In the end, God always keeps perfect time. He never underestimates the amount of time it will take to accomplish a goal or to bring about a certain result. He never misjudges his own ability; he never miscalculates the moment to act. Because he is sovereign over all, his plans and purposes unfold precisely when they should, at the very moment he decreed from eternity past. Every one of God’s works happens exactly on time.

I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. (Ps. 40:1)
What is  patience?  It may be a familiar word, but I suspect we’re more likely to define it by what it’s not than what it is. Patience, we think, is not pacing the room while I wait for that important phone call.  It’s not fussing at  my dawdling  teenager or honking at the elderly driver in front  of me. Patience is not grumbling, fretting, or exploding when I experience a delay. But the Bible also presents patience as a positive virtue. It’s not merely the absence of sin; it’s the pursuit of righteousness. Today we’ll see that patience is waiting on the Lord. The Lord is sovereign over the circumstances and people in our lives; ultimately, he is the one who causes us to wait, and he brings our waiting to an end. We practice patience by looking in faith to him.
In Psalm 40, David is stuck. He’s trapped in a “pit of destruction” and floundering in a “miry bog” (v.  2). The psalm doesn’t explain exactly what David’s swamp was; it could have been a work struggle or a relational mess. It could have been both. But, whatever the circumstances, David’s response was to cry out to God and then wait. And because he studied God’s Word and works (vv.  5, 7–8), meditated on God’s kindness and mercy (vv. 6, 11), and diligently participated in corporate worship (vv.  9–10), David waited with hope. We can learn from his example. Whether we are stuck in unmet desires or tangled in financial worries, we can call on our Lord. We can seek to know him as he is revealed in his Word. And we can trust he will do what is best.
In the end, God always keeps perfect time. He never underestimates the amount of time it will take to accomplish a goal or to bring about a certain result. He never misjudges his own ability; he never miscalculates the moment to act. Because he is sovereign over all, his plans and purposes unfold precisely when they should, at the very moment he decreed from eternity past. Every one of God’s works happens exactly on time.
This is why David could say in another psalm, “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (27:14).  Our souls should be encouraged when we realize it’s God we’re waiting on. Unlike fallible people, God has never had to rush in and say to anyone, “I’m so sorry I kept you waiting.” If the Lord delays, it’s not because he miscalculated.  We can wait with hope, knowing he has wisely determined that this precise period of waiting is the best thing for our good and his glory.
Let your heart take courage.
Taken from Patience: Waiting With Hope, by Megan Hill, a recent release from P&R Publishing. Used with permission.

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, August 26, 2021
We must always know that the kingdom cannot be fully inaugurated without Christ’s return, and even our very best attempts will be flawed before then. We must always stress the need to respond to Christ’s kingship to further bring the kingdom into the world.

We live in modernity, the source of all evil, according to some. I’m the sort of grumpy curmudgeon who thinks everything was better before the modern era, by which I mean the last 500 years.
This clearly isn’t true. Antibiotics, for one, are a gift we would not want to give up! What is true is that the current age had a particular set of challenges that are different to those of ages before ours; that the digital revolution in 2007 has changed the world in innumerable ways we have not even counted, let alone fathomed; and that there is something hostile to Christianity in our specific cultural moment.
Yet, if we look around at people’s desires and attempts to change the world we see that much of what people desire looks something like the kingdom of God.
Let me give you some examples:
After reading my post on acedia several friends sent me this New York Times piece on ‘languishing,’ which seems to be talking about essentially the same phenomenon. I rolled my eyes at the need to define a new term for something when there are rich resources in the great tradition for us to draw on, but what else did I expect? The nature of liberalism, and for now at least the NYT remains staunchly liberal, is to with dewy eyes reinvent the wheel. I get that there’s no gain when writing to a largely progressive audience to appeal to the great tradition, but it irks me.
(For the sake of clarity, I am using the term liberalism to mean liberalism, rather than to mean ‘left-wing’ as is probably more common in discourse).
It’s exactly the same approach that made everyone declare the Covid-19 pandemic ‘unprecedented’ until it became true by its repetition. Unprecedented in your lifetime, maybe.
The follow-up to that piece outlined ways to ‘flourish’ instead of ‘languish’. Broadly speaking they outlined the Sermon on the Mount.
At the same time the Guardian had this wonderful post-pandemic idea of inventing ‘lockdown days’. As numerous respondents on Twitter pointed out, they’d ‘invented’ humanity’s oldest law, the Sabbath.
A Kingdom
There’s a reason we keep seeing things that look a little bit like the kingdom, and there’s a reason they don’t look as good.
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If you have been brought face-to-face with your sin and have come to believe that Jesus is your Savior, no name will be more precious to you than His. Though at one time you may have held Him at arm’s length, despised Him as nothing more than a profanity, or even thought that you could save yourself through good works, the name, the person, and the work of Jesus have now become dear, for you have drawn near to Him and experienced His compassion, kindness, and mercy.

When the angel visited Mary and Joseph to announce the birth of the Messiah, he gave clear instructions concerning the child’s name: “You shall call his name Jesus” (Matt. 1:21; Luke 1:31). Christ has many glorious names: King, Creator, Lord, Judge, Son of God, Son of David, Master, I Am, the First and the Last, etc. But the angel commanded that a very specific name be given Him at His birth—and we may wonder at the intention behind that choice. Why “Jesus”?
The name itself was not an unusual name. In fact, it is the Hellenized version of the Old Testament name Joshua. In Hebrew, it is Yeshua, and simply translated, it means “The Lord saves.” So of all the glorious names He might have been given, the name that would mark out the incarnate Son of God would be that which describes Him as Savior. Jesus’ name communicates His purpose: “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). As Peter would later proclaim, “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
While Jesus’ name and ministry invite people into grace, many do not respond to Jesus Himself with warmth. His name is precious, yet so many treat it as peripheral, or even profane. During this Christmas season, then, we ought to ask ourselves, “What does the name Jesus mean to me?”
Profaned and Peripheral
Many people have no interest in the name Jesus, except perhaps as a curse word. They have no interest in Jesus as a Savior, they have not experienced Jesus’ power to change their lives, and they may even question whether Jesus really is who He says He is—but they still find the sound of His name to be a convenient interjection when they are surprised or angry. So they choose to profane the name of the incarnate God, who came to save us from our sins.
Yet it is not only the obvious offenders who profane Jesus’ name. Many people feel some respect for the name of Jesus, but their lives are busy, and so Jesus is ultimately sidelined. After all, there are places to go, people to meet, money to be earned, bills to be paid, and children to be raised. Jesus is just one of many obligations, and certainly not their chief desire. People thus have little awareness that they need to be saved at all, and they ignore the testimony of Jesus’ own name: that He has come to save them.
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