Of Time and a Season Part 5

[HKHaugan]

Of Time and a Season   Part 5

Let’s continue our trek through Ecclesiastes 3. When we use the Hebrew Scripture it’s important, we follow Jesus’ lead and see everything in a spiritual perspective. When Jesus talks about time it is always in a spiritual context. When He teaches, it is the same. His miracles and healings are loaded with spiritual intention. When Jesus becomes central it is the Holy Spirit who brings Him into our minds and hearts. The primary purpose of the Holy Spirit is to bring His Word to life in us so that we mature through our relationship with Him.

So, what could time and seasons mean spiritually? From what I’ve written so far it has to be apparent that thinking spiritually, trusting spiritually and acting spiritually (belief, trust and faith respectively) fulfill the born-again nature in us.  How far mankind has drifted from the consciousness of God and turned time into a new slavery and don’t even realize how much we worship our clock and calendar. Everything is calculated based on those two inventions. Where were they in the Garden of Eden? What Adam and Eve lost for us was spiritual time and timing. Jesus came to recover them for us. It takes a tectonic shift in our hearts from the fissure of frightened aloneness and its pride to spiritually relational oneness in Christ that only the Holy Spirit can bring. He restores our relationship with God and others through Jesus. The fissure of sin was bridged through the Cross. Now Jesus is the one who shifts the heart back into its spiritual balance.

I read a catchy thought recently, “God created the wolf. Man created the dog.” It might follow to consider God created relational life out of His love. Man created religion in it many forms out of sin based on a time and a clock. God created man in His image giving him an eternal identity and the ability to multiply relationally.   Man shifted everything from relational living to survival between life and death. Man created the calendar and the clock to make and measure his identity apart from God. Personal success and ownership became his gods. The real God offered man a relationship with Him in Jesus to restore his spiritual creativity so he could redeem the use of calendar and the clock to love Him and each other. Born into the seasons of aloneness, pride, fear and emotional confusion, self-centeredness became his timing into death. This is the human condition without God.

That brings us to the last part of vs.2, “a time to plant and a time to uproot.” God has given us a spiritual purpose. Using this farming picture, you can visualize the process of planting and harvesting. We are to plant and harvest. Every moment of our lives is a spiritual moment, a spiritual event, a spiritual opportunity. We plant a spiritual seed in the relational moments given us. Our personal experiences are always seeds the Lord can use wherever we are. Our emotional crises, our economic downturns, our relational mistakes, our health issues are spiritually tuned in to the way we allow the Spirit to move through them.

Each of us has experiences that, spiritually interpreted, can be shared. That is the time to plant. If you carry this further, the seeds take time to develop, the season of growing. The ground they’re in has to be watered and fertilized. That’s where the love, grace and truth of God are follow-ups to the planting. This is where Scripture helps us nurture others through the growing season (1Cor.3:6). You see it in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk.10:30) ministering to the half dead man and following that up by going back to see him and taking care of the cost. The old teaching “make a friend, be a friend and bring a friend to Christ” is a purposed principle. By the way, it applies as well to long time believers with each other. Actually, it’s always a season to plant and the times happen whenever we meet someone. Spiritual gifts open the door for the times and spiritual fruit give us the seasons in which they work.   There is a time for everything and a season for every activity...A time to plant and a time to harvest.”