L. C. FOX-SMITH - 23/03/26 - I’ve been thinking about James 4:13-17 and how I think of time as ‘my’ time, when really it’s God’s time, His gift to me. How I choose to use that time is what I should be thinking about.
“Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain:
Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.
For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.
But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.
Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”
But time isn’t a gift I should just accept and then put on a shelf, I should do something with it and use it in a certain way. God’s grace allows me to choose what that way is, and I have the freedom to waste it or I have the freedom to use it to walk faithfully with God. That freedom puts the responsibility on to me now, and when I know the difference between sinning and doing good - and especially when I’m aware of when I arrive at a fork in the road where I consciously choose one or the other - my choice holds so much more weight. It doesn’t feel like a burden, though, more like I’ve been given something valuable and I want to cherish and respect it, and realise that I haven’t been doing that.
I’m really drawn to 2 Peter 1:3-8 at the moment, and have been reading it over and over for the past few days:
“According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:
Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge;
And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness;
And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.
For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
It feels like these steps are strengthened each time I make the ‘right’ choice. And that’s where the small moments in life that I have thought in the past were times better spent, were actually exactly where I was supposed to be, and I gave little credit to them. That’s something I wrestle with a lot: God is almighty, beyond time, creator of everything, yet He is interested in those small moments in time, those “vapours”, they mean something to Him, much more than I can understand and appreciate. I pray that the Lord keeps me grounded in these moments, and that I don’t forget how important they are.