Are you a student? The verse speaks to you redeeming your time as a student. The time that you are in, student time, presents special opportunities. There is a quite remarkable degree of openness in your peers, those around you. They may be antagonistic; they may be difficult, but they, like you, are in the stage of life which used to be called the stage of enquiry. You have access to them. All too soon you will be carried away into your profession. You will be in an office by yourself maybe, or with one other. The pace of life could quicken. As a student, life goes at 50 miles an hour. When you get into real working life, you will find it goes at 90 miles an hour. You won't have much time; you have got to be precise. You don't have the opportunity for witness. You are surrounded by far fewer people. You will look back and say, I wish I had made more of my time, my time was a special opportunity and gave access to all kinds of people of my own age. This is what the apostle has in mind: redeeming the time that you are in, the window of opportunity that you have, redeeming the gospel time.
In 1990 I went to Moscow to speak to Baptist ministers there who had been released from prison, because Perestroika had come and so they had some get-togethers. But something which deeply impressed me was their response to the opening of opportunity: the Moscow believers had started bookstalls in the Moscow Metro, the underground. I was taken down to see some of them. You could not do it here in London, but suddenly, a chink of liberty had opened up and they were taking advantage of it and there weren’t any laws to stop it. Nobody would have dared do it before, but they had bookstalls in the Metro underground the queues were hundreds of yards long: the people of Moscow had had no access to spiritual books. And they couldn't sell them because they would have run out of books; they had to turn these bookstalls into libraries and find a way of stamping the books and lending them, hoping the people bought them back. What were they doing? Well, they heard the words of the apostle ringing in their ears, ‘redeeming the time’, buying up the special opportunity, and they did. It was marvellous while it lasted for some months before they were thrown out of the underground and somebody in high places realised what they were doing.
This is the sense in which the apostle Paul speaks here: redeeming your time, your surroundings, your opportunities. When the Lord takes us home, will we look back upon a life, and he stationed us in a posting, in a particular place for much of our lives, and you can redeem the time there, you can turn it to account in so many ways as a believer. We may be sick and hospitalised. Now we say as Christian believers, ‘Redeem the time. Who is around me? Who can I speak to? Who can I help and encourage spiritually? This is a posting. This is a time for me, surrounded by sick and perhaps depressed folk. I can redeem it, buy it back for the Lord and spread light, and spiritual opportunity and life. I may be old, and failing, and faculties falling. Well, how will it be in my family circle? Will I grump and groan and complain as the little pains come, and the problems occur, or will they see a bright Christian in twilight years? This is my opportunity. My opportunity in health has been different. Now it is in old age and infirmity. Will I buy it up for the Lord ‒ whatever it is, and wherever you are? Broadcasting: at the moment we can do it, not with the BBC, not with the regular channels. We are shut out, banned, but we can buy airtime on the free channels while we can broadcast, and who knows how quickly the day will come when the powers that run the internet will throw all Christian testimony off the internet. Buy up the opportunity while you have it.