Opportunity knocks…   Ephesians 5:15-17

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason - March 21, 2004

15So be careful how you live, not as fools but as those who are wise. 16Make the most of every opportunity for doing good in these evil days. 17Don’t act thoughtlessly, but try to understand what the Lord wants you to do.

Some years ago, an energetic young man began as a clerk in a hardware store. Like many old- time hardware stores, the inventory included thousands of dollars' worth of items that were obsolete or seldom called for by customers. The young man was smart enough to know that no thriving business could carry such an inventory and still show a healthy profit. He proposed a sale to get rid of the stuff. The owner was reluctant but finally agreed to let him set up a table in the middle of the store and try to sell off a few of the oldest items. Every product was priced at ten cents. The sale was a success and the young fellow got permission to run a second sale. It, too, went over just as well as the first.

This gave the young clerk an idea. Why not open a store that would sell only nickel and dime items? He could run the store and his boss could supply the capital. 

The young man's boss was not enthusiastic. "The plan will never work," he said, "because you can't find enough items to sell at a nickel and a dime." The young man was disappointed but eventually went ahead on his own and made a fortune out of the idea. His name was F.W. Woolworth. 

Years later his old boss lamented, "As near as I can figure it, every word I used in turning Woolworth down has cost me about a million dollars!" 

As we consider our text for today, we note that the Apostle Paul begins by drawing a conclusion from the things he has just said in his letter. The New American Standard Version of the New Testament begins verse 15 with “Therefore,” We are to understand that he is saying, “Because of what I have just taught you…now you should live your lives like this:  be careful how you live…”

He draws a distinction between being wise or unwise. Wisdom according to the Scriptures involves two things:
* Knowing what is right
* Doing what is right.

Wisdom is not just knowledge. We have very smart, intelligent, educated people in this country who have absolutely no wisdom at all. They have lots of knowledge, but they never seem to get around to understanding what is right and true or doing what is right and true.  Wisdom involves what you and I do with the knowledge we have…and especially what we do with the knowledge of God which has been entrusted to us.

Paul tells us to take heed how we are conducting ourselves in this world.  In Colossians, he has this to say about how we should live: Colossians 4:5-6
      5Live wisely among those who are not Christians, and make the most of every opportunity. 6Let your conversation be gracious and effective so that you will have the right answer for everyone.

4:5 {Toward them that are without} (pros tous exw). A Pauline phrase for those outside the churches (#1Th 5:12; 1Co 5:12f.). It takes wise walking to win them to Christ. {Redeeming the time} (ton kairon exagorazomenoi). We all have the same time. Paul goes into the open market and buys it up by using it rightly.

In 1 Peter 3:15-16 we find this:  “…if you are asked about your Christian hope, always be ready to explain it.”

It is not doing any injustice to the text to understand that we are to live our lives in such a way that non-Christians ask us about our hope in Christ. This is what makes us different from them. They have no hope and we do. We need to be attractive Christians. Attractive enough so that people will ask us about our hope, our faith.

Having said this, Paul goes on to encourage us to make the most of every opportunity given us. The expression in the original Greek is “redeem the time”. The word for time is not chronos which would be clock time, but kairos, or time viewed as seasonable, opportune season. This is Paul’s way of saying that we should make the most of, take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves.

An opportunity by definition is a “favorable circumstance or advantage, a good chance, favorable time or convenient occasion.  See the World Book Dictionary, p. 1458.

A gathering of friends at an English estate nearly turned to tragedy when one of the children strayed into deep water. The gardener heard the cries for help, plunged in, and rescued the drowning child. That youngster's name was Winston Churchill. His grateful parents asked the gardener what they could do to reward him. He hesitated, and then said, "I wish my son could go to college someday and become a doctor." "We'll see to it," Churchill's parents promised. 

Years later, while Sir Winston was prime minister of England, he was stricken with pneumonia. The country's best physician was summoned. His name was Dr. Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered and developed penicillin. He was also the son of that gardener who had saved young Winston from drowning. Later Churchill remarked, "Rarely has one man owed his life twice to the same person." 

As a result of his quick action, the gardner was given an opportunity and he took advantage of it. Little did anyone know then what that action would mean later to this family or even to the rest of the world with the discovery of penicillin.

In the spiritual world, there are opportunities that come to us. We have to be ready to act upon them. We have to be ready to “redeem the time”.  An example of failing to redeem the time can be seen in the following:

In 1269 Kublai Khan sent a request from Peking to Rome for "a hundred wise men of the Christian religion...And so I shall be baptized, and when I shall be baptized all my baron and great men will be baptized, and their subjects baptized, and so there will be more Christian here than there are in your parts." The Mongols were then wavering in the choice of a religion. It might have been, as Kublai forecast, the greatest mass religious movement the world has ever seen. The history of all Asia would have been changed. 

But what actually happened? Pope Gregory X answered by sending two Domnican friars. They got as far as Armenia, could endure no longer and returned home. So passed the greatest missionary opportunity in the history of the church. 

One of the elements of making the most of the opportunity given us is found in the word sacrifice. We will have to be ready to sacrifice if we are going to redeem the time. What we want for ourselves may have to go in order for us to make the most of  the opportunity God gives us. Just remember that it cost Jesus his life to be in the center of the will of God for his life. It might cost you yours. God’s will for your life might not mean actually dying for him. But you may have to die to all the plans you have for yourself; you may have to sacrifice what you want to do or be in order to redeem the time God has given you.

We have opportunities for doing good. Opportunity knocks for all of us. We have to be ready to respond when God sends the opportunity to us. Special opportunities arise for all of us. The establishment of this church is one of those special opportunities God gives us and we have to make the most of it.

We believe that God is doing something special in blending traditional evangelical Christianity committed to the Word of God with a Pentecostal/Charismatic emphasis on living in the power of the Holy Spirit.  We have to redeem the time because of the evil days in which we live. We have light in a world of darkness. We have a message of love and life to share with a world that knows neither in their truest sense.

Paul goes into the market place to find the expression that identifies our responsibility:  it is the word “redeem”. The word means “to buy up, to purchase”. You can see it most clearly in the slave market. A person could be bought out of slavery, or redeemed with the right amount of money. The word suggests knowledge of just what to buy and when to buy it.

The days in which Paul lived were as he put it “evil days”. However, if you were in Ephesus when this letter arrived from Paul, and you were a non-Christian, you would not have seen the days as evil. These were the most prosperous days in the life of Ephesus. Business was booming. The people were prosperous. The temple of Artemis was not only the center of worship, but also the banking house of the merchants of the area. They were doing quite well.

On the other hand, if you were a Christian in Ephesus things were different for you. You would have a difficult time being prosperous, because as a Christian, you would not be admitted to one of the business guilds that governed commerce in the area. You had to belong if you were going to be able to do business with others in the community. The guilds were pagan in every sense of the word and you would not have fit in anyway. Economically you would have struggled to survive.

And then there would be the reality that you who had been separated unto God would be hated by those who were not Christians. If you lived out your faith, you would have come into conflict with the pagan people of Ephesus. Paul said earlier in this chapter, that they were to be “imitators of God”. They were to live in Ephesus as God would if he were there personally. This among the earliest that you find the concept of  “WWJD…What Would Jesus Do?”  Love was to be the master passion of their lives, their thinking, their speaking and all their doing.

To those kinds of people,…believers…the days were certainly evil. The world is not a friend of Jesus Christ.
* It may speak respectfully of him,
* It may even patronize his teachings, but it is not a friend of Jesus.
 If you are a friend of Jesus and are trying to live for him, the days will be evil for you too. For many if not most of the people we come in contact with, the ideal of life is godless. Men are living without relationship to the claims of God, without recognition of that relationship. In fact, it is fair to say that for most people today God is irrelevant. The Church, the Bible and Jesus have no part of their lives.

We need to understand that the world in which we live is against us if we choose to live for Christ. Mel Gibson could easily attest to that today.
However, there are opportunities to share Christ and we must make the most of them. We must be prepared to buy them up.

The very things that make it difficult to be a Christian where we work, where we live are the things which enable us to shine, are opportunities to display the meaning of Christianity and the value of our relationship to God.

Abraham discovered that in his friendship relationship with God; Oswald Chambers, in My Utmost For His Highest, in the reading for March 20th has this to say about that:
  The Delights of His Friendship.
   Genesis 18 brings out the delight of true friendship with God, as compared with simply feeling His presence occasionally in prayer. This friendship means being so intimately in touch with God that you never even need to ask Him to show you His will. It is evidence of a level of intimacy which confirms that you are nearing the final stage of your discipline in the life of faith.
  When you have a right-standing relationship with God, you have a life of freedom, liberty, and delight; you are God’s will. And all of your commonsense decisions are actually His will for you, unless you sense a feeling of restraint brought on by a check in your spirit. You are free to make decisions in the light of a perfect and delightful friendship with God, knowing that if your decisions are wrong He will lovingly produce that sense of restraint. Once he does, you must stop immediately.
  If you want to know what God’s will for your life is, then develop your relationship with God to such a point that you have that intimate, love relationship with Him.
  When that happens, you will recognize that there are very special opportunities that God gives you to be the right person, in the right place, with the right message, at the right time. Your choice will be to redeem the time, to make the most of the opportunities God gives you.

Opportunity will knock on the door of your life.
  Are you prepared to answer the door?
  Are you ready for the sacrifice answering the door will require of you?
Are you ready to walk in such an intimate relationship with God that you will simply know the    will of God for your life? WWJD can become a simple thing for you.
  You can have it…if you want it.
  God is waiting for us.
  The choice is always ours.
  Make the most of it. Redeem the time.
 

Your own world…of family, friends, co-workers needs to see the hope you have in Christ so that you will have the opportunity to explain it. People will ask us to explain God to them when they see us living out our faith day be day.

  Be careful how you live. Live as one who is wise…knowing what is right and committed to doing it. Live as one who understands the will of God.

--Dennis Gleason