Trust God's Timing

Ecclesiastes 3: 1-11 (NIV): There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:  a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,  a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent 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 workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

    God is a god of order, not chaos. Everything has a proper time and place. This is a well-known passage from Ecclesiastes, and was even the basis of a hit song in the 1960’s. The years seem like a cycle of seasons, holidays, and events at the time, but when we look back, we see each trip around the sun takes a year off of our lives. Each year is a reminder that we are just passing through in this life. This is not our permanent home. We will live the vast majority of our existence in the after-life. I will be in heaven with God, and I pray you will too.

    But God is not a slave to time. He created time, holds it in his hand, and lives outside of it. He never changes, never ages, never grows weary or old or impatient. He is an eternal being – something we can’t fully understand in this life.

    My question for us today is do we trust God’s timing? The Bible says, “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,” (Galatians 4:4). It is no big deal to us, looking back, but the people had been waiting for his birth for hundreds of years. There had been a 400-year silent period, when no prophets spoke. But Jesus was born at just the right moment.

    Trusting God means we trust his timing. We not only trust he will take care of us and watch over us, but he will do things at the right time. We grow so impatient, and that is natural, but faith allows us to wait on God. (Faith is supernatural, by the way, and we live at the intersection of the natural and the supernatural.) His timing is perfect; do we trust him?