A Time for Everything | Ecclesiastes 3
Brian Hedges | September 6, 2026
Well, good morning. Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to Ecclesiastes 3.
There is a magnificent sculpture in Washington Park in Chicago that is called the Fountain of Time. It was commissioned in 1913, completed by Lorado Taft in 1920. It’s a 126-foot long sculpture, as a hooded figure, Father Time, watches a procession of one hundred figures who pass before him—children, lovers, workers, soldiers, the elderly. And the inscription for the sculpture comes from a poem called “The Paradox of Time.” The inscription says, “Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, time stays; we go.”
The sculpture makes a fitting intro to our text today, Ecclesiastes 3, which is a text about time, a time for everything. This, of course, is part of our ongoing series on the book of Ecclesiastes. We’ve called this “Breathing Lessons: Wisdom from Ecclesiastes for This Fleeting Life.” We’ve seen already that the author of this book tells us that everything is breath, everything is hevel, often translated “vanity,” but the concrete image is breath. It’s fleeting, it’s passing.
Ecclesiastes has been called the most contemporary book in the Bible, and it’s contemporary because, more than perhaps any generation in history, we are conscious of time. We now have precision instruments for measuring time, whereas for most of human history people sort of lived by the seasons of the year and the rhythms of the day. But now we measure everything in hours and minutes and seconds. We are conscious that time is a fleeting thing. Time is a precious commodity, more precious even than money—money can be replaced; time cannot. So this is a wonderful passage for us to study together.
Before we read the text, I want to just give you an interpretive framework for the book of Ecclesiastes that I think especially fits in this passage. This comes from Bobby Jamieson’s book on Ecclesiastes, and he imagines the book of Ecclesiastes as a three-story house. He says on the first story, on the ground floor, you have something like observation, as Ecclesiastes—Qoheleth, his Hebrew name; the Preacher—as he observes life under the sun. And he’s giving us wisdom, he’s giving us truth about what life is like in this world, but it’s not the full picture. He’s just viewing things from the ground level.
But occasionally in this book, he climbs up the stairs to the second story, and with consideration and reflection he tells us things like this: “I perceived that there was nothing better than that people should rejoice in the work that God has given them.” He brings God into the picture. And you just have this several times throughout the book, including the passage we’re looking at this morning.
But then just a few times in the book he takes an elevator all the way up to the third floor, and from the third floor, he makes a theological confession of faith, where he tells us to fear the Lord and to remember that God will bring all things to judgment. And it is the theology of this book.
Keep that framework in mind. It will help you read the book of Ecclesiastes, and it will help us this morning.
Today, we’re going to be looking at the whole of Ecclesiastes 3. I’m just going to read it in sections as we work our way through it, so here’s the outline for today. We’re going to look at the poem, then the theology, then the application.
1. The Poem: The Human Experience of Time
2. The Theology: God’s Sovereignty over Time
3. The Application: How to Inhabit Time
1. The Poem: The Human Experience of Time
So first of all, the poem, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. This is the first floor of this house.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.”
This is God’s Word, and it is one of the most famous poems in Scripture. Most people may recognize this from the 1960s song from the Birds, “Turn, Turn, Turn.” This is a song that pops up every now and again in popular culture.
It’s a poem that teaches us something about time. It conveys to us the idea of the completeness of time.
In this poem, there are fourteen pairs of opposites: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time for war, and a time for peace. They are opposites, fourteen of them, and in fact, that means it’s multiples of seven—which seven, as you know, in Hebrew literature, seven is the number of completion. So it conveys for us something of the comprehensive nature of the human experience of time.
All of the things in this list are things that we experience. Times of mourning, times of dancing; times of seeking, times of losing; times of love, times of hate. It’s just a description of what life is like for us as human beings.
But there’s also a complexity to the poem. There’s a pattern with the fourteen pairs, but a complexity, because the pairs do not follow a logical order. “A time to be born and a time to die” kind of comprehends everything, but some of the other pairs are, while they’re opposites, it’s hard to determine which is the positive and which is the negative. It’s hard to determine exactly what the order of the poem is, and the scholars debate this.
I think it’s intentional, because it’s showing us something about the complexity of this life. In fact, it shows us something about the cyclical nature of time and of human history. This poem, in some ways, parallels the poem in chapter one that talks about the cycles of life in the natural world.
I think the poem—especially when you read the next verse, verse 9, “What gain has the worker from his toil?”—the poem is an echo of chapter 1, which asks this question, “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?”
In the cycles of life that we experience in our own personal histories and in the history of the world, what’s the gain? What’s the point? What’s the advantage? It’s that driving question in Ecclesiastes.
It’s similar to the famous opening of that wonderful novel by Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Do you remember this?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”
A Tale of Two Cities is an echo of this, the cyclical nature and the paradoxical, complex nature of time and history. Dickens in that novel is comparing London and Paris, but he’s also comparing 1775, the time of the novel, with 1859, the time in which he wrote the novel.
In every time in history, some people are thinking, “This is the best time we’ve ever lived,” and some people are thinking, “This is the darkest point in human history.”
The reality is, this is just life. This is life. This is the human experience of life.
I think when we take everything the poem says about our experience, it teaches us two basic lessons about time.
(1) First of all, it teaches us that time brings change. Time brings change. The old word for this is “vicissitudes,” the vicissitudes of time. That’s a wonderful word. It comes from the Latin vicis, which means change. It just means the ups and downs, the changes of time.
This includes the very positive, wonderful things that come into our lives that bring change, but also the harder, darker things.
I preach this morning to you with a full heart because of changes in our lives. We just yesterday celebrated the wedding of my oldest son, Stephen. It was one of those milestone events—twenty-four years of raising him culminating in this remarkable change in his life. We gained a beautiful daughter yesterday. It was a time of celebration with food, and with dancing, and music, and all the rest. It was just wonderful. It was wonderful.
Last night, when I got home, I took the boutonniere off of my suit lapel, I laid it on my little table, and this morning, as I was on my way out, I picked this up, and I saw it had already wilted. I threw it in the trash, then I thought, “No, actually, that would make a great sermon illustration,” because this is what time is like, isn’t it? We have these wonderful moments, but they pass. Why? Because time brings change.
The old hymn writer Henry Francis Lyte, said,
“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away.
Change and decay in all around I see” [and then the prayer];
“O thou that changest not, abide with me.”
Time brings change—first lesson.
(2) Here’s the second lesson: time is short. Time is short. The vicissitudes of time and the finitude of time. The grains of sand in the hourglass of time will all eventually fall. The minutes and the hours keep ticking away. Time passes swiftly—“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; / Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away.” Time is swiftly passing by. Time is short.
It’s both of these realities—the changes of time and the brevity of time—that accentuate the basic struggle of Qoheleth, the teacher in this book, as he wrestles with the brevity of life. Life is a breath. Life is a breath. It’s a wonderful breath, but it’s just a breath, and it passes so quickly.
We experience this in all kinds of ways. We experience this, of course, in the wonderful moments like weddings and the births of children, but we also experience it in the darker moments, when we lose someone we love.
Let me read these words to you from C.S. Lewis. He wrote this in his book A Grief Observed after the loss of his wife, Joy.
“You tell me, ’She goes. She goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, ’Come back, come back!’ But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I cannot get. On any view whatever, to say, ’She is dead,’ is to say, ’All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past, and the past is the past, and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death.”
Wow. We pass through time. The changes of time and the shortness of time, the brevity of time. Life is a breath, it’s a vapor; it’s here today, it’s gone tomorrow. This is our experience of time, the human experience of time.
2. The Theology: God’s Sovereignty over Time
But this author tells us more. He gives us the poem, and then he moves up the stairs to the second level of this house, the second story of this house, and he begins to give us theology. He gives us theology, and he teaches us about God’s sovereignty over time. So point number two, God’s sovereignty over time. We see this in verses 9-15.
I want you to notice how in these verses the author brings God into the picture. In fact, he mentions God, either the name Elohim or a personal pronoun, nine times. That’s significant, because he barely mentioned God at all in the first two chapters, and now nine times he brings God into the picture. Verse 9:
“What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.
“I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.”
God’s sovereignty over time. God is the main actor in this paragraph, as the author speaks of the mystery of God’s ways, the different ways in which God is orchestrating time.
I want you to notice two truths from these verses.
(1) The first is the beauty of God’s gift of time. You see that in verses 9-10 and the first part of 11. “What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with—” the gift, okay, “what God has given to the children of men.” And then verse 11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”
This emphasizes how the various seasons of life are God’s appointments or allotments to us. And he is saying that these things are fitting. God has made everything beautiful in its time. Especially when we think about all of the positive things that God gives us in time. Half of the list in the poem are positive things. So, Qoheleth says in verses 12 and 13, “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live, and also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil. This is God’s gift to man.”
So do you see this, the beauty of God’s gift of time? One of the things that I think we should walk away from the book of Ecclesiastes with is a profound gratitude for God’s gifts—for the gift of life, for the gift of time, for the gift of every moment, every day; the blessings, the little blessings of life and those milestone moments in life as well. These are God’s gift to us—love and life, and friends, and family, and weddings, and celebrations, and birthdays. These are to be celebrated. They are to be cherished. They’re God’s beautiful gift to us. So we see the beauty of God’s gift of time.
(2) But we also see in this passage the mystery of God’s work in time, and you see that also in verse 11. “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also he has put eternity in a man’s heart, yet so he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
And you really see the mystery in the second half of the verse. He’s put eternity in man’s heart, but he can’t find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
What does that verse mean? This is one of the more famous verses in Ecclesiastes. “He has put eternity into man’s heart.” Sometimes that has been interpreted like this: God has put a God-shaped blank in the heart of every human being, and nothing can fill that heart but God himself. He’s put eternity into man’s heart. I kind of walked into this chapter thinking that was the interpretation, that was the meaning.
The problem is it doesn’t quite make sense of the second half of the verse: “Yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
That word “eternity” is a word with a very wide semantic range. It can convey ideas about the past or about the future or about forever. It’s a word that just carries the idea of the duration of time.
I really think the best translation is from the NRSV, which puts it like this: “He has made everything suitable for its time. Moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
“A sense of past and future.” Now that’s what separates us from the rest of animal creation. We have a sense of our past and our future. We’re reflective on our time. We’re conscious of the fact that time is actually passing. We are able to look back and say, “That is past. I experienced that, but it’s gone.” We’re able to anticipate the future and think about what may be. We have very little control over it. We live in the present moment, and we know that there is a whole to our lives, but we don’t quite see the full picture. So it’s a mystery to us.
Especially when we think about the negative things in our lives, there’s a tension. God has made everything beautiful in its time? Even death? Is death beautiful? Even war? “A time for war and a time for peace.” Is war a beautiful thing? Is it fitting? We don’t understand how all of the things fit into the picture. There’s a mystery to God’s ways.
William Cowper put it like this:
“God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.”
He plants his footsteps in the sea—you can’t see footsteps that are planted in the sea. Just as Qoheleth here says that human beings “cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” There’s a mystery to it. There’s a mystery.
Some have suggested that time and history are like a woven tapestry, where we see the underside of the tapestry. We see the dark threads, but for us it looks like a mess; only God sees the picture on top. In fact, a poet put it like this:
“My life is but a weaving between my Lord and me.
I cannot choose the colors; he worketh steadily.
Ofttimes he weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride
Forget he sees the upper and I see the underside.”
There’s a mystery, isn’t there, because there are so many difficulties that we experience in our lives. Our times are sometimes wonderful, but often very hard. We’re like Joseph sold into slavery, and we’re wondering, “What is God doing?” We’re like Job on the ash heap. We’ve lost everything, and we’re questioning God’s ways.
Or we’re like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. You remember this? When Frodo has already been chased by black riders, he’s on this dangerous quest to destroy the ring of power. He’s suffering on this journey. It’s a burden that he carries. It’s not an adventure for him; it’s a burden that he’s carrying. He says to Gandalf, “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had ever happened.” And Gandalf says, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”
All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you. Time is God’s gift with all of its mystery, all of its complexity; and the question is, what do we do with the time that God has given us?
3. The Application: How to Inhabit Time
That leads us to point number three, the application. How should we inhabit time? What is our appropriate response to time and to the God who reigns over time, who gives beautiful things in time, but whose ways are often mysterious to us?
I want to give you three spiritual disciplines, derived from Ecclesiastes 3, that teach us how to inhabit time—three spiritual disciplines.
(1) Number one, rejoice in your work. Work here is more broad than just your vocation. The idea here is to rejoice in what God has given you to do. Look at verses 12-13.
“I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”
And then again in verse 22,
“So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?”
So we’re still on the second floor of this three-story house, where the author is telling us to rejoice in what God has given. This has been an application every week in this series so far, because it is a refrain that Qoheleth hits again and again and again in this book.
But what might that look like? What does it look like to rejoice in what God has given you to do, to rejoice in your work? What might that look like?
I’m going to give you just a concrete thing: it means that we need to learn to live in the present moment. We learn to live in the present moment, the moment that God is giving right now.
We spend so much of our lives mulling over the past, which we cannot change, or anxious about the future, which we cannot control. As someone once put it, “Yesterday is a canceled check, tomorrow is a promissory note; today is the only cash you have. Spend it wisely.”
We’ve got to learn to live in the present moment. You live today. You receive what God has given today, the joys and the blessings. These are all gifts from God, and we entrust both the past and the future into God’s hands.
Here is a very concrete way to help you do that: put the phone away when you are in an experience, and don’t always be trying to capture the moment. Now, I’m not saying never take a snapshot, never take a picture, but have you noticed that sometimes you get in an event—you can see this on TV all the time; I see this when I’m watching golf, and there are all these people—Scotty Scheffler is right in front of them, right? He’s right in front of them, and there are all these people with their phones up, and they’re looking at their phones. I’m kind of like, “Look at him, look at him!” They’re trying to capture the moment.
Did you know that researchers have studied this, and they have discovered that when people go into some kind of an experience, like a museum or some kind of arch or whatever, and if they go in with their phone, they actually remember less of the experience than if they observe with their eyes. So live in the present moment. Don’t try to capture it and seize it. Live it, enjoy it, savor that moment. It is God’s gift to you, and it’s one of the disciplines for us to learn to be present.
Next time you’re in a conversation, focus on that person. Focus on that conversation, that moment. That person before you deserves your full and undivided attention. When you’re speaking with a spouse or with a child, give yourself fully to them. Attend to the moment that God has given you. Don’t obsess over the past, don’t obsess over the future.
(2) Number two—maybe somewhat paradoxically—but number two, remember your death. Remember your death.
Now this is in the future, and yet it’s an emphasis in this book. Verses 18-21:
“I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.”
Now, the author here is not reducing human beings to the level of animals. He’s instead showing that just like animals, our lives are passing. He’s just making the point that we are mortal. We have a common mortality with the beast. Verse 19:
“For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is [mere breath]. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.”
This, of course, is a clear echo of Genesis 3:19, where Adam and Eve have fallen into sin and the curse has fallen on them and on creation, and where God says, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For you are but dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The emphasis here is on the mortality of human beings. And then verse 21 asks a question and does not give an answer. Keep in mind, this is the first or maybe second story of the house, but it’s not the top level. He asks this question: “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?”
“Who knows?” He’s asking a question here. The question is actually answered in Ecclesiastes 12:7, which says, “The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” So I don’t think it would be right to say that Ecclesiastes is denying the reality of an afterlife. He’s asking a question; he’s pondering from the human perspective what happens after we die. But the emphasis here is on the fact of our mortality, and what I’m saying this morning is make this a spiritual discipline. Remember your death.
This actually was a spiritual discipline in the ancient church—memento mori. It means to remember death. Saint Benedict, for example, said, “Keep death daily before your eyes.” And Thomas á Kempis, in The Imitation of Christ, wrote, “Happy is he that always hath the hour of his death before his eyes, and daily prepareth himself to die.”
These authors are saying, do this regularly, do this habitually; keep death daily before your eyes.
Did you know that even secular productivity literature tells us to do this? I’ll never forget reading Stephen Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I was twenty years old; that book changed my life. Habit number two, “Begin with the end in mind,” and one of the exercises in that book was to imagine your own funeral. Imagine sitting there—what are people saying in the eulogy? The whole point was to help you think through the way you want to live.
How do you want to live your life? Wisdom says, “Remember your death, keep in mind your mortality, and live as you would have wanted to live when you come to the end.”
(3) So rejoice in your work, remember your death, and then here’s the third discipline: Revere your creator.
This is the fear of the Lord. Here we get a view from the third story of this house. Look at verse 14.
“I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him.”
This is the purpose, he says: “so that people fear before him.” And then in verses 16-17 he raises the question of justice and injustice, and reminds us in verse 17 that “God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and a time for every work.”
You put those two verses together, and it’s basically the conclusion of the book. Ecclesiastes 12:13-14:
“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”
Fear the Lord. Live in the fear of the Lord.
Now what does that mean? What does it mean to fear the Lord? It does not mean to be terrified. This is not a negative kind of fear; it’s, rather, reverence. It’s revering the Lord. It’s really the idea of standing in awe before the majesty of an almighty God, standing in awe before him.
The fear of the Lord is a trembling, reverent, awestruck, delighted, joyful fear. In fact, the Scriptures often put these two things together, fearing the Lord with joy in him. Psalm 2:11: “Serve the Lord with fear; rejoice with trembling.” Trembling joy.
It is this awe before the majestic, sovereign, God of goodness, that we are just stunned at who he is and at the gift he has given, and we want to live with reverence before him, so as not to offend this good God.
Michael Reeves defined the fear of the Lord like this in his wonderful book Rejoice and Tremble:
“This right fear of God is not the minor-key, gloomy flip side to proper joy in God. There is no tension between this fear and joy. Rather, this trembling fear of God is a way of speaking about the sheer intensity of the saint’s delight in God.”
It is a taste of joy so deep that it makes you tremble. The fear of the Lord.
Brothers and sisters, Ecclesiastes calls us to cultivate this and to walk in the fear of the Lord.
Rejoice in your work, remember your death, and revere your creator.
Now, I want to just end by taking one more step in our conclusion, this time into the New Testament for just a few minutes—a New Testament perspective on time. And if we’ve been on the first floor, second floor, and third floor of Ecclesiastes, now we’re going to the rooftop. Now we’re getting the widest perspective of all, as we think about time in light of the gospel. I just want to point out a couple of things.
First of all, that Christ came in the fullness of time. It was our assurance of pardon this morning, Galatians 4:4-6: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’”
“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son.” This is amazing. It means that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God, entered into time. He came down into time. He entered into our experience of time. He was born and he died. “A time to be born, a time to die.” He experienced it! He experienced time as we experience time.
Why did he do it? To redeem us, to save us. It was an amazing sacrifice.
If I could just recall Charles Dickens again for a moment—do you remember the end of A Tale of Two Cities, when Sydney Carton lays down his life for his double, Charles Darnay? He becomes his substitute and he dies there in the prison because of his love for Lucy Manette and her family. And he says, “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
We read a story like that and we’re moved by the sacrifice. How much more should we be moved by the fact that the sinless Son of God, the eternal one, entered into time to redeem us and to save us? Christ came in the fullness of time.
But Christ also reigns as the Lord of history. Here I’ll just take you to the end, the book of Revelation, Revelation 5. I don’t even need to read it, just describe the scene, where John sees a figure seated on a throne with a scroll in his hand, sealed with seven seals. The scroll represents the unfolding of God’s purposes in history.
He hears one of the elders from around the throne, as John is weeping—he’s weeping because no one can open the scroll—and he hears one of the elders from around the throne say, “Weep no more. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” And John looks and he sees not a lion, he sees a lamb that was slain, and the lamb is the one who begins to open the scrolls.
John is just showing us in powerful, evocative imagery, he is showing us that it is the crucified Christ who reigns over history. It is Christ who is worthy to see that human history unfolds according to God’s plan until we reach that ultimate day; as Revelation says, time will be no more. Christ reigns as the Lord of history.
“Crown him the Lord of years,
The potentate [or the sovereign king] of time,
Creator of the rolling spheres,
Ineffably sublime.
All hail, Redeemer, hail,
For thou hast died for me.
Thy praise shall never, never fail
Throughout eternity.”
Crown him the Lord of years, the king of time, the one who reigns over human history.
Do you see here how the gospel shapes our view of time? Your past—are you worried about your past? Do you feel guilty about your past? Christ died to redeem you from your past.
Are you worried about the future? Christ reigns over history, and he will see you through to the end. And in this present moment, Christ speaks to us now through the proclamation of his word.
I want to end with these verses from 2 Corinthians 6, where Paul says, “In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you. Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
It’s the present moment. “Now is the day of salvation.” Right now is the opportunity. You have today; you may not have tomorrow. You have today. And so, as Paul says to the Corinthians, I say to you, to all of us, on behalf of Christ: Be reconciled to God. Be reconciled to God. Today is the day of salvation.
Let’s pray.
Our gracious and merciful God, we thank you that through your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, you reign over all things. You reign over history and you reign over all the circumstances of our lives. We confess this morning that we do not understand the pattern of this tapestry. There are so many things in our lives, even now, that we do not fully understand. There are difficulties, there are trials, there are hardships, and we only see the underside of this weaving. But we confess our trust in you today that you are the God who reigns and who rules; that in some mysterious way you make everything beautiful in its time, that you work all things together for good for those who love you, who are the called according to your purpose; and that your great purpose is, in each one of our lives, to conform us to the image of your Son, Jesus Christ.
We pray today, Lord, that you would help us to confess with David, the psalmist, in Psalm 31, “My times are in your hands”; that we would entrust you with our lives, with the big moments and the small, with the good things and the bad, that we would entrust it all to you; and that we would then attend to you in the present moment, that we would walk before your face in the fear of the Lord—this reverent, holy joy—and that we would know your presence with us. We pray that in this moment now, as we come to the table, that you would help us attend to you, to focus upon you, to focus upon Christ and what he has done in giving his body for us and shedding his blood for our sakes; and that we would in these moments, by faith, feed on Christ, who is the living bread, who gave his life for the world.
So draw near to us, we pray, by your Spirit, fill us again with your Spirit today, and be glorified in our worship. We pray this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and for his sake. Amen.
