrum. 

On the other end, two years ago, Catherine Leftwich spent her first Sunday in a Cliff Temple cradle.  Tomorrow, she celebrates her second birthday.  Even at two, Catherine is very verbal.  This past week her dad, Greg, was getting her dressed for the morning and Catherine asked dad, “What are we going to do today?”  Dad said, “I don’t know.  What do you want to do today?”  Quicker than Julie can clip a coupon Catherine said, “Go shopping.”  On one end of the spectrum, a woman who was once cradled by this church, running out of time.  On the other end, a little girl just out the cradle, with no thought of time running out and whose greatest joy is just the thought of spending time with her father and mother, whatever they do, as long as they do it together, as a family.

Catherine’s words touched something deep in me.  I thought of how many times my prayer life has been more like calling God to a staff meeting with a well-planned agenda, making sure to check off every item but leaving with an empty, cold feeling.  What if we prayed more like Catherine talked to her father?  What if we got up every morning, not driven by the thought of time running out but by the sheer joy of just being with our heavenly father, whatever we do, as long as we do it together?  What if our prayer life was simpler, “What are we going to do today?”  What if God said in return?  “I don’t know.  What do you want to do today?” 

What if God’s will isn’t a software program that he uploads to a CD and inserts into our soul’s hard drive so that all we have to do is download the blueprint and spend the rest of our lives just making certain to finish the program before time runs out?  The scripture says God’s will is our “adoption” into his family, “through Jesus Christ according to (his) good pleasure . . . and his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in (Jesus)”?  Do you hear it?  Family, good pleasure, freedom!  What if God’s will isn’t so much an agenda as it is just the sheer good pleasure of just being with his family, whatever we do, as long as we do it together?

Jesus once said, “‘you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free (John 8:32).’”  Paul later wrote, “For freedom Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit to a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1).” 

To the Christian Jews who first heard them, those words were a warning to avoid the tragedy of abstracting their confession of faith from their daily lives, of living with religious legalism driving the car even though they claimed Jesus was behind the wheel.  For 21^st century followers of Jesus, especially middle and upper-middle American Christians, it may mean something else.  It may mean that, while we’re behind the wheel, we may have to stop and invite whoever is driving us in directions our confession doesn’t call us to get out of the car so that who’s behind the wheel and who is driving are one and the same.  We may have to invite them to get out of the car so that we can finally hear the voice of Jesus.  The voice that wants so desperately to tell us that, just as God took care of how we got here, he has already taken care of where we’re headed.  In “the fullness of time,” we have “the pledge of our inheritance . . . as God’s own people.”

On both ends of life’s spectrum, God has our time taken care of.  What that means is that, because this is God’s world and we’re God’s children, we’re on God’s clock, not ours.  We can stop living as though we’re running out of time.  Followers of Jesus never run out of time.  Our Father’s house has no clocks.  That’s not just a good funeral message, for those who’ve already died.  That’s a good living message, for those who never really started living. 

Everything we will ever really need God has already promised is ours.  The same God who made the mountains and the seas and stars too many count, even before time as we know it began, will finish what he started.  In the meantime, he wants to lavish on us the good pleasure of just being a part of his very free family.  Do you ever wonder how it would change your life, your family’s life, your church’s life, your witness, your faith, if you really believed that?