As we approach the conclusion of our series on the Discipline of Time, we offer two final devotionals. This week we focus on always having enough time to do the will of God.
The sum of our job here on earth is to glorify God. This was the sum of Jesus’s task as well. How did He do it? Shortly before He was crucified He said to His Father, “I have glorified thee on earth by completing the work which thou gavest me to do.”
There were endless demands on Jesus’s time. People pressed on Him with their needs so that He and His disciples had not leisure even to eat, and He would go away into the hills to pray and be alone. At times the disciples came to Him with reproach because He was not available when needed. There must have been, everywhere He went, those who wanted to be healed who could not get to Him because of the crowds, or who learned too late that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, or who had no one to carry them must have left behind, how much more that He “could have” done. There must have been things, also, that Jesus Himself would have liked to do during those three packed years of His public ministry, but He was a man, with a man’s limitations of time and space. Yet He took time to rest, withdrawing to the hills to pray alone and sometimes taking His disciples to lonely places where they were free of the crowds. Still He was able to make that amazing claim, “I have finished the work You gave me to do.” This was not the same as saying He had finished everything He could possibly think of to do or that He had done everything others had asked. He made no claim to have done what He wanted to do. The claim was that He had done what had been given.
This is an important clue for us. The work of God is appointed. What was given to the Son to do was the will of the Father. What is given to us to do is also His will.
There is always enough time to do the will of God. For that we can never say, “I don’t have time.” When we find ourselves frantic and frustrated, harried and harassed and “hassled,” it is a sign that we are running on our own schedule, not on God’s.
**Excerpt originally published in Joyful Surrender, pp 102-104