Prayer To Redeem The Time Left

Redeem Your Time

Prayer To Redeem The Time Left

Is there anything more tragic than time? Is there anything that brings about deeper grief than seeing time pass us by, than acknowledging how much has already elapsed and how little remains? We who were made to live forever are now given a mere “threescore years and ten” (Psalm 90:10) before we are gone. “If a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all,” says wise old Solomon, “but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 11:8). Become a Patron

Christian men, you have been given a race to run, and you have been called to run to win. At times this race will seem a marathon and at times a sprint.

During times of sorrow or adversity, the days may seem to drag, each one bearing the weight of a lifetime, grueling days giving way to long, sleepless nights. But during times of joy the days will fly by, and you will marvel at how quickly time has passed.

An Olympic sprinter spends years in training to prepare for an event that is over in 10 seconds. At times it will seem your life has gone by just as quickly, that the child you were only just cradling in your arms is now holding your arm as you escort her down the aisle.

Whether life plods by or speeds by, you are responsible for each moment. If you are going to run to win, you must redeem your time.

Redeem the Time

There is nothing you have that has not been given to you, no good thing you possess that is not a gift of God’s grace. You who deserve nothing but wrath and condemnation have been given innumerable blessings. You are responsible before God to faithfully steward each one of them.

If God has given you the blessing of marriage, you must always keep in mind that your wife is first God’s daughter, his creation. Your foremost responsibility is to care for her in a way that honors and pleases the Father. If God has given you children, they are first his children, created in his image and for his glory.

The call of the father is to discipline and instruct his children on behalf of God. If God has given you money, it is his money, and you are meant to use it as if God is going to require an accounting for every penny. What is true of a wife and children and money is true of time.

Yet, as Donald Whitney says, “If people threw away their money as thoughtlessly as they throw away their time, we would think them insane.”

God has given you the gift of time, and he has given it to you in trust with the expectation that you will use it wisely and that you will diligently commit it to the highest of purposes.

When Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, he calls them to live lives of extraordinary holiness, then says, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15-16).

“Making the best use of time” is, more literally, “redeeming the time.” Time must be redeemed by liberating it from useless pursuits and dedicating it to the highest purposes.

Time is laid out before you, and it must be grasped, it must be seized from all the ignoble purposes that could otherwise steal and waste it. You relate to time well when you understand it as a precious gift to be used, not a valueless possession to be squandered.

God knows the number of years, months, and days he has allocated to you. You cannot add to or take away from them. But what you can do in greater or lesser measure is put that time to use.

While still a young man, Jonathan Edwards resolved “never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.” He understood that time had been given to him in trust, and he meant to use it well.

He, the wise and loyal servant in Jesus’ parable of the talents, longed to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:21).

Time Wasted, Time Redeemed

Time is a gift you are meant to accept and treasure. Yet there are many things competing for your time, many temptations to misuse it. Let’s consider a few common ways time can be wasted.

You waste time in laziness.

If Solomon so regularly warned of laziness in his day, how much more do we need to guard against it in a world of endless entertainment and ubiquitous social media? The lazy man is the one who makes any excuse not to work, the one who lies in bed or on the sofa when there is work that needs to be done, the one who begins projects but never brings them to completion, the one who cannot learn because he considers himself surpassingly wise (Proverbs 26:13-16). Your mother may have warned you that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Behind the cliché is a sober warning, for those who pass their days in idleness are those who practically beg Satan to tempt them to sin.

You waste time in busyness. Busyness is a cousin to laziness and no more noble than its relative. It is a modern-day plague.

Even if you reject laziness, you may swing to the opposite pole of busyness, filling your every moment with activity and judging yourself by the number of tasks completed.

Today you practically expect that when you ask a friend how he is doing he will reply, “Busy! So busy!” Yet busyness must not be confused with diligence, the number of activities with meaningful accomplishments.

God has given you a short little life and expects that, of all the great things you could do, you will identify and pursue the few that matter most. Because there is only so much you can do, diligence and redeeming the time involves saying “no” to a million good opportunities to focus fully on a few excellent ones.

You waste time in spiritual carelessness. It was Martin Luther who famously said his busiest times also needed to be his most prayerful. When responsibilities threatened to overwhelm him, he knew that he was too busy not to pray. You fail to redeem your time when you fail to prioritize your spiritual growth and health.

If life is too busy for you to read God’s Word, to spend time in prayer, and to attend the local church, it is far too busy. If you are too unmotivated to commit to such basic disciplines, you are in spiritual peril.

Before you do anything else, take a step out from the whirlwind of busyness and reassess your priorities in light of eternity.

You waste time when you do not rest. God himself chose to work for six days, then to rest for one. He did this not because he was worn out, but to set a pattern that we would follow. We are weak and limited creatures who need to rest.

Our need for rest requires that we commit enough of our time to sleep and to activities that will refresh our minds and spirits.

Rest and recreation are necessary to renew us and to prepare us to diligently carry out the tasks God has assigned to us.

Do It Now

Right now is the time to redeem your time! Consider how you can commit to diligently steward your moments and your days.

  • Pursue and grasp a biblical understanding of productivity. Properly understood, productivity is not “getting lots done” or “getting more done than the other guy.” Productivity is using your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God. A biblical understanding of productivity will free you from lesser pursuits and help you focus on the ones that matter most.
  • Plan to be disciplined. It is very telling that when we are busy or lazy, the spiritual disciplines tend to be among the first things we neglect. Be sure you plan the time, place, and context in which you will read God’s Word and pray every day. Be sure you prioritize worshipping with the local church and never allow anything to supplant it. And then, once you have put first things first, plan how and when you will do your most meaningful work throughout the week.
  • Resolve to constrain or cut out enemies of your diligence. In our day, there is no shortage of distractions eager to bring you from meaningful labor into meaningless sloth. What needs to be cut out or significantly restricted from your life in order for you to redeem the time? Do you need to limit Netflix time so that you can spend more time connecting with your wife and children? Do you need to delete social media apps that lure you away from diligence throughout the day? If you are going to run to win, you need to remove whatever is slowing you down.
  • Speak to someone who does it well. We have all encountered people who model the faithful use of time. Find one of these people and ask him how and why he does it. Ask for practical pointers on using time diligently.

Run to Win!

You came into this world with nothing and will leave this world with nothing. All that you have between the beginning and the end is a gift of God’s grace, and that includes the little dash on your tombstone.

That simple line will represent the time given to you. It was given in trust with the expectation that you would take hold of it and put it to the best and highest use.

If you are going to run to win, you must redeem your time.

Run to Win!:

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Источник: //www.challies.com/articles/redeem-your-time/

Redeeming the Time

Prayer To Redeem The Time Left

The year is racing away from us. We need to be “redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (EPHESIANS 5:16), making the most of what we have, what we are, and our fellowship with the Son of God.

It is frightening, except for God's redeeming grace, to think that the Lord is asking us not to waste, or casually use any of our allotted time on earth. Time is as essential to life as the air we breathe and the food we eat.

It is the immeasurable gift of the Creator.

One of the concerns for the church must be the demands secularism, or the world, makes on the believer's time, especially in the form of work and the modern-day demands of families and homes.

It seems that in an affluent society both parents are expected to meet ever-increasing demands in these areas. No level of commitment is enough.

And yet neither the children nor the pressures of society are ever satisfied.

What Does Redeem Mean?

Is God being robbed of the time He should have in our lives? I think that for believers the time has come to do an evaluation of our lives and ask whether we are “redeeming” the time.

I find there are two Greek words translated with the English “redeem”. One is the simple word for “to buy”, agorazo. It means to buy on the legitimate, normal market or in the marketplace.

In Young's Concordance, “to acquire at the forum“.

The other is “exagorazo” which means “to acquire the forum” or outside the legitimate, normal market. We read, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law”.

He did not “buy us back” in any NORMAL market we know of. The transaction was done on a cross with blood and torture. He was made a curse for us and “hanged on a tree”.

In the same way a ransom paid to criminals is a deal that takes place outside the legitimate market.

So we are to redeem the time. There is a place where time can be purchased if the right price is paid, but it is not in any normal marketplace. Jesus purchased the SOULS of men on a cross.

TIME is the only other substance which the Bible says can be redeemed in this special way, outside the normal markets. God wants us to FIND THIS PLACE where time is available to those who believe, AND BUY TIME THERE.

Then we will never be short of time for God's work again. This means there is NO EXCUSE.

How Does It Work

Does He do it by making us more efficient? Do we stop wasting time on unnecessary things in life? Do we define priorities and stick to them? Do we live more in faith so that we achieve more by believing and in less time? Probably a combination of all of these and His granting us the power NOT to be deflected from our number one commitment to the things of God.

Pastor Yonggi Cho describes how the Lord showed him that if he had to go and catch quail he might catch a few in a night. But when the wind (spirit) of God blew all Israel was knee deep in quail. Why can't we be just as effective in evangelism? (See “Prayer – Key To Revival” by Pastor Cho) I do believe an essential is to take charge of our time.

We have to decide before God how much time we are prepared to give to work and the other demands. We rob God if He does not get a reasonable portion of our lives. Remember the man who laid up his goods and was told, “This night thy soul shall be required of thee.

” To allow ourselves to drift into a heavy work commitment simply because things are there to be done is madness, in the spiritual sense. Let's all learn to REDEEM THE TIME. Find that marketplace of God where time can be purchased from Jesus. A delusion is that by our own efforts in allocating the Lord little measures of time we do achieve a little.

Just as Yonggi Cho may have caught a few quail in his own strength. But God wanted much more, a divine effectiveness, as if all the time in the world were available.

Have you noticed how one of the marks of great sportsmen is that in the middle of a football game or with a fast bowler hurling cricket balls at them, they seem to effortlessly find the time to deal with the situation.

They just know where to be or what is coming and set themselves to meet it with all the time in the world when everyone else is in a fluster and panic. Let's be super sportsmen in the Lord. We can find the time from God to be a fantastic performer for Him.

Sure it's hard in the flesh or normal marketplace but we have another market. A “white” market (because we can't call it a black market).

Here's something else. I sat down to start typing this with the notes from last Sunday's talk all ready to go. I typed in the date, saw that and thought, “Not May already,” and all the above flowed out. Thank God for His inspiration which is so much better than our own efforts. May God forgive us for all the time we waste in so many ways.

How to Save Time

Home is one of the great time users and, I must say, time wasters. The “normal” situation is that men consume time at work and women consume it at home. Let's all give this some serious thought. I believe the answer is not so much in using time management techniques, but in the order of commitment.

We give the Lord His portion FIRST, and believe that He will look after the rest. By simply making things go well instead of badly He can save us weeks rather than just hours. We figure our week around the Lord's work and let Him sort out the other things. We establish spiritual priorities.

by Pastor Fred Needham

Taken from HQL-9420, p. 10-11 

Источник: //www.cai.org/bible-studies/redeeming-time

Prayer Times Calculation

Prayer To Redeem The Time Left

By: Hamid Zarrabi-Zadeh

Muslims perform five prayers a day. Each prayer is given a certain prescribed time during which it must be performed. This document briefly describes these times, and explains how they can be calculated mathematically.

Definitions

To determine the exact time period for each prayer (and also for fasting), we need to determine nine points of time per a day. These times are defined in the following table:

TimeDefinition Fajr

Sunrise

Dhuhr

Asr

Sunset

Maghrib

Isha

Midnight

When the sky begins to lighten (dawn).
The time at which the first part of the Sun appears above the horizon.
When the Sun begins to decline after reaching its highest point in the sky.
The time when the length of any object's shadow reaches a factor (usually 1 or 2) of the length of the object itself plus the length of that object's shadow at noon.
The time at which the Sun disappears below the horizon.
Soon after sunset.
The time at which darkness falls and there is no scattered light in the sky.
The mean time from sunset to sunrise (or from sunset to Fajr, in some schools of thought).

The next section provides information on how to calculate the above times mathematically for any location if the coordinates of the location are known.

Astronomical Measures

There are two astronomical measures that are essential for computing prayer times. These two measures are the equation of time and the declination of the Sun.

The equation of time is the difference between time as read from a sundial and a clock.

It results from an apparent irregular movement of the Sun caused by a combination of the obliquity of the Earth's rotation axis and the eccentricity of its orbit.

The sundial can be ahead (fast) by as much as 16 min 33 s (around November 3) or fall behind by as much as 14 min 6 s (around February 12), as shown in the following graph:

The Equation of Time (Ref)

The declination of the Sun is the angle between the rays of the sun and the plane of the earth equator. The declination of the Sun changes continuously throughout the year. This is a consequence of the Earth's tilt, i.e. the difference in its rotational and revolutionary axes.

The Declination of Sun

The above two astronomical measures can be obtained accurately from The Star Almanac, or can be calculated approximately. The following algorithm from U.S. Naval Observatory computes the Sun's angular coordinates to an accuracy of about 1 arcminute within two centuries of 2000.

d = jd – 2451545.0; // jd is the given Julian date g = 357.529 + 0.98560028* d; q = 280.459 + 0.98564736* d; L = q + 1.915* sin(g) + 0.020* sin(2*g); R = 1.00014 – 0.01671* cos(g) – 0.00014* cos(2*g); e = 23.439 – 0.00000036* d; RA = arctan2(cos(e)* sin(L), cos(L))/ 15; D = arcsin(sin(e)* sin(L)); // declination of the Sun EqT = q/15 – RA; // equation of time

Calculating Prayer Times

To calculate the prayer times for a given location, we need to know the latitude (L) and the longitude (Lng) of the location, along with the local Time Zone for that location. We also obtain the equation of time (EqT) and the declination of the Sun (D) for a given date using the algorithm mentioned in the previous section.

Dhuhr

Dhuhr can be calculated easily using the following formula:

Dhuhr = 12 + TimeZone – Lng/15 – EqT.

The above formula indeed calculates the midday time, when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky. A slight margin is usually considered for Dhuhr as explained in this note.

Sunrise/Sunset

The time difference between the mid-day and the time at which sun reaches an angle α below the horizon can be computed using the following formula:

Astronomical sunrise and sunset occur at α=0. However, due to the refraction of light by terrestrial atmosphere, actual sunrise appears slightly before astronomical sunrise and actual sunset occurs after astronomical sunset. Actual sunrise and sunset can be computed using the following formulas:

Sunrise = Dhuhr – T(0.833),
Sunset = Dhuhr + T(0.833).

If the observer's location is higher than the surrounding terrain, we can consider this elevation into consideration by increasing the above constant 0.833 by 0.0347 × sqrt(h), where h is the observer's height in meters.

Fajr and Isha

There are differing opinions on what angle to be used for calculating Fajr and Isha. The following table shows several conventions currently in use in various countries (more information is available at this page).

ConventionFajr AngleIsha Angle
Muslim World League 18 17
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) 15 15
Egyptian General Authority of Survey 19.5 17.5
Umm al-Qura University, Makkah 18.5 90 min after Maghrib
120 min during Ramadan
University of Islamic Sciences, Karachi 18 18
Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran 17.7 14*
Shia Ithna Ashari, Leva Research Institute, Qum 16 14

* Isha angle is not explicitly defined in Tehran method.

For example, according to Muslim World League convention, Fajr = Dhuhr – T(18) and Isha = Dhuhr + T(17).

Asr

There are two main opinions on how to calculate Asr time.

The majority of schools (including Shafi'i, Maliki, Ja'fari, and Hanbali) say it is at the time when the length of any object's shadow equals the length of the object itself plus the length of that object's shadow at noon.

The dominant opinion in the Hanafi school says that Asr begins when the length of any object's shadow is twice the length of the object plus the length of that object's shadow at noon.

The following formula computes the time difference between the mid-day and the time at which the object's shadow equals t times the length of the object itself plus the length of that object's shadow at noon:

Thus, in the first four schools of thought, Asr = Dhuhr + A(1), and in Hanafi school, Asr = Dhuhr + A(2).

Maghrib

In the Sunni's point of view, the time for Maghrib prayer begins once the Sun has completely set beneath the horizon, that is, Maghrib = Sunset (some calculators suggest 1 to 3 minutes after Sunset for precaution).

In the Shia's view, however, the dominant opinion is that as long as the redness in the eastern sky appearing after sunset has not passed overhead, Maghrib prayer should not be performed.

It is usually taken into consideration by assuming a twilight angle Maghrib = Dhuhr + T(4).

Midnight

Midnight is generally calculated as the mean time from Sunset to Sunrise, i.e., Midnight = 1/2(Sunrise – Sunset). In Shia point of view, the juridical midnight (the ending time for performing Isha prayer) is the mean time from Sunset to Fajr, i.e., Midnight = 1/2(Fajr – Sunset).

Higher Latitudes

In locations at higher latitude, twilight may persist throughout the night during some months of the year. In these abnormal periods, the determination of Fajr and Isha is not possible using the usual formulas mentioned in the previous section. To overcome this problem, several solutions have been proposed, three of which are described below.

Middle of the Night In this method, the period from sunset to sunrise is divided into two halves. The first half is considered to be the “night” and the other half as “day break”. Fajr and Isha in this method are assumed to be at mid-night during the abnormal periods. One-Seventh of the Night In this method, the period between sunset and sunrise is divided into seven parts. Isha begins after the first one-seventh part, and Fajr is at the beginning of the seventh part. Angle-Based Method This is an intermediate solution, used by some recent prayer time calculators. Let α be the twilight angle for Isha, and let t = α/60. The period between sunset and sunrise is divided into t parts. Isha begins after the first part. For example, if the twilight angle for Isha is 15, then Isha begins at the end of the first quarter (15/60) of the night. Time for Fajr is calculated similarly.

In case Maghrib is not equal to Sunset, we can apply the above rules to Maghrib as well to make sure that Maghrib always falls between Sunset and Isha during the abnormal periods.

Implementation

The formulas described above are implemented completely and can be obtained in various programming languages from this page.

References

Источник: //praytimes.org/calculation

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