SERMON XIV.

REDEEM THE TIME.

EPHESIANS V. 16.

Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

Of all the talents with which the Almighty here on. earth intrusts his creatures, time is the most important, and we fear we must add the most frequently abused. Our infancy is spent in idleness, our youth in thoughtlessness, our age in business; but which of them, as regards the great mass of mankind, can be said to be employed for God, or for the important purpose for which it is bestowed? All complain of the shortness of time, and yet most possess more than they know what to do with, and every one more than he employs well. Still it is of this much-wasted and misapplied talent that we shall one day be called upon to render a strict account. Consider, then, how you would yourselves act under similar circumstances, and you may learn to know what you have reason to expect at the hands of God.

If you were to hire a labourer for a day's work, and he were to come to you in the evening, and upon your asking him, "How have you spent your day? what have you done for me?" he were to reply, "I have spent four

hours in loitering or talking with my fellow-labourers, and four at my meals, and three more in working for myself, and the remaining hour I have dedicated to your service;" would you be satisfied with such a reply? would you pay that man his wages? I trow not. And yet let me ask you what better account, when you retire to rest at night, can you give to your Heavenly Master of many a day which passes over you? After you have deducted all that has been spent with your fellowlabourers, at your meals, and in labouring for your bread which perisheth, what remains for God? And is not God a God of recompense? and has he not declared that as a man soweth so shall he also reap? Truly, then, unless we can render some better account than this, our day of reckoning will be a fearful day, and our sentence the sentence of the unprofitable and idle servant. Let us then seek for the aid of the Divine Spirit, to enable us to receive and to apply the valuable injunction of the text; that we may be taught so to employ our time, that when summoned to render an account, we may do it: with joy.

I shall consider, then,

I. What it is to redeem time.

II. From what we should redeem it.

III. For what we should redeem it.

In explaining what is meant by redeeming time, I shall take the most simple illustration possible; the word: is in the original to buy out, and the English word redeem expresses this as closely as possible.

If an estate be mortgaged, if an article be pledged, the owner cannot repossess himself of them, unless he be able to buy them out, or redeem them. By the use of this term, therefore, the apostle not merely urges us to future diligence, but most strongly implies our former

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improvidence and misuse of time; the very fact that it is necessary to redeem it, implies that we have, as it were, mortgaged it to Satan, pledged it to vanity and sin. Now, strictly speaking, time misapplied is irrevocable; the hours and days and years that have been so improvidently disposed of, are among those unredeemed pledges which must remain, as evidences of our folly and our guilt, to all eternity. The sin may, blessed be God, be removed by a penitent application to the blood of our great Redeemer; the guilt may be washed away, the iniquity be blotted out for ever; but the years so spent can never be recalled, redeemed, or brought back again; the hours which we have sacrificed before the shrine of foolish or of guilty pleasure, can never now (as they might once have been) be laid upon the altar of the living God. That blessed privilege, as regards those hours, is for ever lost to us; that opportunity for ever passed away. Once gone, they are gone for ever; and hours which might have been adding to the happiness of our fellow-creatures, to the increase of our own joy, to the glory of God, to the extension of our Redeemer's kingdom, to the jewels in our Redeemer's crown, have perhaps (how fearful is the thought) been employed in aiding others, by our countenance and example, in their progress to that gulf from which we ourselves, by the undeserved goodness of our God, may have so mercifully escaped.

Since, then, the advice of the apostle, in its literal and strictest sense, cannot be applied to the time which is passed, we must endeavour to render it applicable in our own case to that which may remain to us. My brethren, who shall say what this may be? It is easy to number the days that have fled, but who can calculate what is to come? Can the youngest or the strongest

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here present say, that he assuredly shall hail the opening: even of another month in the same health, under the same circumstances, or even in the same state of existence, in which he has beheld the present? You know that he cannot. You know that your sentence may have gone forth, that your hours may even now be numbered. When, then, I say to you, "Redeem the time," urge it both upon your conscience and upon my own to delay no longer, but to begin in good earnest to live to God, to seek, if you have not yet sought and found, a Saviour; to devote not merely this Sabbath-hour, or the Sabbath-day, to his honour and glory, and the soul's great work for eternity, but every day and every hour, (so far as the absolutely necessary business and relaxation of life will admit,) to the same blessed and all-important occupation.

I proceed, then, to consider from what you are to redeem the time which yet remains to you.

First, then, I charge you to redeem it from sloth and procrastination. An idle Christian is a disgrace to the very name he bears.

Did our Divine Master, while on earth, so occupy his time about his Father's business, that he often, as the Evangelist declares, had not time to eat and to drink, and can you imagine that you are among the number of his followers, when you find time, perhaps, for little else? When every duty that is urged upon you, is too toilsome or too troublesome; and when you would rather sit for days in perfect inactivity, or in the most trifling occupa tions of this poor, miserable, transitory life, than stir one hand, or engage in one labour, for the glory of God or the eternal existence which is approaching? How totally different would be the whole aspect of society, of our country, of the world, if every Christian, the moment he

begins to be awakened to the things of God, were in good earnest to set himself to labour for God, and whatever his hand found to do, to do it with his might.

It is fearful to think how often, when Satan cannot storm the citadel by open violence, he thus possesses himself of it by secret intrigue, and prevails to the ruin of a soul through idleness alone. You who would start with abhorrence if the great tempter were to bring to you a gross temptation, yet fall willingly into his snares of indolence and procrastination. For instance, in the morning you say there will be time to read the Word of God, to pray, to meditate, to examine into your heart, in the evening; but in the evening some more pressing occupation presents itself, and when this is over it is too late, and these great duties are again postponed. Today there is little opportunity of doing good, of fulfilling, or even of commencing some work of kindness, or labour of love, which you propose, for promoting the comforts of your fellow-creatures, or the glory of God, but tomorrow you are assured that there will be time, and to spare; I need not say, that that to-morrow never comes. O how many immortal souls are thus slumbered and trifled and procrastinated away, until the chamber of sickness hears the ten-thousand-times repeated fallacy, "When I recover, every day shall be spent for God;" and the bed of death alone demonstrates the emptiness and the delusion of it.

Secondly, I would urge you to redeem your time from vain and foolish company, and idle and unprofitable pleasures. There is nothing which tends more to rob the heart of every spiritual affection, to deaden the love to God, to make all religious exercises dull and unprofit able, than these great time-destroyers. Thus the Prophet Isaiah, describing persons who so occupy themselves,