The Appointed Time

Dear lovely people,

I read in Ecclesiastes 3:1 “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.”  

This New Year is certainly going to be a year of self-actualization for many. Many projects started in the past years are waiting completion this year and many more people have made great plans to push at all fronts towards their fondest dreams.  Will it all depend on your human capacity? Are you sure that working hard, thinking positively, not giving up will be enough?

You need some of the important tools God has placed at your disposal one of them being time. In His infinite wisdom, God created time.  He provided His children with a measuring tool.  With it, we measure distances.  It allows us to plan for the future and learn from the past.  Farmers look to the seasons in order to prepare their fields.  There is a rhythm to our existence while we are on earth. Time as short as a millisecond can be measured, as well as hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades and so on.  The ability to measure our progress over a period of time can be motivating and encouraging or discouraging and devastating.  Either way, time serves a useful purpose.

Irrespective of the dreams we have, they will amount to nothing if not associated to the appointed time that is actually an important part of our lives. Whether at the end of this year or ever later, the most important question you will have to answer to yourself and before God is, “What have you done?” To God, every purpose of His has a time. Isaiah 55: 8 – 9 tells us that: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  Verse 11 further states: “so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

God made a promise to Abraham, that he would be the father of a great nation. He and his wife Sarah experienced a time of barrenness. It appeared as if the promise of having a child would never come to pass. They tried to manufacture their own deliverance by producing a child through Sarah’s servant Hagar. But at a set time, a season appointed by God, even though Abraham was 100 years old, and his wife Sarah was 90, God decided that the child Issac would be born. Issac was God’s promise. He was a part of God’s master plan.

Sometimes when you are pestering God concerning a particular thing and He does not grant it immediately, it is because His ways are higher than your ways and He knows the best time to grant your request. At times when it seemed as if God was not moving, it was not that He was not concerned. It could be that the time was not yet right. When the mother of Jesus told the people at the marriage at Cana of Galilee to approach Him for wine, He said to her, “Woman, my hour has not come,” and when His hour came, He said, “Father, this is the hour. Glorify Yourself.”