With all the noise in the world, do you hear the voice of God? Your calendar tells you what to do, but do you remember who you are? Being comes before doing. This is a call to put first things first. Return to the Lord with this daily pattern of prayer and devotion. Set aside this time as a sanctuary. Find a space free of distraction and follow this pattern.
Invocation
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Invitation
“You have made us for Yourself. And our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” (Augustine)
Creator of all things, hear my voice, for you have made it. You who live in heaven, hear my prayer from earth. I am one person in one little town in one corner of your vast creation. Of all the people on the planet, hear me also. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Confession
O God, in the beginning you made us good, even “very good.” I admit the many things in my life that are far from your good intent. I try to change, and then find myself in the same place once again. Lord, you know me. Have mercy. Make me right. Forgive my wickedness. Bring me back to good, as you intended from the beginning. Amen.
Word: Acts 1:6-7
““So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.’”
Meditation: Times and Seasons
Today’s meditation is written by Megan Roegner.
When God creates the lights in the heavens to separate day from night in Genesis, he also intends them to be “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years” (1:14). As Ecclesiastes 3:1 tells us, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” God created time because he knows that we humans, in our mortality, need the boundaries of hours and days and months to direct our thoughts and actions.
I am a very time-oriented person, probably to a fault. It’s nearly impossible for me to show up fashionably late to a party, for example, because punctuality compels me. When my oldest child was a newborn, I drove myself, and my husband, crazy by obsessively counting the hours of sleep I got versus the hours of sleep he got because I wanted to make sleeping time “fair.” I imagine that part of the reason that I enjoy teaching is the tidiness of a bell schedule and the neatness of my semester calendar, which parcels the enormity of the task of educating the next generation into a series of due dates.
Give me a task and a timeframe, and I am tempted to believe I can accomplish anything. Yet, sometimes I struggle with anxiety, and most of this anxiety is rooted in time: not enough of it, too much of it, controlling it. The idea of control seems to be at the heart of Acts 1:6-7. When Jesus ascends to heaven, he gives the church a task but not a timeframe. The disciples ask a fairly reasonable question: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?” When Jesus tells them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority,” perhaps he is reminding them that they are not the ones in control.
The problem I’ve found with trying to control time is that it makes you think in terms of the past and the future, rarely the present. The main objective becomes meeting a deadline instead of fully engaging in the task at hand. When Jesus tells us that “It is not for you to know” God’s timing, his church can focus on the needs of the present moment, to be his witnesses in every context, to respond to his commands with persistence but not the anxiety of being too late or too soon.
The paradox of God giving us an awareness of time but not binding us to it can remind us that, despite our passing mortality, ultimately, we are not temporary or temporal (Latin root word “tempus,” meaning time or season). We, like God’s kingdom, are made for eternity.
Dear Jesus, help you remember that you are always in control. Give us patience and peace in the midst of busy schedules.Help us remember that our days and weeks belong to you. Amen.
Benediction
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Rom. 11:33,36))