Michael Kelley - The Right Time God - Ecclesiastes 3:1-15

certainly my honor to be here thank you for the kind invitation allowing to open up God's word uh with you i' love for us to pray together as we do that so Lord You're you are you're a good father and you're the kind of father who knows how to give fish and knows how to give bread even sometimes when we find ourselves asking for snakes and Stones you're the good father that knows the difference Lord this morning as we open our word we recognize that we open it together with a variety of of different needs

we look across the world see a myriad of circumstances and so we pray that you would do what only you could do which is make this word come alive in our hearts again speak to us in individual ways Minister encourage convict and we pray Lord that you would speak through what you have spoken we trust you to do it we ask it would be done in the name of and for the glory of Jesus Amen Dr aen introduce me my name is Michael Kelly and uh again I'm so glad to be able to be here

with you you know uh for our purposes here this morning there is one other thing that I wanted to tell you about myself which I think will help inform our time a little bit and uh and that is that I uh part of my personality is that I love to make lists not just like like love and and maybe not even love but need to make lists so even right now in my bag there is a folder a paper folder not just on my phone there is a paper tangible folder that's put together that has

a list of stuff in it it was a list it's the name of the person that's picking you up in the airport this is what time you're supposed to be there man I love that it's great it's a list in fact if you were to look at my office right now in my trash can there are at least five different lists in my trash can right now one for every single day of the week and if you were to look at the list that was made on Friday you would see that the last item on

Friday's agenda was to make the lists for next week so that's just how I roll it's what I do and in fact I love list so much that if I do something if I do something that was not on my list I will write it on my list just for the sheer pleasure of Crossing it off the list I mean there is no better feeling in the world than the one that I get relatively uncommonly but to look at the end of the day and see a list of paper that has lines drawn through it

because that means these are all the things that I have accomplished it's a little OCD I know but I think the reason why I have such a compulsion for list other than the fact then I am a little bit OCD is because lists are the only way that I can adequately and appropriately deal with the issue of time which is an issue that all of us have that it feels like I'm sure to me and to many of you that time is a resource of great scarcity in life right now and it's a resource that

all of us have an equal amount of there's 24 hours in a day nobody gets a little bit of extra time and for us it's left as managers to decide what we're going to do with the hours that we have been given now time is one of the subjects that the teacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes es looks to and says vanity meaningless and that's the text that I would love for us to look at together today it comes from the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 and I'm going to be reading Ecclesiastes chapter 3 beginning

in verse 1 and reading through verse 15 this is what the teacher says in regard to time there's an occasion for everything and a time for every activity under Heaven a time to give birth 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 up a time to weep and a time to dance a time to throw stones and a time to gather Stones a time to embrace and a time to avoid embracing

a time to search and a time to count as lost a time to keep and a time to throw away a time to tear and a time to sew a time to be silent and a time to speak A Time To Love love and a time to hate a time for war and a time for Beast what does the worker gain from his struggles I have seen the task that God has given people to keep them occupied he has made everything appropriate in its time he has also put everything in its time he has also

put eternity in their hearts but man cannot discover the work God has done from beginning to end and I know there is nothing better for them to rejoice and enjoy the good life it is also the gift of God whenever anyone eats drinks and enjoys all his efforts I know that all God does will last forever there is no adding to or taking away from it God works so that people will be in awe of him whatever is has already been and whatever will be already is God repeats what is passed now I wonder if

there's anybody here who has a song in their heads right now right A Time To Live and a time to die a time for this and a time for that the birds in 1965 popularized this passage from Ecclesiastes with their song and if you remember what the tune sounds like it's a pretty easygoing kind of Melody I mean it's something that you would put on and play on a lazy Saturday afternoon it just kind of makes you feel good you can sit back and listen to it it's got a real slow easy melodic vibe to

it but I'm not sure that that's the tone that the teacher intended when he wrote these words that I think if it fits contextually with the rest of Ecclesiastes he didn't intend for us to look at these words in that smooth melodic easygoing kind of nature but instead to see it with the same sort of frustration with which he saw everything else Under the Sun that is Vanity so I wonder maybe if we could sort of reimagine Ecclesiastes chapter 3 in our modern vernacular to help us get the sense of the tone that the teacher

is after here so it might sound something like this you know there's a time for a healthy pregnancy and there's a time for miscarriage there's a time when you can have fun with your kids and then there's a time when they're too cool to be seen with you as teenagers there's a time when your babies are in diapers and then there's a time when you wonder if you can afford all the groceries to feed them there's a time when you're earning a salary and then there's a time when you wonder if you've saved enough for

retirement there's a time for chemotherapy and there's a time for remission there's a time for diplomacy in the world and then there's a time for unavoidable conflict so when you read it like that you sort of feel it like that then you can say along with the teacher vanity we're prisoners of this thing 24 hours in a day and time even now is ticking on your life at both a macro and a micro level at the micro level this singular moment right here is a moment of your day that you have spent doing this thing

in instead of doing something else but in a macro level this singular moment is a moment of your life that you can never have back and you are now one moment further toward death than you were just a second ago vanity the clock ticks talk tick over and over again and part of the issue that we have with time is that we live our lives in a reactive posture when it comes to time see all of those events that the teacher mentioned right there all of those events are events primarily that happen to us so

we spend our whole lives trying to figure out how do we appropriately react to all these individual seasons of life that we find ourselves in we are sort of victims of time in that sense and when we realize that we have this reactive posture it gives us the uncomfortable realization that we really don't control anything that is happening now that's not to say that we don't want control and that we don't seek after control because we certainly do that we put the seat belt on and we eat the organic food and we invest in the

401K and we buy the health insurance we do all of these things but when it comes right down to it all of those things are really fooling us into the impression that we can actually exercise control over the circumstances of life we can't vanity but one of the other problems we have with time is that when we realize that we have a ticking clock a limited resource and we realize that we are living reactively inside of this ticking clock resource there's something that Wells up inside of us that says this isn't right it shouldn't be

like this this is what the teacher acknowledges when he says In this passage that even though there's a time for all of these things that God has put eternity in our hearts so we get the sense that there's something else there's something other and that's why we're super frustrated at our inability to take hold of this resource called time it's because in our hearts we know that we were meant for something more than just to live inside of these constraints this is what CS Lewis would say about that longing inside of us he would say

if I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world and if none of my Earthly Pleasures satisfy it it does not prove that the universe is a fraud probably Earthly Pleasures were never meant to satisfy it but only arouse it and to suggest the real thing he would describe then this sense of longing this sense of something else that we have inside of us this eternity in our hearts as the scent of a flower not yet found the echo of a

tune we have not heard news from a country that we have never visited this is the eternity that the Lord has planted in our hearts one of the problems with us understanding the nature of this eternity that's put in our hearts is that many of us I think have a misguided interpretation of what eternity really is see for the longest time in my own life I thought about eternity as a line like time exists on a line and Eternity are those arrows at the end of the line so that there's eternity past and that's represented

by this line This arrow on the line that goes far in that direction with a never stopping point and The Eternity and the future is represented by the arrow on the other side that goes all the way in the other direction with a never stopping in the future but that's a misunderstanding of Eternity eternity is not being on that line and going on forever eternity is escaping from the line entirely because that's the arena in which God dwells and does his work this is one of the reasons I think why in The Book of Revelation

that we see Jesus called the lamb slain before the foundation of the world and it's the reason why Paul in Romans chapter 8 can look out at Christians and use terms like Sanctified and glorified in the past tense even though we know that those things to us happen in the future tense it's because God who exists outside of the constraints of time all of these things have already happened from his perspective in fact God's very name points us to this reality that when the Israelites needed to know the name of God the way that he

responded was with the present tense form of the word be so God essentially said you want to know my name my Essential character you want to know the one word summation of who I am I am the god who is not The God Who Was Not The God Who will be but the God who is right now all the time there's this kind of Eternity is in our heart hearts and so if we want to escape from the vanity of time the only way we can do that is by looking to the one who exists

outside of time or to put it in the language of the teacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes the way that you escape from the vanity that is under the sun is to look outside from Under the Sun that's the only way that it can happen see time is a created entity just like everything else so God thought up time in the same way that he thought up the ante eater the zebra the rock the hamburger whatever else there is these are created entities such as the fact with time so God exists and rules over time

in the same way that he rules over his creation and we can look to the one who rules over time the one outside from Under the Sun to escape the vanity of time that's under the sun right now one of the wonderful things about this passage in Ecclesiastes is that it points us not just to the futility of time in our respect it also reminds us of the great purposes that God has in time see in English you you might know through your studies that in English I mean we see the word time uh repeated

over and over again In this passage time for this time for that time for this time for this in the Bible there are two words that are often used to represent time one of the words is Kronos this is the Greek word and Kronos means like a specific moment in time so if you wanted to know what time it was you would say what Kronos is it right is what it means and then there's another word chyos that doesn't mean a specific moment in time instead it's meant to represent the convergence of events for a

specific purpose purpose now the Old Testament was written in Hebrew the New Testament was written in Greek but the Greek translation of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint and if you look in the septu agent the Greek word that's repeated over and over again for time in ecclesiast chapter Ecclesiastes chapter 3 is not Kronos it's chyos so from the teacher's perspective he's not just talking about there's a time for you to do all these things a time to live and a time to die a time to PL and a time to reap a time

you know for birth a time for death there's not he's not just talking about you he's saying there is a Kronos time so there is a way that you can view Ecclesiastes chapter 3 through the Divine lens of God so that in God's active timing there truly is divine meaning and purpose behind all of these Seasons so while for us all of these Seasons we react to because we live caught in the vanity of time on the line from God God's chyros timing when he looks at the way he is directing and moving and bringing

factors together none of these things these seasons are outside of his control so the question then for us becomes do we really believe that God is actively involved in the universe and we would of course say yeah we do absolutely we're Christians this is what we believe we're not deists I mean deism is is is sort of this offshoot of faith that would say that the Lord God is kind of a cosmic clock maker who at the beginning of time set the world in motion and wound it up and then just sort of took his

hands off and stepped back and let everything run its course and we would say we're not deists we're Christians we believe that the Lord does not have a passive stance when it comes to the events of human history and the events in our lives we believe that he's working and active in the midst of all those things but do we really and do the people that we minister to really believe that perhaps not and maybe one of the ways that we see that we don't really believe that nearly as strongly as we think we do

is through things like the way we pray let me give you an example uh we often if someone is hurting if someone is suffering if someone you know needs something from the Lord when we pray for that person often times we will say something like Lord I pray that you would be with so and so now I get what we mean when we say that when we say I pray that you would be with soand so what we mean is I pray that you would deliver them I pray that you would comfort them I pray

that you would make known to them that you are indeed with them that you would comfort them in their Affliction but that's not what we say we say would you be with them which begs the question on the backside where has he been up till now if we're asking God now to come and be with this person has he been on a break has he been absent is he not well informed about everything that's going on in their lives it points to the fact that our words reveal many times that we don't truly believe in

God's active working in our world but this passage says that all of these seasons are chyos in nature we're not on some outof control train kening toward an unknown end instead even though we are reactive on the line of Eternity feeling this unction in us for the eternity that's been implanted in our hearts that God exists outside of it and is moving and working and shaping and orchestrating events in ways that we cannot possibly comprehend and the true measure of whether we believe that God is actually active is not in our words but in our

own activity let me take you to the New Testament for an example Jesus told a parable about a master who went away and entrusted his servants with a certain level of talents and he gave each servant a different level of talents and as he was away the servants used the things that the Lord the the master had given them he used them each servant used them in different ways and the first servant used the talents the resources that they had been given to turn a greater investment and the second one did the same and the

third one buried the talents because he was afraid of the master and then when the master came back for the first two he gave accolades well done good and faithful servant but for the third one he he was cast out God expects that we are active with the resources that he has entrusted to us so when we truly believe that the Lord has not taken his hands off of humanity that the world is not spinning out of control when we honestly believe that God is Not only here with us but these actually actively involved in

the Affairs of humankind the way that we measure how deep deeply that resonates with us in our souls is how active we are in investing for his kingdom that if we're active in sharing the gospel that if we're active in generosity that if we're active in Ministry that if we're active in giving that if we're active in listening that if we're active in going and doing and being that if we are active we demonstrate that we believe that our God is orchestrating opportunities for us and we just have to take hold of them another passage

in the New Testament I love in this respect is from Ephesians chapter 5 this is Paul the Apostle you'll remember this passage in Ephesians chapter 5 before he gets to the part where he talks about husbands and wives and marriage he talks a little bit about time and he encourages the Believers at Ephesus he says take every opportunity to make the most of the time that you've been given this is from Ephesians 5:15 he says be very care careful then how you live or walk not as unwise but as wise making the most of every

opportunity because the days are evil now we're tempted sometimes I think to read that passage where Paul says be very careful how you walk to treat it like we're walking through a mindfield okay so Paul wants us here to be very careful about the way that we're walking through the world we got to be careful because we don't want to step in the wrong spot and get any sin on our shoes this is not what he's saying Paul's not advocating that passage for a defensive carefulness he's advocating for an offensive carefulness instead of walking carefully

like this to the world Paul is saying as you walk and live out the days the time Keep Your Head on a swivel because you are confident that God is actively engineering circumstances in your regular everyday lives for the sake of his kingdom you better have your eyes open if you want to redeem every single moment of time your confidence in God's Sovereign activity will be measured by your activity for the sake of his kingdom but there's one more question that needs to be answered I believe about this passage because what we've said so far

is that we exist on the line and when our focus is just on the line of time that we say with the teacher vanity meaningless vanity And yet when we look outside of the line and see a god that is active in engineering circumstances that we can overcome the sense of vanity and meaningless and instead redeem the time that God has given us for the sake of his kingdom but the question that we have left is this how do we know that this God who exists outside of time is actually for us how do we

know that he exists outside of time and how do we know that all of these circumstances that he's engineering are actually for our good how do we know because frankly if you look around at your life and you look around at the world outside of here everything that you see seems to contradict that message the circumstances of Our Lives the circumstances of the nation the circumstances of the world seem to contradict the fact that there is a God who is in control and a God who loves his people how do we know in the way

that we know that this God who lives outside of under the sun the way that we know that this God not only is powerful but also loving is not by looking to our circumstances it's by looking to Jesus because in Jesus we see the God who is always on time when we look to Jesus we see that there was 400 years of Silence in between the end of the Old Testament and the start of the new test this was 400 years of people suffering 400 years of unclaimed promises 400 years of generation after generation asking

each other has God left us and abandoned us and yet in Galatians chapter 4 Paul tells us that at just the right time when the time came to completion that God sent his son born of a woman under the law to redeem those under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons and so Jesus was born and then Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and for 30 years he matured and made himself ready to the point where maybe some were wondering is this ever going to happen is he ever going to be anything

more than a carpenter son is anything good ever going to come out of Nazareth and then at just the right time Jesus presented himself as the Lamb of God that would take away the sins of the world and then after 3 years of ministry and teaching and miracles Jesus was arrested and he was taken to the cross and if there was ever a moment when it looked like that this was kening out of control when Jesus was crucified brutally at the hands of sinful men we find that even this happened at just the right time

for at just the right time while we were still helpless at the appointed moment Christ died for the Godly and then after he died he was in the grave and those were three days of darkness three days of questions three days of wondering whether or not all the mission had gone arai three days of disciples and Believers wondering if anything would ever be the same three days of going back to fishing three days of grieving and yet at just the right time Jesus burst open the tomb and rose from the dead and now we find

ourselves here today some 2,000 years after that when we look out just like they did in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning and we say will it ever be different will all the bad things ever come untrue will God ever come for his people will Redemption of us and creation ever really happen and yet we know even now that the son stands ready at the right hand of the father waiting for the father to say at just the right time go back friends this is not a message this morning about making sure you don't

miss your moment and it's not a message about squeezing all the life you can out of the time that you've been given this is a message this morning when you feel the vanity of time when you feel reactive to circumstances when you feel like it's kening out of control to look to the God who is not under the Sun but sits above it and whose time is always right no matter what time it is for us Lord we pray this morning for a vision of time like this that you would help us by your grace

Lord we feel it we feel it this morning this eternity that you have put in our hearts it's there Lord it is it's there we feel it as we think about this limited resource that you've given us and Lord we confess collectively together this morning the best way that we know how that even though we are reactive you are proactive that you are the great engineer of time and circumstances and we pray Lord that you would help help us overcome our unbelief we pray by your grace that we would look to you confident that it

is always the right time with you even when it seems like the wrong time with us help us holy spirit we pray to reaffirm the fact that we trust you you are the god that's always on time we pray that it would be so in the name of Jesus Amen