I've none some stubborn men in my life but here's two guys who take it to new heights. The the London Times ran a front-page story about an Englishman named Arthur Arch. He had just celebrated his 95th birthday, which was an accomplishment in and of itself. But the truly newsworthy thing about Mr. Arch was that for 42 years he had been precisely and consistently 20 minutes late for every meeting and appointment he had. According to his own time, he was always prompt. But according to everyone else's time, he was always late!

You see, in 1922 in England they changed all of the clocks by 20 minutes. I don't know why, but I do know that Mr. Arch never accepted the change. In fact, he said: "Nobody is going to take 20 minutes off my life. So, I'll keep my watch at the old standard time. And some day I plan to die 20 minutes late just to prove that I was right!"

Now, Mr. Arch had an American counterpart, who was also a very stubborn man, a Kansas farmer, and an independent thinker if there ever was one. I don't know his name, but I do know that in the early 1940s, this Kansas farmer alleged that the worst thing that ever happened to the United States of America was the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President. And, he said, the worst thing Roosevelt ever did was to approve the order of Daylight Saving Time. As you know, the order went through, but the old farmer never changed his clocks, so he was always one hour off the time observed by everyone else. That farmer, like Arthur Arch, lived and died by the old time. And his defense, he felt, was theological. He said, "I will not exchange God's time for Roosevelt's time!"

Our scripture lesson today resounds with the same thought, that we are not to exchange God's time for Caesar's time. We are to "take heed, watch, pray; for you do not know when the time is."