J-P spoke tonight about the number 86.400… Imagine having £86,400 each day and having to spend it all, not being allowed to save any of it or carry it over to another day! Would you go on a spending spree? Would you buy a house? Would you help others? We may not have this amount of money each day, but we do all have 86,400 seconds every day.

We all have the same amount of time each day, but the question of time management means we are forced to think about if we are spending this time wisely. Do we do what we want with our time or do we understand that time actually belongs to God? Ps 24:1 reminds us that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it; even when we use our time to earn money, we have to acknowledge God’s help in giving us the strength to work.

Our priorities determine how we spend our time. Ex 20:8 reminds us of the importance of the Sabbath, giving time to God. This Sabbath time means we organise our day differently to usual, giving God our whole focus. Mark 12:28-31 reminds us that love for God must be our priority and we need to organise our time to give Him priority and to love other people as well (rather than things).

Our love is demonstrated through our obedience, our worship and our witness. We have to give ourselves – and our time! – to God and allow Him to direct and manage our time.

We looked at three things today which God definitely wants us to want:

1. To live in harmony and unity
2. To live with purpose
3. To seek God’s kingdom first

Living In Harmony & Unity

Harmony & unity do not mean that we are all the same. God is the God who made each one of us different. The God who made over 60,000 species of trees, over 69,000 species of flowers, over 8.7 million species of animals, 32,000 living fish species and 10,000 different species of birds can cope with variety! So He calls us to celebrate diversity and live together in harmony, respecting our differences and not trying to squeeze everyone into the one mould.

Harmony musically is not the same as unison. It’s infinitely more varied and adds much more depth (and pleasure) to music. When we live in harmony and unity, we achieve more together than we can possibly do on our own. Church, I believe, means we are ‘better together.’ (Rend Co Kids)

Living With Purpose

God has plans for our lives, individual plans and corporate plans, and there is nothing more exciting and fulfilling than living life God’s ways. So many of us once had dreams and ambitions, but perhaps life has got in the way, and we feel deflated and lacking ambition. Maybe we have never really had any clear idea of what life is all about and so we just drift on, never quite knowing why we are here or what God wants from us. God wants us to be like Caleb, living with purpose even in old age. (Joshua 14:12-14) He can take our dreams and make of them so much more (‘Dream For You’, Casting Crowns.) Though it may take time for these dreams to be fulfilled, we can live with vigour, passion and purpose.

Seeking God’s Kingdom

Seeking God’s kingdom first and seeking to be salt and light in our community means we live with purpose and hope. We can do this in many different ways, which may often seem mundane (litter-picking, distributing hearts and doves and painting murals, for example), but ‘each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.’ (1 Pet 4:10-11) We’re back to the ‘various forms’, to the diversity each one of us represents, but this is the wonder of God’s great plan: to use humans as His witnesses and messengers to transform the world from the inside out, so to speak.

Some of us may feel it’s more spiritual to not want anything, that ‘wanting things’ is too carnal to be worthy of Christians. I don’t think it’s actually possible to live in a place of no desire, however. The Buddhists may wish to attain this state (Nirvana, a transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self), but I don’t believe this is a Biblical view. If we answer this question with ‘nothing’ or say ‘oh, I’m fine, thank you, Jesus’, I believe we are actually deceiving ourselves. There is always scope for something more in the spiritual life. ‘There must be more than this,’ the song lyric goes, and it’s true. (‘Consuming Fire’, Tim Hughes) We can be content in Jesus – Paul tells us that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’ (1 Tim 6:6) – but this does not mean there should not be at the same time a yearning for more of God. Paul says, ‘I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.’ (Phil 3:10-11) If we don’t want something from God, we are in a dangerous place, a place where apathy and indifference will soon rob us of spiritual life and passion. If we don’t want more of God, then I think we are heading towards the lukewarm attitude of the Laodiceans, which God despises. They said, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ (Rev 3:17) God’s reply was, ‘you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.’ (Rev 3:17)

We must not, therefore, answer this question glibly or assume that not wanting something is a good thing. If you have no need of material things, that’s one thing, but all of us need to reflect upon what our spiritual desires are and understand that God places these desires in our hearts to bring us to the place of calling out to Him to satisfy those desires. He doesn’t ask us what we want to reject us, but to draw from us those spiritual desires which will see us draw closer to Him.

In our series ‘Questions’, looking now at the questions God asks us, we looked at Jesus’ question ‘What do you want?’ This occurs in three places (John 1:38, Matt 20:32, Mark 10:51) and shows us that Jesus is interested in every aspect of our lives. Often, we find this hard to believe, but God is a loving parent who is genuinely interested in our welfare (see Luke 11:9-13); He is a generous Father who seeks our best interests in everything (see James 1:17, Ps 84:11). We may feel diffident about telling Jesus what we want, fearing that He does not really care and will not answer our prayers, but the Bible paints a very different picture of prayer (see 1 John 5:14-15, Mark 11:24).

These verses don’t give us carte blanche to ask only for material things and expect God to work for us like a slot machine or like Father Christmas! As every parent knows, there are times when we have to say ‘no’ or ‘wait’, which can be difficult for our children to understand. But we certainly shouldn’t be afraid of asking for deeply personal things. The blind men to whom Jesus asked this question told Him plainly that they wanted to see; they wanted their sight. (Matt 20:33, Mark 10:51) Jesus told us in the Lord’s Prayer that we are to ask for our daily needs to be met: ‘Give us today our daily bread.’ (Matt 6:11) So we can ask God for personal things, but we need to understand also that what pleases God most is when we link our desires, our wants, our needs to His glory, so that we care about His will being done and His kingdom coming on earth, as it is in heaven. (Matt 6:10) What we want should be aligned to what God wants. Prayer is as much about relationship as it is about petition.

We need, above all, to hear in the question ‘What do you want?’ not the weary, exasperated tone of a worn-out parent, not the scornful tone of someone who doesn’t really care about our deepest longings, not the frustrated, angry, resentful tone of someone who is at the end of their tether… but the gentle, hopeful, caring tones of a Father who loves us more than we will ever know. John speaks about ‘what great love the Father has lavished upon us!’ (1 John 3:1) When Jesus asks us ‘What do you want?’, it’s because He really wants us to articulate to Him those deep desires of our hearts and He wants us to know that He is able to meet those desires.

Are you in the doldrums?

This phrase means to be depressed or listless, to have no interest in anything and consequently to do nothing, to be aimless and drifting. The origins of the phrase arise from a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters. The Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, (ITCZ, pronounced and sometimes referred to as the “itch”), is a belt around the Earth extending approximately five degrees north and south of the equator. Here, the prevailing trade winds of the northern hemisphere blow to the southwest and collide with the southern hemisphere’s driving northeast trade winds. There is often little surface wind in this area and sailing ships can stay there for weeks, unable to move forward.

This NASA satellite image shows the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, known to sailors around the world as the doldrums.

On the one hand, the thought of no winds and calm water may seem highly desirable in life; many of us are tired of life’s storms! But wind is essential to sailing, and to be becalmed in this area can be highly frustrating. In the same way, whilst we may long for the peace and calm of a life without trials, temptations and troubles, if we are drifting aimlessly without the wind of the Holy Spirit moving us forward, this is a dangerous place to be. Some may feel that to lack ambition or purpose, to aspire to nothing, is the height of contentment (‘if you don’t aim for anything, you’ll never be disappointed!’), but this is not how God wants us to view life. He gives us purpose and dreams; He wants us to move forward with passion and fervour.

May the breath of God’s Spirit fill our sails and move us forward.

2 Cor 5:16-17 reminds us that all those who have come to faith in Christ are new creations, and as such, we must leave our old ways and old ways of thinking behind. To be a Christian is to live by the truth of God’s word. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer, born in 1918, whose Christian faith clashed many times with Communist dogma. As a writer, he wrote stories about the truth which criticised the government heavily and as a result, he was imprisoned and subsequently lived in exile. One of the things he wrote was that ‘people need to live by the truth. Live not by lies.‘

God’s truth must be the guiding principle of life, but we live in a world where many ideologies clash with it. Our world sees no need for God or His values; the move away from truth has permeated our society, arising in part from the evolutionary view which sees human life as nothing more than an accident (and therefore having no intrinsic worth or value.) In recent years, the Government has even approved DIY abortions, with few checks on this; experimentation on embryos is another example of how little worth we place on human life. Nowadays, ‘relative truth’ is often talked about, but God says that only the truth can set free.

Col 3:12-14 indicate the kind of fruit we are expected to grow, fruit that will look very different to the things the world prizes. Matt 5:13-16 talks of Christians being salt and light in our society, but we need to let our light shine and not hide it from others. The fruit of truth, of a life lived according to the truth, has to be seen in our actions.