The Connection

"and came to His moment of accomplishment."

THE CONNECTION between heaven and earth is not fragile. Nor easily interrupted. God is not difficult to please nor testy. He isn’t an impatient Father, who is disturbed when we act out. His discipline is, instead, gentle, tender, and kind. What translators call “chastening” is a turn in the right direction. It is “not that way, this one,” and encouragement with His strength beneath us.

God is of infinite patience. We are supposed to be, because He lives in us, but we are not. So we can’t fathom His timing. Even teaching on timing drives us nuts. There is a Truth to it, though, that we must grasp. And it’s not an excuse God makes to “teach us something” but an awesome piece of the Word.

GOD CREATED TIME TO END TIME. In the beginning, He took six days to do what He could have done in seconds. And He set times and seasons through the movement of the sun and the moon (Genesis 1:14). He then committed Himself to work within time, although He is outside of it. His Son would be born during the Roman Empire, for instance, in a sliver of time when they owned the Jews and practiced crucifixion. God prophesied of it because He knows time.

Why does this matter? Because so much is lost on us, lost to us, from lack of time. We are either in a hurry and so push the clock, so to speak. Or we give up. We think God has disconnected from us, either because of our behavior or His mood. But I heard a Jew say it this way: “G_d made me, so He made me not only to endure, but to show Him on the earth.” We are here to be His hands and feet, he said. I would put it this way: We, each of us, have a plan for our life that He has written, and I, for one, am not going from the earth until it is accomplished. Nothing can take my life because it is entirely His.

I sat at the funerals of my uncles and saw this so clearly, how loved they were by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. All they’d accomplished in their many years, and in those moments, life all made sense. The process of time, why God works within time, and how blessed we are to endure. How connected we are to Him. Not that there aren’t days which are hard. But how well I can overcome them is because He is with me. Because Jesus gets us. He lived within time and came to His moment of accomplishment. He did that so He could live in me and walk with me every day. Yet it is so much greater than just a walk.

What God does in us upon salvation changes us from death to life. We become new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17). This needs to be said in churches on repeat. Salvation is the rebirth of the spirit of man (John 3:3), the real me. Sin killed us. God erases it and moves in, filling us with all that He is, never to leave us or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). But to be with us through eternity. Eternal life is length of life, but it is also quality of life. It is having abundant life across time. Forever. And this I will fully embrace, for every twenty-four hour period, every dark night, every beautiful sunrise.

Here is God’s promise: Seedtime and harvest, night and day, will never cease (Genesis 8:22) until He reforms this earth. For He has decreed the end of time. He began time on His terms. He ends it when the gospel has spread around the world (Matthew 24:14). And in that hour, there will be no more death, all sorrow and mourning will flee away (Revelation 21:4), and we will be together forever with the Lord.

But we are together forever now. Just be yourself, I say to those who will hear me. When time was at its darkest for me, I discovered God was there in even greater measure. When I acted out, when I wept.

And today, when I rejoice.

Photo by NIR HIMI on Unsplash


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com