Discipleship

In the fullness of time…

In the Greek, there are two words for “time.”

The first word is chronos—from where we get “chronology.”

The other word is kairos. It means “right moment.” It’s like the right moment to pick a piece of fruit or the right moment to tell the punch line of a joke.

While there may not be an exact time (chronos), there’s certainly a right moment (kairos). And God deals with right moments.

You see it all the time in the Bible. “In the fullness of time,” God acted. When everything was just right, God moved.

The problem most of us have is that we’re driven by chronological time. That means we expect things to be done by a certain time.

What’s worse is if something doesn’t happen by a particular time, then we assume it’s not going to happen at all.

When we decide this, we end up either giving up too early or trying to force something to happen before it’s ready. Both choices lead to disaster.

God doesn’t work in chronological time. He works in kairos time. That means we need to be looking for signals around us about what time it is.

How are things unfolding around us? What doors are opening and closing? What light is now available to you that wasn’t before?

Kairos is a word of seasons—and seasons have their own time. Learn to read the seasons. Learn to know what time it is.

How sad would it be if we missed what God was doing because we were looking at our watch?

Marriage

The Destination Matters

How many of us have tried to go out to dinner with our wives and asked them, “Where do you want to eat?”

Remember their answer? “I don’t know.”

I know where the Mexican restaurant is. I know where the steak and sushi places are. I know where there’s a meat and three.

But I don’t know where “I don’t know” is. No one does.

So if I ask you, “Where’s your marriage headed,” how would you answer?

Would you come back with “I don’t know”? That answer will work for your marriage just about as well as it worked for your dinner date.

Where you’re going matters. The destination determines a lot of things about the trip—how to get there, what to wear, what to pack.

And the destination of your marriage determines a lot as well—how you budget, how you spend your time, who your friends are.

So, l’ll ask you again. Where’s your marriage headed?

After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

Discipleship

Before Love Came to Town

Have you heard this song? Both U2 and B.B. King covered it. I love the lyrics.

“Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down,

But I did what I did before love came to town.”

The song is about a lot of us.

We made decisions and mistakes ending up in royal foul-ups that we don’t think we can ever undo. And what makes us doubly angry is that we see we made bad decisions for bad reasons.

We thought: If I do this, somebody will love me. If I do that, I’ll be accepted.

We gave in, made bad choices, then found out it was all a lie.

These are the stories we hear at Kairos every week. Young adults who were given freedom before they had acquired wisdom. Young people who believed the lies they were told about relationships, sex, identity, and the meaning in life.

And they did what they did before Love came to town.

We have the privilege of telling the story of Jesus—the Good Shepherd—looking for His lost sheep. We remind them the Good News isn’t that we can get to God, but that God in Christ Jesus has come to us.

Yeah, I know. We’ve all messed up. We’re all broken. But Love has come to town.