Fast Company magazine reported on a New Zealand doctor’s remarkable medical breakthroughs. Ray Avery said he started working on them after discovering how many years he likely had left. Out of curiosity, he devised a complex algorithm to find he had 4,795 days left. A little over 13 years.
He had made bank in the pharmaceutical industry, but he decided to put his remaining time into creating medical devices to help the world’s neediest babies. So, in his garage he created the Life Pod, an incubator for babies in poor communities that costs $2,000 instead of the average $40,000. He’s now working on a way to take the leftover chicken bits that fast-food restaurants don’t use to make a highly nutritional supplement that could save millions of babies in the developing world.
What are you doing with the limited time you have on this earth?
In John 9:4, Jesus said, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work.”
“Night cometh.” That used to be a common phrase in our culture.
As I watched the Tom Hanks WW2 drama, Greyhound, the Lieutenant Commander used that line to report the radar was out. “Night cometh when no man can work,” he told the Commander. I imagine when most viewers heard the antiquated language, they thought it was a quote from Shakespeare. It’s the King James Version of John 9:4.
For centuries, people in Western cultures would use that line to remind each other to make the most of our time.
But in John 9, Jesus wasn’t speaking about the limited time to accomplish any task. He was speaking about the limited time to accomplish a specific task.
What is that task? He wants you and me to be involved in divine ophthalmology. That’s the branch of medicine specializing in sight. Jesus expects us to join him in helping the world see him better.
We’ll study the first seven verses of John 9 this Sunday. Read the passage now, and then join us at 10am on campus or online!
--Tom
Sign up here to receive Tom Goodman’s weekly devotional in your email inbox. Tom serves as pastor at Hillcrest Church in Austin, Texas. His sermons are available on YouTube and the HillcrestToGo Podcast and you can find him on Facebook and Twitter.