Like the rolling waters of a mighty rushing river, time ever hastens on.
So true are the words of Moses in the Ninetieth Psalm, "we spend our years
as a tale that is told." James adds, "What is your life? It is even a vapor
that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." It is difficult
to believe, but the New Year we ushered in not long ago is half spent. So
many things remind us of how swiftly time moves by us. Perhaps it is the
busy-ness of the age, or maybe it is just because I am growing older, but
it seems as if time moves much faster than it did some years ago. We are
often too busy to notice time as it is passing, but when we pause in retrospection,
we wonder where the time has gone and what has happened to the once promising
prospects of the future. How we need to grasp Moses' prayer, "So teach us
to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."
We often spend our time on the trivial, rather than investing our time
in the great and important values of life. May God help us to weigh the values
of our activities, and to choose those which will give us joy in eternity!
I, like you, often get rolled under the circumstances of activity and have
too much to do with too little time to do it. I sometimes feel like the fellow
who wrote on the placard, "The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get!" May
God help us to be "redeeming the times!"
With summer here, there are many opportunities to advance the cause of Jesus Christ. At the same time the work of God often suffers because many of God's people decide to take an extended vacation from His service. Take a vacation, you need it. So do I. But do not vacation from God. I exhort you in the blessed name of our loving Lord, do not let the temporal pleasures of this world, the leisure of summer, or the cult of "summer sacrilege" rob you of the eternal pleasures of service to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Invest in the eternal. Redeem the time. Time may not slow down, but wise investments will pay eternal dividends.