We used to have time on our hands before they invented so many time-saving devices. Twice a year we change our clocks for Daylight Savings Time, and for a few hours at least we may know the effects of that. Time is on our minds.

Among other folks, we have Benjamin Franklin to thank for that. He was in Paris, France (I suppose without his kite) with nothing else to do but walk in the early evenings.

In those early-evening walks he became disturbed about the fact that so many candles were being used and wasted. He tried to get people to change their life-styles, retire early and not waste their candles. With no success at that, he said, "If we'll just move the clock back, we won't be so wasteful." He was one of the early advocates of Daylight Savings Time, which was debated from his time until 1967, when the official Savings Act went into effect. We have time on our minds.

When that Act first came into being, I was finishing my first degree at seminary and riding in a carpool of other pastors coming in to Fort Worth, Texas, every weekday morning, going back that evening to their church fields.

One of our members decided that the best thing he could do that Sunday morning -- that first Sunday morning when we "sprang forward" -- was to preach a sermon on time. He developed a powerful sermon entitled, "What Time Is It?"

He was going to lean over the pulpit that Sunday morning and ask the question in his beginning statement, "What time is it?" Then he would proceed to explain to them that it was time for them to start doing what God had called them to do.

He was all ready that Sunday morning. He leaned over the pulpit and asked, "What time is it?" A little lady in the middle said, "It's about 11:30, Brother Pat." He decided he would never again start a sermon with a question.

I didn't preach on time that Sunday morning over in East Texas because we had among those in the church some folks who wouldn't change their clocks. They said the "guv-ment" didn't have any business messing with God's time, and they refused to change their time. They may still be on the same time.

At least they got one thing right. They did relate God and time, and that's the way it ought to be.

I. God Created Time

With time on our minds, we are encouraged to look back to the beginning of time -- before time began, when God created time. In those early hours and moments of time recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years." (Genesis 1:14). Time as we know it was created by God.

He began to place things into time and into space, and then he created man and placed him in time as a subject of time to live in time. Then Satan entered time. He tempted mankind and man chose to follow Satan rather than God.

In that disobedience sin entered time, and God began working within time to mold and shape for Himself a people to bring about the real purpose of time. God began to work first with all of mankind represented by that first creation, Adam and Eve. Upon their sinfulness and disobedience He began to narrow the focus of time, not to all of mankind but to a nation within mankind, the Hebrew nation.