Time Travel

and saying, “The time has been fulfilled, and the kingdom of God draws near”  Mark 1:15

Time – What gift can I leave with you that will carry you into the approaching new year?  I can think of one very special gift – a gift that has enduring value.  I can give you the gift of time.  Ah, but it’s not the kind of time that you are used to.  No, what I want to give to you is not chronos time.  You have plenty of that.  In fact, you have all that anyone could ever have.  This minute, this hour, this day, this month – chronos time stretches out before you.  I can’t add a thing to it, and neither can you.  Each of us has precisely that same amount of this stuff. 

But very few of us have the kind of time that I want to give you – kairos time – the exactly right, perfectly suited, fulfilled moment of revelation when God scoops us up into another realm and we see the world of our chronology from a different perspective.  We have mentioned kairos before.  It is opportune time; the kind of time that expands our minds and hearts; the time when God invades my precious minutes and shows me His calm sovereignty over all my troubles.  Kairos is the time of disconnected existence, the time when I live according to the Spirit and the will of the Father and not according to the press of the calendar or the clock.  Kairos is the time of Jesus, following God’s direction regardless of chronos circumstances; a twelve-year-old boy in the temple who is surprised that his earthly parents were concerned about him; a man who pushed the soldiers to arrest him so that he could complete his mission; a prophet who saw invisible things because he lived in a different zone.  Kairos time is infinitely available in every chronos moment.  Each second of my clock can reveal the presence of the Almighty and transport me from this step-by-step world into the heavenlies where I see the Lord, high and lifted up.  Isaiah, Ezekiel, Stephen and Paul all spent some “time” there.

I want to give you this kairos perspective.  But, of course, I can’t.  You already have it.  It resides in each one of us who has become the temple of the Spirit.  The problem is not that you need something more.  The problem is that you have not been transformed by the renewing of your mind.  You still think that the real world operates according to chronos.  So you ask God for chronos solutions to chronos problems; exactly the same problems that you could work out yourself if you only had enough “time.”  But God doesn’t work that way.  God invades our chronos thinking with the fulfilled moment, the precise event that explodes and expands our thinking, blowing us completely out of the chronology and into the world of the infinite God.

So, my gift to you is this:  time travel.  Ask God to move your mind from chronos to kairos thinking.  And hold on to your seat.  You are in for the ride of your life.