Telling God’s time doesn’t depend on an iPhone, a watch or a liturgical calendar. Nor should God’s kingdom be solely identified with an earthly place, movement or group. This side of the resurrection, no one has the keys to God’s kingdom, and no one has the device that will calibrate God’s time. If Jesus brought God’s kingdom into human history, then the best way to keep God’s time is to follow God’s Son. In concrete terms, that means living by his Spirit – that is, being animated by the Spirit of God in Christ Jesus.
Now there are a lot of “spirits” out there: the spirit of capitalism, the spirit of racism, the spirit of consumerism, the spirit of greed, the spirit of addiction. Later in his letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul tells the community how to recognize the Spirit of God in Christ Jesus: “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Wherever Christians see these dispositions at work, they know that the kingdom of God is near. Whenever Christians act out of these dispositions themselves, they enter – if only for a moment – God’s time.
This message is excerpted from “Keeping God’s time” by M. E. Stortz in the October 2020 Gather magazine.
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