LOVE, THE OPPOSITE OF SELFISHNESS
LOVE, THE OPPOSITE OF SELFISHNESS by: Pastor Raphael Giglio
Time and Purpose – Pastor Raphael
The passing of time is one of the most mysterious sensations we experience. Have you ever said or felt: “I can’t believe so many years have passed since … ” or “It seems like only yesterday when … ?”
It should feel ordinary and natural that time passes as it does because we’ve been on the same time clock our whole lives. Certain events and experiences, however, surprise us when significant amounts of time have passed.
As I write the date “2018,” just the appearance of the numbers looks daunting. Then when we consider that next year’s New Year’s Eve celebration will be welcoming in the third decade of the century, “The ’20s,” it’s crazy!
Watching the Winter Olympics with our 10-year-old twins is one of the reminders of how quickly time passes. They are now intelligent young people who have been waiting for the games to begin and are intrigued by every event.
Last time, however, it was all new to them, and we had to explain it in language they could understand. The time before that they were babies, and the next time they’ll be teenagers.
Here’s why: “We were made for eternity.” Not our bodies, of course, but our “hearts,” the spiritual essence of who we are. Solomon the Wise tells us in Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
Since God set eternity in our hearts, things that are temporal seem unusual or peculiar and sometimes hard with which to get comfortable. Ultimately, God desires for us to spend eternity with Him, but here in this life, we live under the “Tyranny of Chronology.”
The good news is that this is not a mistake. God has intentionally given us a limited amount of time to achieve a designated number of purposes. How do we know this? We look again to Solomon: “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
“A time for every purpose” means that each of the dots in the timeline of our lives has a specific purpose to be fulfilled. It makes it exciting to live out our days knowing that for each moment we live, God has plans for us to fulfill and purposes for us to achieve.
So, although I am still a bit uncomfortable with the rapid passing of time from year to year and decade to decade, I am also excited to discover God’s purposes for those times as each day begins.
My hope is to fulfill each one of them the best I can and to enjoy every passing moment along the way.