Kingdom's Keys Fellowship

Where God's Kingdom Meets Man's Heart.

Of Time and a Season Part 12

“…a time to keep and a time to throw away…”

Our trek into spiritual reality is our most important journey. What we have to realize is we take that trek every day. We are born with invisible senses that we use all the time to live out our existence. Shallow or deep, broad or wide, personal or impersonal, our mind, our heart, our spirit are at work using belief, trust and faith as vehicles for the choices and decisions we make. We can’t escape those facts. We need to keep this basic principle of human nature before us: 100%, yes, one hundred percent of everything we do is motivated by what we can’t see.

In the case of this verse, ‘a time to keep’, is anything that happens in a particular moment where a choice is made. If we can see choice as an event then life is full of event-choices. A choice has a beginning, a period of time and an end. It can be as mundane as walking up and down a grocery aisle or as encompassing as a career choice. Whatever moment brings major or minor choices, they are events that make up who we are. They spring from the identity we have. So, what do we want to keep and what do we want to throw away?

Perhaps, like many of us, you’ve lived in the same house for a long time. That house and all it contained represents an accumulation of what you have experienced and who you are. But you’ve made the choice to move. What do you keep and what do you throw away? As you sort through it all from memory joggers, ‘keepsakes’, to the necessary, it all says something about who you are and want to be reminded of. It’s pictures, photo albums that bring back so much. It’s you in all the stuff.

Now shift that thought to your spiritual being. Your identity is being an image of God. What is in your spiritual garage and attic that you want to keep and what do you want to throw away? What have you accumulated over the years that compliments who you are and the things that don’t? Take those pictures and photos for instance. In your mind there is a memory bank of past personal and relational events for which you are thankful and those that surface an unwanted reminder of errors and unpleasantness. The thankful ones bring a sense of gratitude, peace and a desire to keep them embedded. They are the ‘you’ and they bring that deep sense of comfort. But the unwanted ones you would rather throw away. They are pictures with images of failure, mistakes and ‘shoulda-coulda-woulda’s.’ However, in our spiritual life those have a purpose. They keep us honest. If there are still behaviors that wiggle their way through them, they can be discarded by the Holy Spirit as He works His forgiveness into you mind and heart. Remember, the Lord is building character in us, spiritual character that will carry us into His Kingdom.

Paul gives us a good reminder when he writes that anyone in Christ is a new creation (2Cor.5:17). The old man died but has a way of jumping out of our memory to instigate guilt and despair. Memory repair is a spiritual process, but the Holy Spirit has a way of taking our faith and bringing grace as the healing agent to neutralize the ‘dead man’s memory intrusion. You can remember without the pain, which is replaced by gratitude, our grace enabled response.

There is a whole other battery of support for the new person in us, the spiritually reborn “I am.” It’s all there in Scripture. Jesus leads the way in the Gospels. Paul follows with his application of Jesus’ teachings. The entire set of Hebrew writings in the Old Testament outline the problem of sin and the need for God. Jesus brings Himself as the answer and the entry way into eternal wholeness in the New Testament. What we do is to keep Him and His Word and discard, throw away, all the worldly secular methods that do not include Him. Throw away religion and keep growing in a relationship with Jesus.

One more thing. We are not talking about secular time but God’s time and timing. Every choice is a reminder we are living in a new dimension, the spiritual dimension. We are new people with a new concept of time. In Christ that new time is the blessing and the old time is an honesty check to shift our mind to think spiritually, our heart to feel spiritually and our spirit to act Spiritudinally.

God’s time is our new context. Every moment, event, happening, meeting take place in His time frame and His season of faith, hope and love prevail through the leading of His Spirit through His Word.