Lesson One: Who Am I To Think I can Improve The Timing Of God?
/The Lessons I Learnt From Trying To Give A Homeless Man A Sandwich.
Lesson One: Who am I to think I can improve the timing of God
If you haven’t read the preceding post where I share the story of trying to give a homeless man a sandwich, I encourage you to take a few minutes and read about it here.
Who am I to think I can improve on the timing of God?
2 Peter 3:8 (Amp) says “The Lord does not delay [as though He were unable to act] and is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness..”
We exist within the constraints of time. We each only have 24 hours in a day making time a great equaliser for human beings. God, however, doesn’t exist within the same constraints. He might have created time but he is no respecter of the constraints of time when it comes to working out his love.
I think about all the examples in the Bible where it was inconvenient to the individual for God to disrupt their timing. Joseph, for example, being woken in the middle of the night from a dream telling him he had to get his family out of Bethlehem. Imagine if Joseph had decided to wait until morning!
Along the same vein, think of Mary. A young woman, on the verge of marriage and God “inconveniently” impregnates her with the Saviour of the world. I’m pretty Mary would have preferred to be spared the shame of being pregnant out of wedlock.
There are a multitude of examples within the Bible about God disrupting our timing. Some of these examples show us the consequences of ignoring God’s disruption. Others, like Mary, show us the blessing that can be found when we allow God to disrupt our lives.
I naively (and unconsciously) thought that I could improve on the timing of God when in reality what I was doing was stalling. I was procrastinating. I held off because I had to check that Graeme was there. When in actual fact I wasn’t willing to allow God to disrupt me in that moment.
2 Peter 3:8 talks of God’s perfect timing and how God does not delay, it’s not like he is unable to act in a certain situation. But I think that the only thing that would cause a delay with God is us. Our inability to respond when he calls directly affects the outcome. God can and will use anything, including our disobedience, for His glory and he is able to turn it around. I just wonder what could be achieved if we were willing to allow our lives to be interrupted in the first place.
How can we hold the tension of the ‘now’ and ‘not yet’?
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