The Lord's Time and Our Time

[HKHaugan]

‘Now,’ The Lord’s Time and Our Time

‘Now’ is the present, the moment, the conscious awareness that we are.  When Jesus lifted His eyes to Heaven and prayed, “Father, the hour has come.”---this was his recognition that there is a conscious sense of being in the ‘now.’  However, His human time was to become a spiritual time; chronos to Kairos.  ‘Now’ was on the verge of being transformed into eternity. Jesus was conscious of Himself, His Father, His Spirit and what His task was, His destiny had arrived, His Cross awaited, His death a reality to be faced, His aloneness to be isolated and judged.  No court of appeals, no second chance, no judicial, social or religious forgiveness, no last-minute rescue team or reprieve to save Him from an undeserved death He alone could and would experience.   

‘Now’ is the key word. Now is a point in time when clocks, calendars and dates have no ultimate authority.  ‘Now’ is about choice, decision and the faith it takes to make them.  ‘Now’ is what our past sets up and our future awaits, and the present is.  Jesus knew them all not as an intellectual conclusion but as a challenge in His heart to belief, trust and faith.  He was in the ‘now,’ His ‘now.’ There was no one to turn to but His Father in Heaven whom His physical body could not see but the One to whom His Spirit pointed, the One in whom He believed and trusted and in whom He made His choices and decisions.  He believed, trusted and chose faith in someone He could not physically see in a ‘now’ moment.  His ‘life’ was a ‘now’ moment.

Why this destiny for an innocent man whose only message was to love God and one another?  He is the only one in history who made sense of the ‘now’ by lifting every moment as a spiritual decision moment.  Each moment is a spiritual moment where choice is not just my choice but a choice in the invisible to bring spiritual life to shape our personal and relational life, spiritual reality.  He lived in the ‘chronos’ but made choices in the ‘Kairos.’  Each one of us is a personal and relational being living in a ‘now’ that starts in the one and ends in the other…that is, if we choose to see them for what they are. 

There’s always a choice and decision to be made.  He showed that the last choice you make is always the first choice shaping your future. 

That’s the ‘why’ for Jesus saying, ‘Now is the hour.’  Now is always there and the relationship we have with God is processing our ‘now’ as Jesus did when He said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”   His Cross was His perfect faith, Kairos time .  Our cross is the faith to die to what inhibits us, sin, which influences us to do life ‘my way’ without God our Creator, chronos time. 

When Jesus rose from the dead, He gave us a spiritual relationship with Him where every ‘now’ moment presented a spiritual choice to believe, trust and have faith to act for Him.  This is not about being faithful but being full of faith, not spiritual but full of the Spirit, not graceful but full of grace, not being loving but being full of love.  It’s not about my intention to be good for Him but about His intention to be good through me.  They all come from Him.  This was the way of Jesus, the truth about Jesus and the life in Jesus.  ‘Now’ is our hour of choice He made for us by His Kairos choice of six human hours on the Cross for His Father and the 7^th a Kairos spiritual hour of the Resurrection for us.