“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:” Eccl 3:1
One man rushed into a suburban railroad station breathlessly and asked when does the 8:01 train leave? "At 8:01” “Well its 7:59 by my watch. 7:57 by the town clock and 8:04 by the station clock, which am I to go by?”
"You can go by any clock you wish but you can't go by the 8:01 train, for it has already left."
Time is important in our culture. We are much more time conscious than at any other age. Computers get faster and faster every single year. Researchers from Germany and Austria have found the maximum possible speed of a single transmission in microchips — one petahertz. That’s also roughly 100,000 times faster than current microchip transistors can go today.
Clocks rush and whirl, and control our lives. The question remains, "Are we following the right clock?" God does not follow our timing. We are in subjection to His timing. Someone said life is like a coin, you can spend it any way you want, but you can spend it only once. You can never repeat it.
Time changes things. More correctly, I should say that things change with time. When I returned to Detroit one time it was not the place I remembered as a child growing up. The big back yard shrunk considerably. New freeways and buildings were put up. Little tiny trees were now huge and overgrown. Time passed and things changed.
There are things we can take security in. One is Time. We can trust that in 24 hours a new day will greet us. We can schedule our lives around 7 days and call it a week. This is all part of a gift from God to bring consistency in our inconsistent lives.
The writer of Ecclesiastes has a beautifully written view of time in Hebrew poetry that reveals important truths of time. Time is in the hand of God. The question is, "Are we?" Whose clock are we going by? For we can rush around with wrist watches on and I-phones, but as far as eternity goes, many don't have the foggiest idea of what time it is. Solomon explains some things from God's time table.
There is a right time for doing things, and there are wrong times for doing things. All things are under God's sovereignty. As hard as man tries to control his life he is not its master. There are reasons for things that happen to us.
Application: Are you walking in the plan and will of God for your life? Are you running and functioning according to God's time table or yours?
Prayer: Lord, show me how to use my time well with my eye on eternity and live in a way that makes the best use of time to Your Glory.
