Asset Management
redeeming the time because the days are evil. Ephesians 5:16
Time – Professor R. Paul Stevens makes an important observation about our usual interpretation of this verse and its parallel in Colossians 4:5. We think that the word for time here is “clock” time (chronos); time that “can be managed, dissected, digitalized, and processed – but not expanded.” But Paul does not use chronos. He uses kairos, a word for “time” that really has no English equivalent. It is the “time of opportunity, time fraught with eternal dimensions, as a call to salvation.”
“These verses sadly have been twisted by Christian time management consultants to mean squeeze all you can out of the limited resource you have, rather than to seize the kingdom irruption as the moment provides.”
What a difference this little shift makes. God is not interested in squeezing all you can out of the fleeting seconds. He is not limited by the ticking clock. To live under the gun of the encroaching past is to never have enough time assets. But the Biblical perspective is quite different. The Lord of the clock is interested in expanded time – the age of kairos – of redeemed opportunity revealed in the slices of chronos.
Our temporal world allows for two different perspectives. One is the managed rush of “to do” lists, the call of the calendar, the demand of the moment. From this perspective, the assets of time are always scarce, never completely controlled and incessantly demanding. But so many of us live under the tyrant of chronos that we now believe our lives depend on managing it.
There is another perspective. Kairos allows us the luxury of realizing that time is pregnant with revelation. Kairos is the operating modality of the divine, where a thousand years are but a day. What’s the hurry (a word Jesus never applied to his life)? God has all the kairos needed to bring about His purposes regardless of the press of chronos. You and I are invited to make a radical shift in framework. We are born into chronos, a constituent element of human life. But we are resurrected into kairos, lifted from the tedious insistence of the clock to a world governed only by the will of the Father. Which one runs your life?
