time Archives : Life with the King

July 30, 2026July 30, 2026

God’s Perfect Timing

“How long, O Lord?” (Psalm 13:1, Psalm 79:5, Psalm 89:46).

I’ve seen people close to me wait on the Lord. Have you? It’s an amazing thing to witness. When you know their hearts are longing and desiring something that just hasn’t come about, and instead of complaining or dwelling on it, they release it to God. Over and over again, every day. Instead of choosing to strategize, tap every earthly resource, forge connections that weren’t there before, they surrender to the Lord’s timing. Stories like this preach to my heart. Patience, one of the fruits of the Spirit, is something many of us need to rely on God for. Waiting indefinitely doesn’t come naturally to many people. Seeing the patience that comes from trusting the Lord’s timing is a sure sign of His work in their hearts.

I’ve also seen people rush ahead, making things happen for themselves. You can see this when you sense striving, strain, and difficulty to find opportunity. God’s Word repeatedly instructs us to wait on the Lord (Psalm 27:14, Psalm 37:7, 34). We choose for ourselves what we do with our limited time here; we can choose to wait on God’s timing, or we can choose to build the Babel of our own desires.

When we’re talking about ourselves, it’s very easy to miss the difference. We tend to be convinced that our own desires are good, that our desires are God’s will for us, our desires are there simply because they are supposed to be satisfied. So we push. We try to make things happen. I’ve done this myself and seen it over and over again with many others. It’s what the world and the culture is convinced is best for us to do. In a world that worships being self-made, we need to make it happen, right? Well, if you look at the history of God’s people, actually, not so much.

Abram and Sarai, for example. They wanted to have a child, and God promised them children. But Sarai was desperate to make it happen, and had her servant Hagar bear Abram’s child in her place when he was 86 years old. Instead of waiting on the Lord or trusting in the Lord’s timing to fulfill her God-given desire for a child, this was an act of striving that reached outside of God’s will. God’s will was always to give Abram and Sarai a child. Striving for that apart from God led to a very costly sin. God gave them new names, Abraham and Sarah, when, 14 years later, His perfect timing came to give them their son, Isaac. Isaac became a forefather to Jesus, through whom God desired to provide salvation for all nations, by His grace, including those descended from Hagar.

Saul, who later became Paul, provides another example in the Bible of pushing ahead, instead of earnestly listening and waiting on the Lord’s direction. Saul was a Jewish Pharisee, pushing to kill people based on what they believed, convinced he was doing the right thing in God’s eyes (Acts 7:58, 8:1&3). My guess is that he hadn’t asked God about whether it was right or not. Jesus Himself got Saul’s attention by blinding him and speaking audibly to him, saying that he would be told what to do (Acts 9:3-6). Saul didn’t know God’s will at all, even though he was convinced that he did, enough to approve of another soul’s murder! It is a risk to act based on anything but God’s direction.

God’s timing is often not what we would like or expect it to be. King David, the man after God’s own heart himself, wrote, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). No matter how close we are to God, we are all bound by time. We all struggle to wait patiently for God. We all eventually become aware of the fact that our time on this earth quickly runs out. We expect God to operate in this way in our lives too.

But God operates very differently. He tells us nothing is impossible with Him (Luke 1:37). He tells us in His Word that there is abundantly more than we could ever ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20) in His plans for us. He tells us to trust Him and wait on Him. Who will we trust, our experience in the world, or God?

“And Elijah came near to all the people and said, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” And the people did not answer him a word” (1 Kings 18:21). It all comes down to what we choose to believe about God (see Characteristics of God series).

Paul sums up the tension between following our own desires and following the Spirit, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Paul describes the struggle every person has of falling into sin even when actively trying not to sin. “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Romans 7:18-20). Only Jesus Christ can provide deliverance from the sin that derails our actions (Romans 7:24-25).

It isn’t just failing to wait on the Lord that can cause us to stumble in our walk of obedience. Another kind of waiting can trip us up; when God tells us the time has come to take action, but we wait instead. We procrastinate, ignore responsibility, or simply run away. Waiting isn’t the right thing to do when God is calling us to act.

A famous example of that is the story of Jonah. God tells him to go to Nineveh, but he runs in the opposite direction instead (Jonah 1:2-3). It was another costly sin of disobedience, and yet in God’s grace, after three days in the belly of a whale, Jonah had another opportunity. He eventually went to Nineveh in obedience to God’s will (Jonah 3:2-3). Has God nudged you to move forward with something in your life, but instead of immediately carrying it out, you waited? Maybe you’re in that situation right now. He asks us to trust that His timing is perfect. But when we miss it, God in His grace can make a way, even when we’ve waited past His timing.

I have spent weeks, months, and years trying to make things happen on my own strength (for more on this, check out All About Trust). But there have been many things in my own life that God’s timing (not mine) was perfect for. The things I couldn’t control like getting jobs, finding churches, meeting friends—all had a divine timing that only required surrendering and receiving the gift. There was no striving or making-it-happen involved; these moments were pivotal to where my life went in that season, by God’s mercy. We may not be patient with God, but thankfully God is always, always patient with us. Halleluiah!

The more I learn to trust that God is in control, the easier it is to surrender the fear of missing something. The more we trust God, the more patient we can become, as we grow in our knowledge that God’s timing is always perfect. Amen.

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7).

“In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?” (Psalm 56:4).

Thank you for spending some of your time journeying with me. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Life with the King, and like & follow the Facebook page; it truly helps me continue writing this blog. Grace and peace.

May 28, 2026May 28, 2026

Tell of His Faithfulness

Seemingly out of nowhere this week, I got help with a practical household errand that I hadn’t known how to take care of, after 11 years. That soon turned into more help to repair some damage elsewhere. These acts of service, while maybe not so big of a deal to the helper, meant a great deal to me. They spoke to me loudly, as if an angel of God had come to me to let me know, “I’m taking care of you. You don’t have to do things on your own.” There are many such things that I tried and failed to figure out on my own. After many experiences like this, I can say with certainly that we are each very much seen and known by God; He knows just what we need. Let my story be an example that He hasn’t forgotten what you need, even if you’ve had many years of waiting. Things get done in His timing not our own. I so often am tempted to rush, but being patient and knowing that God will provide what is needed is the Way He invites us to go as we follow Him in trust.

So what does life look like when we’re trusting God fully, desperately, knowing that He is our Source of help? Psalm 30 says, “To you, O Lord, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy: ‘What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me! O Lord, be my helper!'” (Psalm 30:8-10). Here we see that God’s desire for us in life is to praise Him and tell of His faithfulness. So today, I’d like to simply tell of His faithfulness!

God has never given up on me. For me, God’s love and faithfulness can be summed up pretty well in that statement. People may give up on us, or we may give up on ourselves sometimes, but God never, ever does. He isn’t ashamed of us, and He always sees the best in us and has confidence in a hope and a potential for fullness of life in us. We may not feel worthy or capable, but He always believes the best for us. Luke 1:37 says, “…nothing will be impossible with God.” He made us, He is the only One who knows what we are capable of. You can’t change His mind about you; that you are worthy of His love, and you are His.

God has shown His faithfulness to me in countless ways, but perhaps most of all through my sister Abby. God used her voice to encourage me and see good when I saw none at all. God has spoken to me through Abby countless times, but the fact that she never seems to get tired of pointing me back to Jesus has been God’s faithfulness in action in my life. She has done this since she took me to a church service with her in 2015, at a time when I had stopped going to church for years, had lost hope, and was lost.

In my wrestle with faith and then with following Jesus, she never made me feel like things had gotten too messy or too hard for God to redeem. She never stopped believing that I could surrender what I told her outright I couldn’t. She wasn’t afraid, not once, to challenge the lies I believed about God and about myself. God used Abby’s voice to faithfully and consistently speak Truth in my life. God’s faithfulness to me has flesh and bones in my sister. I am forever grateful for the gift that she is to me.

Abby is excellent at what we all need from a trusted brother or sister in our walk with Jesus—pointing us to Him with courage, conviction, and most of all love. Where there was a great deal of mourning in my life to the point of losing hope, God in His faithfulness didn’t give up on me. He used Abby, the church, and others to help open my heart and then He did transformative work and restored my faith and hope. He truly made it possible for me to dance and have gladness (Psalm 30:11) when I didn’t feel like I could again.

God is faithful! If you don’t already have one, may God bring a trusted believer into your life to challenge you and help you transform into the likeness of Jesus (Ephesians 4:15). We need each other to help sharpen and spur us on to follow Christ to the end. Amen.

“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5b).

“What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?” (Romans 3:3).

November 20, 2025November 20, 2025

Loosening the Constraints of Time

Last weekend I visited a place near the water and stayed for a couple of days. This beloved place of retreat has a wonderful sense of peace, covering, and wonder that I’ve returned to over the years. While there, I often get a sense that I could be in many different time periods other than my own, with its creaky wooden staircase and its decorative historical references. All these elements combine so that being there often comes with an intangible sense that anything is possible.

However, the huge, imposing grandfather clock has rung its familiar chime every hour on the hour year after year. I never have really loved being so acutely aware of the time. It often falls into one of two extremes; either feeling like the time is slipping away too quickly, or it’s dragging on so slowly that the chime, which makes some form of a sound every 15 minutes, starts to loom irritatingly large. Even with the place’s magical quality, the clock’s chiming made time feel like something I couldn’t have the illusion of escaping from, even on a restful vacation.

That is, until this trip. The grandfather clock rang its familiar tune, but this time, something was off. First, the hour chime missed the hour by quite a lot. Then the chime indicating which hour it was was comically off by several hours. Suddenly, it became a magical land in a new way. The fantasy of not being constrained by time was much easier to inhabit when I knew the chimes could be laughed at, even ignored altogether. I could look at the actual time whenever I chose to, instead of having the time imposed upon my conscious mind. Time became irrelevant, and it felt like freedom.

God Himself is not confined by time. He operates in eternity, which can be difficult for us humans, trained on the limitations of time, to understand. “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4). Similarly, Peter reminds us that time is not so relevant in light of the eternal timeline of God, “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:8-9). We have no control over time, how much we have, how fast or slow it comes and goes; we are completely dependent on God for the time that we have. Time can become so complicated the more we think about it, but there at the retreat this past weekend, I was reminded that all we are able to do is trust God with the time that He’s given us. “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. Selah” (Psalm 62:8). With that broken grandfather clock chime, God provided me with a glimmer of the feeling of living in His realm. There He loosened the constraints of time that I am bound by here on this earth, and gave me a taste of eternity.

Even with how much is made of time, and how much time has been overemphasized in some ways, time is in fact a good thing. God made it, and the original clock was the moon and the sun, “He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting” (Psalm 104:19). It is good for us to have rhythms to our lives, to follow the rhythm set for the earth from the very Beginning.

But, it is also good for us to catch these glimpses of eternity, which is just as real as time. Jesus Himself tells us to focus on the things of heaven, set in eternity, where time no longer has an effect on us, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21). Our real treasures are the ones that are in the eternal realm; they’re the ones that last. The ones built on the fruits of the Spirit. Our time here in time is short, but it is enough for us because of Jesus. It is not something to dread or avoid, but to bring before Jesus and ask Him for wisdom.

May we ever look for God’s Truth and wonder, and find His order and respite in the midst of chaos.

“Remember how short my time is! For what vanity you have created all the children of man!” (Psalm 89:47).

“For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:9-12).

February 24, 2021February 24, 2021

The Character of Jesus

God is ageless; God always has been, is, and always will be. Yet, entering our human timeline as Jesus, He was fully human and fully God. As fully human, Jesus had chronological age while here on earth–thirty-three years.

The chronological time we think of in our day-to-day schedules or even in the timeline of our lifetimes, in the Greek is the word chronos, or sequential, chronological time.

Paul wrote in Romans 5:6: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” In Paul’s original Greek, the word for “right time” is kairos. Kairos means “the supreme moment of grace,” and it also means a call to action, or an opportune time. At kairos, the supreme moment of grace, after Jesus of Nazareth had lived as a human being for thirty-three years on this earth, God brought about a supreme moment of grace, THE moment of grace, that would also mark all of “chronos” time for every living being on this blue planet.

There are some moments that are, in fact, meant to be, divinely ordained, especially set apart. And they work, not in opposition to sequential time, but still, somehow, outside of it.

Just by being born in the place and manner that He was, the prophecies about Jesus were undeniable. King Herod committed heinous violence in the name of preserving his position of power when Jesus was around 2 years old (Matthew 2:13-16). God kept Jesus and His family safe from Herod and they successfully fled to Egypt. Before He could even talk, simply by entering the human timeline, Jesus defined the ages into what we now call Before Christ (B.C.) and After Death (A.D.).

Humanity’s timeline was defined by Jesus coming into the world.

Jesus grew up living a fairly typical Jewish life after His early years in Egypt. Back in His hometown of Nazareth He learned carpentry, the trade of His earthly father, Joseph. In the gospel of Luke, there is a story about how Jesus stayed in the temple during His visit to the Passover festival in Jerusalem. He spoke with understanding and wisdom to the teachers there at just twelve years old. Jesus’ devotion to God was demonstrated even then, listening and learning in His Father’s house (Luke 2:42-50).

Jesus is a loyal and faithful Son to His Father.

At about the age of thirty (Luke 3:23), Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan for 40 days, and passed this test, remaining steadfast in faithfulness to God. After being rejected by the people (nearly being thrown off a cliff) in Nazareth (Luke 4:28-29), He left and started developing close personal relationships with twelve particular men, His apostles, but also women, several of whom he cured of disease, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna (Luke 8:2-3). He taught them all by His living example, caring for their souls’ well-being, and speaking of the Kingdom of God. He also occasionally taught in parables that compelled them, even when they didn’t understand them.

Jesus fiercely loves His friends and followers.

Thirty-three is the age many believe Jesus was when He suffered and died on the cross for the sins of the world. After just three years of ministry, healing people, gathering grain on the Sabbath, and criticizing the Jewish authorities’ contrary hearts, God brought about the kairos, the ordained moment, for Jesus to give up His life for you and for me. Jesus chose to seize the moment, not avoid it. He leaned into His role in the kairos of God out of His faithfulness and love. He was put to death as a threat to power, both according to the Jewish leadership and political (Roman) leadership.

Growing up learning about Jesus I used to think thirty-three was pretty old, but it is not long at all to have fulfilled one’s entire life purpose, let alone God’s ultimate purpose for fulfilling His covenant with humanity. In thirty-three years, God turned flesh was able to make sure that everyone, Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles, had a Way through Himself to live in hope and peace with the Father. This Way remains open to us to this day!

Jesus is our self-sacrificially courageous Savior.

Though He was crucified at thirty-three years old, Jesus rose again. He is alive today, seated at the right hand of God. He is ruling and working on our behalf, interceding for us even now (Romans 8:34).

Because of Jesus, life never ends for us, even when our bodies die. “For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!” (Romans 5:17). Jesus has demonstrated His characteristic loyalty, faithfulness, love, selflessness, and courage flawlessly, even being fully human. We can know Jesus is interceding for us with the Father because of who He is! He knows that we are dust, meaning we are weak and prone to sin, and yet, He has deep and active compassion for us all.

Jesus is the present-day Ruler and King of all kings.

I’ll be turning thirty-three myself tomorrow. To be this age for me means sharing something, even in some small way, with Jesus. I feel it is a beautiful kairos, a moment to be celebrated and observed in light of God’s goodness. But it is not the only one, nor the last one. It is not the last chance. It is instead yet another invitation to enter into His unending grace. We have these invitations now, and at every moment, from Him, no matter what age we are or whether it is our birthday or not.

And that, friends, is something to celebrate.

“He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life” (Revelation 21:6).

“He is not God of the dead, but of the living. …” (Mark 12:27).

Thank you for spending some of your time journeying with me. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to the blog, and like & follow the Facebook page; it truly helps me continue writing about Life with the King. Grace and peace.