Friday, January 1, 2016

TIME

Friday, January 1, 2016


Devotion VIDEO here

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.  A time to be born and a time to die.  A time to plant and a time to harvest.  A time to kill and a time to heal.  A time to tear down and a time to build up.  A time to cry and a time to laugh.  A time to grieve and a time to dance.  A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.  A time to embrace and a time to turn away.  A time to search and a time to quit searching.  A time to keep and a time to throw away.  A time to tear and a time to mend.  A time to be quiet and a time to speak.  A time to love and a time to hate.   A time for war and a time for peace.  What do people really get for all their hard work?   I have seen the burden God has placed on us all.  Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time.  He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.  So I concluded there is nothing better than to be happy and enjoy ourselves as long as we can.  And people should eat and drink and enjoy the fruits of their labor, for these are gifts from God.     
Ecclesiastes 3:1-13(NLT)

A person would have had to be living on the moon to have not heard the expression, there’s a time for everything.  One writer characterized the “seven seasons” of life this way:

1.     Spills of Infancy – Everything goes to the floor as you play the game of “I drop; you pick up”.

2.     Drills of childhood – Spelling drills, multiplication drills, bible drills - The lessons drilled into your head by your parents and teachers.

3.     Thrills of the Teen Years - The feeling of immortality, roller coaster rides, dating, and acne.

4.     Bills of Adult living – Work, bills, Marriage, bills, buying a house bills; car, bills, raising children bills, bills and lots of bills.  I asked a friend who had just become a father for the third time how it feels to be a father of three; he replied, EXPENSIVE!

5.     Ills of the Hills - When the excitement of the midlife crisis lands you in the hospital.

6.     The Pills of Over the Hill - One for arthritis; one for high blood pressure; one for this and two for that.

7.     Wills of Old Age – I will get up, I will get up, No, I will not get up. Uhmm, can I get some help?  I need to get up![2]

Everyone can identify with those ills, pills and wills.  We laugh, but only because they are our common experience.  There is as much frustration with being in one stage, knowing that the next is coming.  In fact, we know that is the case, as verse 11 tells us [God]…has planted eternity in the human heart.… 

We are different from the plants, insects and animals in that we sense the existence of time and eternity, and the abstractness of God.  Animals and plant life simply respond to the moment and its environs.  If there is food they eat it and enjoy it; if there are competitors for the food, they fight for it.  They exist and reproduce without regard to antiquity or posterity.  They are the true existentialists, living in the moment.

Humans are different; we ask the question, why?  A three year old can ask that question five million times from the back seat of the car!  Humans can focus on eternity and we want to know the meaning of life; we want to know why we are here.  We search for that meaning, and when we cannot know it, unfortunately we manufacture it. 

Our American slogan:  “In God We Trust” is just that – a slogan.  Sounds good, but if we only say it, our real trust is fully leaning on our ingenuity, imagination and technology.  It’s never what we say, but rather it’s what we do which determines where the real stuff of our living takes place. 

For You Today


If God wills, you’ve got 366 days this year…that’s a little over half-a-million minutes. 

It would be good to trust God in all of them.

You chew on that out on that Rocky Road today…and have a joy-filled and blessed day!



[1] Title image:  Salvador Dalí [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
[2] Sheila Crowe in "Changing Seasons", Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, SermonCentral.com

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