Take a moment and recall those vivid memories from when you were young—the feeling of a hug or admonishment from your mom, the joy of playing alongside your brother or sister, even the sound of your shoes as you walk through the schoolyard with your friends. These moments, for some reason, feel as near to us as yesterday. We recall the sights, the sounds, the smells—the feeling so clearly and so powerfully; one taste of a candy in our childhood can leave a permanent imprint on us for the rest of our life. And yet, as we age, those memorable moments become fewer—more blurry—in our memory. Often, we cannot even remember what happened last week. It is sweet to recall our childhood in all its simplicity, and yet it seems that sweetness is often missing in our later life, with our time passing so quickly in the monotony and busyness of modern life. Days can pass us by today without a single, tangible moment left behind.
Do you know why? When human beings grow older, we lose the capacity to interpret life because we lose the simplicity and purity that allows us to be tangible human beings. We get older and more complicated, and the purity of our interactions with our surroundings is lost, replaced with lies, performance, shortcuts, and sophistication. That’s the tragedy of human life; eventually we will feel time chasing us. In our younger years, we may pass the days away in leisure or work, but by the time we are 60 years old, we realize how short time really is and fight for every minute of the time we have left. The way God created human beings to experience time and space is so specific; indeed, we are mortal beings, our outer man decaying every day.
Today, we struggle for time and space—always complaining that there is too little or even too much—but we forget to struggle for the source of time and space. We do so much, yet ignore the very origin of our own existence. Our labor and our efforts are all eventually empty, forgotten in time and space, if we do not have the reality. Most human beings today are not tangible; they have no way to be real in their job, their marriage, their life, or even their relationship with the Lord. We say “I love you,” and yet those words have no power in our living. We waste so much time, effort, and energy to be a good husband, wife, father, or mother, but if we don’t have the true tangibility in us as human beings, time and space just pass us by. If we don’t fight to exercise that tangibility, we will never come out of our failures.
For example, if on a bright Saturday morning you decide to spend the whole day cleaning your house, you will go through every room and every corner, sweeping, wiping, mopping, and dusting. After an entire day, if you have cleaned properly, you will have such a sense of accomplishment and of freshness and newness when you look at the clean house. And yet some people can go through an entire day of cleaning without actually doing the real thing. They will wipe the mop across the floor and run the duster over the shelves, but the floor isn’t clean and the shelves are still dusty. The time was spent and the actions done, yet the fruit is not there. In the same way, we can spend 70 or 80 years going through the actions, yet at the end, the fruit is just not there because we have cut corners or gone through the motions without fighting for the real thing—time passes quickly and without true reward.
The Bible tells us to “redeem the time” (Eph. 5:16). But how can time be redeemed? How can this mortal life be redeemed? We cannot turn back the clock or simply live in the memories of before. As believers, the Lord gives us a way to change the ratio of time and space in our life—to live not according to the degradation, decaying, and corruption of mortal man, but according to the eternity we were made to contain and express. From the very beginning, human beings were made to contain and interpret eternal life. Our God is not limited by time and space; He exists in eternity past and eternity future, and yet came out of eternity to be confined to time and space. He created man to exist within time and space, and thus time and space are very specifically defined for human beings. God created us in a very simple nature. That simple nature is a unique character of human life and makes an excellent human being: a sanctified vessel to hold, express, and interpret divinity. 2 Peter 3:8 says, “…with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.” As soon as we are saved, we become children of God—no longer slaves to the finite world, time no longer a problem to us. If we refuse to be corrupted, we are eternal beings who can enjoy the real, tangible experiences of human life the way it is supposed to be lived.
When we are saved, the first thing that is revived in us is that tangibility. The way that we live our daily life—the way we use our time and space—is the real test of our salvation. There should be a fruit of our salvation, which is realized in the way we use our time and space. If we live the same way we did before we were saved—still sick, still a sinner—then where is the power of salvation? What is the tangible power of salvation to us in reality? Our life as believers should be full of signs and wonders because we are not a common people. That tangibility that has been recovered, redeemed, and renewed when we were saved allows us to reap the fruit of our salvation in our daily life. The tangible experiences we have of the Lord Himself, embodied in time and space, are lasting and weighty, and are not just something we encounter occasionally; eternity can be condensed, expressed, and materialized in our human life moment by moment and day by day.
(Above is part 1 of a series compiled from notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 1/29/2021, not reviewed by the speaker. Read part 2 here.)