Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.
Scripture- “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.” – 2 Peter 3:8-10
Insight- Is it just me, or does it feel like everything is speeding up? I can’t shake the feeling I have deep in the pit of my stomach that tells me that time feels like it is speeding up and compressing. No matter how much time I think I have to accomplish my daily goals, it never seems as if it is enough. Distractions to the left of me, distractions to the right, distractions everywhere I turn. Distracted drivers make it hard to drive anywhere without feeling very vulnerable. Impatient shoppers pushing forward in line, impatient clients wanting answers sooner than humanly possible, impatient bosses wanting results before the time it takes to set up your laptop. Wall street demands growth, main street demands happiness, and politicians demand loyalty or threaten extreme circumstances for those who disagree. Everything seems so fast, so hurried and so thoughtless. Whether your the richest man in the world like Elon Musk, or you’re the poor kid digging through a trash heap in Calcutta, India we all are in a race against time. We all have the same challenge of not knowing when our last breath on earth will be, so we are all frantically trying to get all we can get out of this life before our time expires. But is this the right way to live? Do we have any alternatives to help give us a more healthy perspective that seems to slow time down? Luckily, we do have a place we can turn to put things back into perspective and see the world through a proper lens- and that is in the Bible.
Here above from 2 Peter, we learn that God’s timing is very different than our limited understanding. In God’s kingdom, “a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.” God tells us in His word that this life is just the beginning, that we were made for eternity and that “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.”- John 10:28 In Ecclesiastes 3:11 it says “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” God clearly operates outside of the confines of time and space that we frantically live in to create some sense of order in our lives. We like thinking that we have order in our lives by having 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week and 52 weeks in a year. But God can go long periods where seemingly very little happens and then all in an instance, the whole world changes. The one event that the Bible points to that will have very little warning is the rapture. At that moment, when Jesus comes to rapture his church and remove his saints prior to the 7-year tribulation on earth, it will happen in “the twinkling of an eye,” according to 1 Corinthians 15:52. There will be no more time left on the clock to decide if you’re a believer or not. You are either on His team or you’re not. Everything will literally change in a way the world has never experienced, and then all of our little time-based frustrations will be meaningless. Our wealth or poverty will be meaningless in an instant, and all that will matter will be did we spend our allotted time on earth wisely, and did we “store up our treasures in Heaven,” as Matthew 6:19-21 instructs us to. Eternity will have no traffic jams, no inconveniences or misguided expectations. Time will fail to exist as we understand it. So, a good question to ask ourselves as believers each day is “why are we in such a hurry, when we have all of eternity?” Enjoy the days, for the compression of time is leading to the event we all joyfully anticipate as believers, the coming of Christ in the sky to rapture His church. 1 Thessalonians 4:17-18 tells us so “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.” Yes, time seems to be accelerating due to technological advances and compressing at the same time. Our response shouldn’t be to try to keep up with the herd,in a frantic and mad dash towards an uncapturable illusion, but rather to live our life in a way that yields to the desire of our heart and soul and say Come Lord Jesus come!
Prayer: Father God, help us to be ready for the return of your Son to rapture His bride, the Church, for your word tells us it can come at any moment. We pray in Jesus name for all of those we care about that they would be believers in You when that time happens on the earth. Amen!
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