Right on God’s Schedule
On any given Sunday, this room is filled with 21st-century humans who often find themselves frustrated by God’s sense of timing.
We make our plans. We keep our calendars. And God doesn’t seem to regularly work on our schedule.
You might be ready right now for that next step in life — that job, or for a spouse, or for a child, or for the children to grow up. Maybe you’re not settled in your current location, and God hasn’t yet opened the door to move. Or he took your father away too soon, or mother, or friend. He’s left you too long in that dead-end job. Or too long with your sickness or disability or depression or uncertain diagnosis. Or for the salvation of an unbelieving friend or family member.
One special challenge for us as Christians in the modern world is recalibrating our sense of timing with God’s. Or at least humbling ourselves to acknowledge (1) that God’s sense of timing is not beholden to ours and (2) that God’s sense of timing is better, ten thousand times better, than ours — no matter how often we forget it.
So, I don’t know what your particular chronological frustration is right now, but the exhortation this morning is this, in the words of 1 Peter 5:6: humble yourself under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you.
I promise you this: If you are in Christ, you will be spectacularly exalted. Your final rescue and deliverance is secure. And every desire you have right now that makes waiting on God’s sense of timing painful will have its perfect fulfillment in either exactly what you imagine, or more likely in something beyond, and far better, than what you imagine.
Let’s pray.
Prayer of Confession
Father in heaven, you know our frame. You know we are dust. You know we are small, that our lives are a vapor. And in addition to our finitude, we are sinners. Not only is our vision nearsighted but it is skewed. Our sense of timing is both limited and fallen.
And Father, so much in our world today conditions and reinforces our arrogance in our own sense of timing. We dare to think that you owe us anything, including acting according to our plans and schedule. We become impatient with you. We shake our fist at you. Or just tap our watches.
We need to come awake to the depths of our pride and presumption. And so we linger here in the sequence of our worship as we confess these sins and others in the quiet of this moment…
