We continue in our September series on the Discipline of Time and pray you are encouraged as you both witness and rest in God’s sovereign timing over the details of your own life.
The ninetieth Psalm expresses the human sense of time and its awesome swiftness and seriousness yet looks with hope at the timelessness of God and the promise of future gladness.
Before the mountains were brought forth . . . thou art God . . .
in thy sight a thousand years are as yesterday . . .
they are like a dream at daybreak . . .
our years die away like a murmur
Seventy years is the span of our life,
eighty if our strength holds;
the hurrying years are labour and sorrow,
so quickly they pass and are forgotten . . .
Teach us to order our days rightly,
that we may enter the gate of wisdom . . .
Satisfy us with thy love when morning breaks,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
Repay us days of gladness for our days of suffering . . .
It is wonderfully stabilizing and quieting to recall some of the ways in which God’s timing is seen in the great Bible stories. Events the world would dismiss as mere coincidence turn out to have been synchronized with utmost precision by the Ruler of time. When Abraham’s servant went to find a wife for Isaac, he made the camels kneel by the well outside the city and was praying for guidance to the right girl. Before he finished praying, there she was.
When Ruth went to glean in the fields behind the reapers, it “happened” that she was in the strip that belonged to Boaz, and she appeared there just as he came out from Bethlehem. He became her “kinsman-redeemer.”
The boy David, sent with provisions for his brothers who were soldiers, arrived at the encampment as the Philistine host was shouting the war cry. David ran to the ranks and was just in time to hear the giant of Gath, Goliath, thunder his challenge: “Here and now I defy the ranks of Israel. Give me a man, . . . and we will fight it out.” And David, though only a youth, “ruddy and comely,” defied him in the name of the Lord of Hosts and sank a stone from his slingshot into Goliath’s forehead . . .
“My times are in thy hand” has become a part of my life. When the Lord has left me in an agony of waiting over some decision, these words have put me at rest. His timing is always perfect, though it seldom seems so to me, for my temperament longs for previews of coming attractions. “Wait for the Lord; be strong, take courage, and wait for the Lord” is the word I need many times.
**Excerpt originally published in Joyful Surrender, pp. 96-98