“Walk in wisdom . . . redeeming the time.”

(Colossians 4:5)

A group of college students were being interviewed about their future plans.  Some told of their professional or vocational plans.  Others discussed their more immediate educational interests.  One young woman began her interview by simply stating: “I don’t want to regret my life.”  This was why she wanted an aim in life and some preparation for attaining it – because she didn’t want to come down to the end of her life and regret it.

Shortly before he died Dr. Lawrence Kenney, a Rhodes College Bible teacher, always the whimsical philosopher, remarked to a friend: “Well, I’ve come down to the end of my life and I’ve found that I am what I thought I was.”

The Last Judgment was once described by someone in the simple metaphor of a solitary soul standing before God and hearing the solemn query of the Eternal One: “Well, what did you make of it?”  Whether or not that is to be the divine phrasing of the ultimate question we do not know, but we all do know that this is a succinct summing up of the continual query the self-conscious self in everyone of us is always asking in our more serious moments: “Well, what are you making of it – the adventure of life?”  If we don’t have to answer to God, we must at least answer to the self-judging self – “What did I make of it?”

St. Paul has a word of advice for every one who is ever disturbed by this ultimate anxiety: “Walk in wisdom,” he says, “redeeming the time.”  That is what he wrote to the Colossian Christians. And in similar vein he advised the Ephesians, as Mr. Phillips has translated it from the Greek: “Live life then, with a due sense of responsibility, not as people who do not know the meaning and purpose of life, but as those who do.   Make the best use of your time, despite all the difficulties of these days.” (Ephesians 5:16)

But some ask: “Can time really be redeemed?  What about the redemption of time for the aged when, as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes puts it, “the evil days come and the soul says, ‘I have no pleasure in them; when desire fails and sight dims and bodily aches and pains make every day a misery.’” Can time then, for the old person, be redeemed by the wisest of walking?

A faithful Christian man, troubled over his mother’s illness and senility said: “My mother’s condition in advanced age is the most difficult thing I’ve come up against in all my life, and it is where my Christian faith has given me the least help.”

A devoted daughter was talking about her aged mother and of the distressing time she was having with the old lady’s pains and depressions and imagined slights.  “And what depresses me most,” said this middle aged person, “is that I’ll be the same way myself some day.”

Can there be for this time – the latter days of life – real redemption, or is it as the poet put it: “The years like great black oxen tread the world and I am crushed beneath their passing feet”?

And what about the wasted time we become aware of along the years?  The failures in relationships we have to admit – whether our own or some one else’s fault – there they are – blasted, ruined. Can that time be redeemed by any “wise walking” or clever manipulating? Can the Lord, or anyone else, “restore the years the locusts have eaten?”

And even the earliest years of life, is that time redeemable?  Certainly not just through someone’s saying to young people” “Walk wise now.  Redeem the time.  Make a smart use of all your opportunities.”  For everyone knows that a big part of growing to selfhood is the demand we lay on life to be allowed to make our own mistakes and learn from that only.  So a certain amount of time and experience must be, if not wasted, as least remain unredeemable, having served its purpose in the costly business of sacrifice to trial and error.

And yet Redemption is what the Gospel is all about.  “I am not ashamed of the Gospel,” wrote Paul to the Romans, “for the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.”  Time is one measure of life – a constant and overarching measure.  And all our time – our springtime, summer, fall and winter – can be redeemed, but only by God’s grace through the Gospel.  Yes, there’s wisdom and hope and help for us, in our anxiety about not regretting our life, to be drawn from St. Paul’s watchword: “Walk in wisdom, redeeming the time.”

But first, we need to understand the meaning of time – what it is.  What is your philosophy of time?  Do you think of yourself as an automatic time machine that grinds out of your own “innards” days and years and decades?  Do you have the cycle theory of time: that for everyone it begins at the point of birth, swings upward through childhood and youth to maturity; and then from that zenith slowly descends through old age’s declining strength to the point of death where time’s cycle of life stops?

The Greeks thought of time in two different categories.  They had two different words for it.  Xpovos denoted “time” spatially considered – in the flow of days and years.  The Greek word Xpovos, meaning “time stretched” out like a string, is the origin of our English word “chronology.”

The other word the Greeks had for time is Kxipos – time considered in its qualitative nature, as over against the quantitative Xpovos time.  Kxipos denotes “situation” or “opportunity” for people in the present moment of time.

 The Biblical teaching on time (which includes both the Hebrew and Greek conception of time) is that God made time like he made everything else.  Whatever quantitative amount or spatial flow of time given a person, it comes as a gift from God.  So also the Kxipos aspect of time – the opportunity, the judgment, the fresh start, or the setback of the present moment, is from God, too.

Furthermore, in the Bible, time has special importance for people in that it is the medium of God’s self-revelation to them.  The flow of time, Xpovos, is important and valuable to us, else we would not exist.  The Kxipos, or the opportunity, the situation of the fluid present, is important to us else we could not achieve selfhood and the relationships with other selves by taking advantage of Kxipos.  But the most valuable and important aspect of time is aπokxλuΨis, the New Testament word for “the self-revelation of God” to human beings in time.”

The Bible speaks of the spatial times of Revelation, when the fullness of time has come when, according to no human table of time but in perfect synchronization with the eternal plan, God calls to his human child, breaking through from eternity into time.

“Time then, supremely, is given us in order that we can seize the opportunity and not pass up salvation — because time is not reversible. We cannot have divine revelation at our free disposal. We are constantly called upon to be vigilant and keep ourselves ready for God’s call.” (Interpreters Bible Dictionary)

Next, we need to understand clearly our human freedom and our limitations in dealing with time if we would “walk wisely . . . redeeming the time.” Paul’s advice to us is that we remember time’s nature and our own nature as temporal creatures.  The past for us is fixed, gone into history.  The future which has not yet come is beyond our grasp.  Only the present is fluid and available with possibilities, like wares offered for sale in the market place; but it remains for us to go and buy, making our selections and choices wisely.  We cannot take all.

Dr. George Buttrick used to impress on students the necessity of a disciplined discrimination in the use of time every moment of their student days by reminding them that on a given evening a student could either go to the movies or read a book.  If he chose the book, then he went without the movie.  If he chose the movie, he went without the book, certainly for that night, and perhaps always, and what a loss, if that book had been Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

“Thou must go without,” stormed Thomas Carlyle.  “Thou must go without.  This is the song which thy soul must sing to thee every day of thy life.  Thou must go without.”

But we must always remember that however wisely we choose, however fussily we are concerned about right choices; we human beings by ourselves can never redeem the time.  Only God can redeem, but He, the Eternal God, can redeem only when in each circumstance and each situation we respond to God in the openness of faith and the dedication of obedience.  The redemption of time is always as it was on Calvary; when in faith and obedience we respond to God’s call, then that person, that situation, that moment of time and all the people caught up in the net of human relationships of that Kxipos are infused with the divine love which is the redeeming, transforming agent.

St. Paul saw the results of time’s redemption as twofold, both subjective and objective.  The subjective result he describes to the Ephesians: “Walk wisely, not foolishly, redeeming the time because the days are evil.”  The faithful Christian responding in every situation, not to commercial motivation, nor to status climbing stimuli, nor to considerations of personal security, but to the love and grace of God as revealed in Christ, and letting this flow through his mind and heart and actions, is filled with the fullness of God and finds peace and joy and fulfillment that is simply out of this world.

If I crave practical evidence of this theological proposition all I have to do is to look about at some of the remarkable old folks I’ve known in Christian congregations across many years, who number in their ranks some of the most unselfish hearts and youngest minds in their congenial acceptance of new ideas, and agile, loving service of humanity.  The fact is there.  Why?  Because the winds of the Holy Spirit have been welcomed daily in their lives with the telling effect that courage, sweetness, resiliency, acceptance, power and beauty have been built indestructibly into their personalities.  Oh, how their time has been redeemed, is being redeemed, each ticking second of it, and will continue to be redeemed unto all eternity.

The second result of time’s redemption, as St. Paul sees it, is objective – the result in the world abroad.  This result is his concern as he writes to the Colossians, “Walk wisely before those that are without, redeeming the time.”

“Those without,” the “outsiders,” was the early Christian designation for the pagan world.  The tiny handful of Christians, a pitiful minority among the teeming pagans, did not think of themselves as “the outsiders” living on the outskirts of civilization.  They thought of themselves as the true community from which the unbelievers were shut out.  And though they felt they were separated, as by an invisible wall, they desired to bring the others in: indeed, they lived under the compulsion that this was their chief reason for existence – their prime purpose in using up time. But how?  Paul says, “By walking wisely and redeeming the time.” So they were both a witness and a point of release of redemptive love in the world.

The Epistle to Diognetus, written in the second century, describes the Christians then as “not distinguishable from the rest of mankind in land or speech or customs.  They inhabit no special cities of their own, nor do they cultivate any out of the way life.  But they live in Greek and barbarian cities as their lot may be cast, and follow local customs in dress and food and life generally . . . yet they live in their own countries as sojourners only:  they take part in every thing as citizens and submit to everything as strangers.  Every strange land is native to them, and every native land is strange.  They marry and have children like everyone else, but they do not expose their children.  They have meals in common, but not wives.  They are in the flesh but they do not live after the flesh.  They continue on the earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.  They obey the laws ordained, and by their private lives they overcome the laws. In word, what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world.”

So, ought not we also today to be in the world?  Our walking in wisdom, redeeming the time is not simply that we should live sheltered, respectable lives, but that those outside Christian communities should be brought in.  Let the word and will of our God prevail in and through us!