From our archives, the Billy Graham Classic.
Now tonight, I want you to turn with me to the 90th Psalm, the 90th Psalm.
I want to speak tonight on the brevity of life and I’ll make it brief like I did last night, the 10th verse of the 90th psalm the days of our years of 34 years and 10, that’s 70.
And if by reason of strength, they be four score, that’s 80.
Yet is their strength, labor and sorrow for it is soon cut off and we fly away.
Who knoweth the power of thy anger even according to thy fear. So is thy wrath?
So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts under wisdom.
Do you number your days? Do you realize how important every single day is? Think of it?
God has said that if you live to be 70 you may live to be 80.
And then the scripture says, if you live to be 80 you’re likely to have a lot of labor and sorrow and troubles and difficulties.
I heard about a trained passenger who was handing out cigars because the train down where I live arrived on time for the first time in a long time.
That was a number of years ago. The conductor said he couldn’t accept a cigar.
Why he said, because this is yesterday’s train, there’s the collapse of time all around us, do you know in the days of Jesus, as fast as a person could go as, as fast as a horse could run in?
And that happened all the way until 18 30 when we developed an engine faster than a horse.
Think of that those hundreds and thousands of years, all as fast as you could go was on horse.
Back then in 1910, we developed a military aircraft that went 42 miles an hour.
And then I remember very well just like it was yesterday when Lindbergh took off for Paris and in 33 hours, he was in Paris and we thought that was really something today we get on a Concorde or some people do and they, they are and 3.5 hours.
And in 1960 we started going through the air at 18,000 miles an hour when we got up in the stratosphere.
Now, my father drove a horse and buggy and we’re trying to run today a space age on a horse and buggy, moral and spiritual condition.
Time is collapsing on us. How much longer do we have? The psalmist requested that the Lord?
Remember how short my time is.
Behold, I made my days as a hand bread and my age as nothing to the 1000 years in thy sight.
But as yesterday when it is passed and is a watch, a watch is four hours in the night.
One day is what the Lord is. 1000 years and 1000 years is one day.
He that sit up on the circle of the earth and the inhabitants thereof looked to God like grasshoppers, the grass wither and the flower fade.
The scripture says, my days are like a shadow that decline and I’m withered like grass.
But thou oh Lord shall endure forever and thy remembrance unto all generations think of it. God will endure forever.
But on this earth, we’re like a shadow that’s declining.
We’re all dying from the moment you were born, you started dying because we’re all heading toward death.
Every one of us on the sentence of death, there won’t be anybody in this audience alive.
I’d seen eight years from today. Nobody. We will all be gone.
And what are you gonna do with those years?
Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day.
Do you know how many minutes they are on a day? 1440.
Do you know how many hours there are in a week? 100 and 68.
Now, if you live to be 70 your 1st 15 is childhood or adolescent, you spend 20 years in bed the last five years of physical limitations and your curtailing your activities.
That means you only have 30 years left for everything else, 30 years to live.
And part of that time has to be spent eating and working and figuring up your income tax.
The scripture asked this question, what is your life?
It is even a vapor that appeared for a little time and then vanishes away.
The oldest of us, you won’t live long.
Our time is already in God’s hands.
God has a day already set for you being taken from this world.
It may be in an accident, it may be a cancer, it may be a heart attack, whatever it is, it’s already set.
And the scripture says it is appointed and the man wants to die.
And after that, the judgment, you will stand before the great judgment of God to give an account of how you spent this life and what you did about Jesus Christ because God gave His son to die for your sins because you see we’re all sinners.
We all have the same disease. I don’t care what the color of your skin is.
God doesn’t look at the color of your skin.
God looks at your heart and God sees that you have a spiritual heart disease and that spiritual heart disease is called sin.
And we’re all sinners, that means we’ve broken the laws of God.
We have disobeyed God, we’ve rebelled against God and because we’ve rebelled against him and we’re going to have to face a judgment and he’s going to say, depart from me.
I never knew you. It’s interesting to me that rich people cannot buy more hours.
Scientists cannot invent new minutes. You cannot even save time to spend it on another day.
You’ve got a little time today. You say, well, I’d like to save it up for tomorrow.
You can’t do that. There’s an urgency to time.
The Bible says, redeem the time because the days are evil.
The days of very evil, we look at our newspapers and we cannot believe all the murders and the rapes and the racial problems, all these things all over the world.
Yes, the days are evil and we’ve got a big task ahead of us.
If this earth is to be spared much longer. The scripture says that we’re to redeem the time.
It’s a phrase out of the business world. It means to buy the time.
I heard about people who tied their time.
We’re supposed to tie our money, 10% of our money belongs to God if you’re a Christian, but we can also tithe your time, take 10% of your time and say, Lord, this is yours for Bible study for prayer.
You say we spend too much time on freeways, going back and forth, the interstates and stuck in traffic.
You know, we’ve invented all of these modern things to save time and we have less time than ever before.
We have a lot less time now than my father and mother had in the horse and buggy days.
And yet we have fast automobiles and fast airplanes and we’re running from place to place like mad people.
And most of us don’t know what we’re going to do when we get there.
You have so much time, but for what you have time to serve Christ, you have time to live according to his will, you have time to obey him.
Have you done? Like the psalmist said in 31 15 and put yourself at God’s disposal when he said my times are in your hands.
There’s a current movie showing in this area entitled The Commitments.
Have you committed your whole life to Christ? Has that ever happened to you?
Oh, you say yes, I’m, I’ve been baptized. I, I’ve been confirmed.
I, I, I go once in a while to church.
I think about God once in a while. But have you really committed to it?
Are you totally committed to him? And are you sure if you died at this moment, you’d go to heaven?
Are you certain your sins are forgiven?
That’s why Christ came and died on the cross and shed his blood.
And God raised him from the dead and then there’s the tyranny of time.
It controls us and we become frustrated running from one thing to another because we don’t feel that we have enough time to get everything done that needs to be done.
Jesus said, I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day, the night cometh when no man can work, the night is going to come to you and you won’t have an opportunity to serve God, serve him while you can serve Him.
Now, put him first in your life yet at the end of his life, he said, I finished the work that you gave me to do.
God has a plan for your life and you can finish it with God’s help and He’ll give you a joy and a peace that you never dreamed existed.
If you put your confidence in Him. Oh, yes.
When Jesus left the earth, there were people that needed to be healed and lives that needed to be touched.
But Jesus said he had finished the work that had been assigned to him by the Father.
God has assigned a work that only you can fill. You are unique.
Nobody can take your place and God needs you in his kingdom.
Time can be our tool, but we can also be its slave even so time is amazingly fair and forgiving.
No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you can still have tomorrow.
Adlai Stevenson once said, it’s not the days of your life but the life in your days that count you have to buy it.
What is the price you have to pay the price?
Is that you have no time for certain things.
We shouldn’t drift along haphazardly doing all the pleasures and all the drinking and all the other things that are wrong.
God wants us to love others.
The main thing that he wants us to do is to love your neighbor and love people of another race.
The one thing that distinguishes a believer from others is love that dominates your life.
Your life should be carefully planned. Then there’s the termination of time.
Brethren, the Apostle Paul said in first Corinthians, time is short in revelation.
It tells us that time shall be no more.
Jesus and his disciples spent the 94 verses of Matthew 24 to the end of the chapter 25 talking about the end of the age as we approach the end of the age, we read in revelation 12 that the devil will be frantically active because he knows that his days are numbered.
Yes, there is a devil.
There is a Satan, he’s a real person and they’re real demons and they’re going to battle for your soul tonight because Satan does not want to give you up.
He’ll battle to keep you in his kingdom because there are two kingdoms, there’s the devil’s kingdom and there’s God’s kingdom and you have the right to make a choice which one you want to be in.
Of course, we don’t know when the time of Jesus coming is going to be in math in March 13, we are told heaven and earth shall pass away.
But of that day and hour, I know no man shall take heed watch and pray for, you know, not what your time is.
We don’t know when God is going to come for us.
In Romans 13, the apostle says, knowing the time that now it is high time to wake out of sleep for now is our salvation nearer than when we believe.
the night is far as spent, the day is at hand.
Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armor of light.
The Bible several times uses the phrase the time is at hand.
Jesus told us to discern the signs of the times.
One of the signs is that iniquity shall abound, pick up your newspapers and watch your newscast.
Iniquity is abounding everywhere, not just in New York, not just in New Jersey, but throughout the world when the role is called in heaven, will you be there?
Is your name written on the Book of Life?
Because the scripture says if your name is not on the lamb’s Book of Life, you will never enter heaven.
Your name right now is on what is called in the Bible.
The books and under your name are all the sins that you ever committed.
All the things that you’ve ever thought that are wrong, all of your intents that are wrong.
It’s all that record it. And will face you at the judgment.
But when you come to Christ and present yourself wholly and completely to him as savior and Lord, he blots out everything in those books and writes your name in another book.
The Book of Life, the Lambs book is your name written there.
If my name was not written there and I didn’t know it.
I wouldn’t leave this building tonight until I was sure because they never may never be another moment like this in your life.
This is your hour with God. And then the brevity time calls for immediate action.
The fact that time is short calls for us to do something about it.
Now because the scripture says in second Corinthians 62 now is the accepted time. Not tomorrow. Today.
Things you ought to do do it now, money, you ought to give, give it down people you ought to witness to witness.
Now, every time the clock ticks, it seems to say now today, if you will hear his voice harden, not your heart, you can harden your heart.
You hear a message like this and it can be very dangerous because you will harden your heart.
And the next time you hear the gospel, your heart will be harder and harder and harder come to Christ.
Now, if there’s even a whisper in your heart that you need to come, you come, then there’s the warning of time.
It will someday be too late for your soul time is too short for indecision and vest don’t halt between two opinions.
Fools say there’s plenty of time.
The devil says there’s plenty of time every morning, you have 86,400 seconds to spend and to invest each day.
The bank name time opens a new account with you. There may be no tomorrow come.
Now, the scripture says seeing then that all these things shall come to pass what manner of persons ought you to be.
I read an article some years ago talking about some people that were having a great time on New Year’s Eve and it’s this man that was writing the article said they drink like there’s no tomorrow.
You’ve probably all heard the song another time and another place and that’s what the devil will whisper in your ear tonight.
When I tell you, you need to come and make your commitment to Christ with these hundreds and thousands that have already come in this crusade, the devil will say, wait another time, another place.
This is not the time, this is the time.
The very fact you are here indicates it’s the time by some strange coincidence of Providence, God has brought you here tonight and before you came, you thought you were all right with God.
But now you’re not sure and you want to make sure you want to be certain.
Yes, the devil always says, yes, do it.
But some other time and some other place God says here and now in Luke 19, it tells us of Jesus weeping over the people of Jerusalem.
There’s a poem that I first heard years ago that goes, there is a time we will not win a place.
We know not where that seals the destiny of man for glory or despair.
Someone wrote me a letter here this week it says dear Mr Graham.
In 1957 your crusade came to the old Madison Square Garden in New York City.
I was six years old.
I can still remember the bus ride, the hard wooden bleachers and my shiny new black patent leather shoes.
I remember it all just like it was yesterday when you made the invitation to give my life to Christ.
I was ready and I jumped up to go.
But unfortunately, in those days and in that generation, my mother replied to me and said, hush, sit down.
We don’t do that. Someone might see you.
I stayed in my chair here.
It is 35 years later and I’m privileged to be a volunteer counselor down on the floor.
And it’s my prayer that not one person stays in their seat but comes forward to receive Christ while there’s time.
Thank you for bringing your crusade back to this area. My six year old girl memories are bursting with excitement.
I’ll be praying for you this week. God bless you.
There’s a man from this area, the cliff Barrows told me about on the telephone today, his family had been urging him to stay here because he didn’t believe.
And he made a point of telling people that he didn’t believe in Christ.
He wasn’t a believer, but he would not stay here and he wouldn’t come.
And he didn’t want to accept the claims of Christ.
Instead, he went to the Bahamas Islands and in the early morning this morning, he died of a heart attack for him.
It is now too late. His decision is made. What about your decision?
Is he going to be yes or no to the claims of Christ? Christ died for you.
He rose again and then what do you have to do?
You have to first repent of your sins. That means that you say Lord, I am a sinner.
I’m sorry, my sins. I’m willing to change my way of life.
I want to follow you and serve you and I surrender my life to you tonight or I rededicate my life to you tonight.
I need you Lord and I want to make my commitment on this night in this crusade.
We’ll never be in this auditorium again. And you are here tonight.
I’m going to ask you to get up out of your seat from up there in the balcony.
It’ll take an extra minute. So start now and come and everyone stand down on the front, in front of me here in front of the podium.
And after you’ve all come, I’m going to say a word to you and have a prayer with you and give you some literature to help you in your Christian life.
You say, why do you ask people to come publicly?
Because every person that Jesus ever called, he called publicly, there was something about making it public.
He died for you publicly, hanging naked on a cross.
Certainly, you can come and stand here publicly to make your commitment to him and say, Lord, you have all of me tonight.
I want to be sure that I’m ready to meet you. Just get up and come.