We Must Have the Wisdom to Know the Time

1For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: 2a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. 9What profit has he who works in that in which he labors? 10I have seen the burden which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with.

While we live, for everything there is a season, and every purpose has its time to be fulfilled. For people, each day is a first, and what happens on that day is something they are going through for the first time; but to God, the years of human life hold nothing new and nothing that is a first. Ever since God created this world, one generation after another has come and gone in the limited space called the earth. So the names differ and the ways of living differ, but in the end it is all only the same things repeating. People make new plans of their own and seem to achieve them, but look closely and you find that someone in the past made the same plans and achieved them. Just as you may tear down a building someone else put up and build a new one in its place, someday someone will tear down the building you put up, and another building will go up in its place. This is what it comes to: for the people who have come into this world with time allotted to them by God, everything may be a first, but to God, who watches it all, it is only the same things repeating.

If you look down from high in the sky in an airplane, you will see a beautiful, peaceful world made of little points of light. Seen from far away, it looks so beautiful and peaceful, yet while you were down below it, you will have lived fiercely and gone through many things that made you cry and laugh. At times you will also have felt sorry for your own life, wondering what you were struggling so desperately for in such a small world.

Solomon deeply envied those who, though they had less, lived enjoying the delight of the heart within God’s wisdom, knowledge, and joy, more than those who had lived enjoying wealth as he had. For they had not lived fiercely, as he had, to get hold of the world’s worthless things; they had looked down from on high and lived for the eternal kingdom. Solomon had thought that everyone lives to satisfy their own greed, but only now did he come to know that there are people who live for eternal time within limited time.

When he realized that they had been working hard to prepare to enter the eternal world, using bodies that would return to dust, Solomon felt that their lives were truly beautiful. He himself had thought of the world simply as a place to spend time eating and drinking and pleasing the body, but he came to realize a deep truth: they had been using the world to prepare to enter the kingdom of God.

Whoever makes a decision of faith and turns back quickly can enjoy even in this world the peace that is enjoyed in heaven. A life lived by faith and a life that is not differ as much as heaven and earth, because faith has been guaranteed heaven, just as God promised. If, like Solomon, you know that you must serve God and still cannot let go of the world, you will regret it when frost has settled white on your head.

Solomon said that there is a time for everything, and he told us not to waste our time as he had, but to make the right choice when God gives the opportunity. He said that because the world goes round and round, we must not hurry impatiently but judge calmly, and that if we look carefully around us and work together so that we can walk the good way, we can have fewer regrets. From the moment they are born into the world, not only human beings but all living things, such as animals and plants, cannot escape death. Just as people and animals leave offspring and plants leave seed, people of faith must leave the gospel in every footprint. A farmer puts plants in the ground in order to wait for the time to pluck them up. There is a purpose for each person to fulfill, and that is why people are born into the world; the outcome of that purpose can be clearly known after death.

God is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, and all things in heaven and on earth that he created surely have a beginning and an end. Every life has its anguish and challenges, its joys and sorrows, and at the end of it, whether the ending is happy or unhappy, there is surely an end. People do not meet the problems of life because they want to, but the faith that flows along with their life is something they can choose. So what affects where a person goes after death is not the problems they met in life; it is decided by the faith flowing in their heart.

People are born with a body and a soul. If the soul and the body went back to the dust together, it would not matter how we lived; but if the spirit, which is the root of life, and the soul, which is a person’s very being, are judged by God and divided between heaven and hell, then we must live well now, according to God’s will. Only when we fill our lives with the grace of God, with faith in Christ, and with the fullness of the Holy Spirit will we be commended for having done well when we meet Christ the Judge. God wanted people, within their limited lives, to attain to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, and that is why he sent them into this world, which Satan rules. If we grow wisely in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, God will help us to be sanctified.

How many days do you have left to live in this world? I am asking how much time you have left to live as witnesses of Christ and sow the seed of the gospel in other people’s hearts. If you sow the seed of the gospel diligently now, God will bring in the harvest at the end time, storing the wheat in the barn of heaven and throwing the weeds into the burning fire.

If you do not work, the souls who will receive eternal punishment, like weeds to be thrown into the fire, will grow in number. That is why you must redeem the time and work. When Solomon said there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up, he was stressing that the times God has set do not change, and how important it is for people to live by the right time.

Think about whether you have ever seen thistles and thorns growing thick over the hearts of people you love and pretended not to notice. We ought to set the fire of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the family we love, burn up all the thistles and thorns, and turn them into good ground. Yet we must ask ourselves whether we have ever stood by with folded arms, still not caring about those souls, or simply too lazy.

We must pray for the salvation of souls in season and out of season. The gospel has a hard time taking root in hardened hearts, but if believers give up without even sowing, God will rebuke them. If our hope is in heaven, we will not be able to bear keeping the gospel to ourselves. If we have the cowardly thought that we are worse off than that person right now, so it would be embarrassing to share the Word, and that however we look at it, now is not the time, we will see that soul fall into the fire of hell.

The word is not something we plant in a person’s heart; it is something we proclaim. If we believe that God will work and share the Word with confidence, God makes the seed we have sown take root and grow in due season. If we are trapped in an unbelief of our own making, do not share it, and miss the time, we may let the seed of the gospel God entrusted to us simply rot. People do not set the time; God sets it. So we only have to carry out our mission as each time is given to us.

If you have heard the gospel and know it, and yet are too ashamed to share it or cannot be bothered to share it, know that this too is pride. If you do not share Jesus, who is more precious than any other name, God will not work for you either. In verses 2-8, Solomon is saying that as people live in the world, they must judge the time well and act. Whether it is something people meet in their lives or something in nature, if they cannot rightly judge the time that has been set, they will run into hardship. God set those times, and that is why there is a time for everything in the world. Each thing happens exactly at its time, and that means God is the Creator. People try to set the times themselves, but every time, whether in human affairs or in nature, rests with God.

Do you know that your life is not your own? People’s births and ends do not go as they plan. They make plans because they want to live well, but things do not turn out as they want. They want a healthy life, yet sometimes they fall ill; they invest everything they own in a business, yet sometimes it collapses. At times, at the very moment they are about to give up on life, they find a reason to live, or they watch powerful enemies fall of their own accord. Sometimes, when they have given up, sure they will never recover, something happy they never imagined happens; and sometimes, in a great accident, something like a miracle happens and they alone survive.

In this way, as human beings watch the things that happen within the time God has given, they sometimes come to realize his grace, and sometimes realize that there is nothing they can do. That is why people of the world who do not know God’s will ask in return why, if God is going to do with life as he pleases like this, he made people at all; but they say this only because they do not know God’s providence.

Through faith that has received Christ, God separates the weeds from the wheat, and he wants the holy wheat to carry out his work so that more wheat can be gathered in. Because God knew from before the ages that human beings would sin, he appointed the cross on which Christ would atone for them, and he set in place a plan to save those who believe in the grace of atonement. The people who keep their faith to the end, unaffected by their circumstances, are the very ones who have been chosen by God. We can see these people, called by God, doing their very best to the last moment so that they will not betray him.

People who do not believe in Christ complain that it is narrow-minded for salvation to be decided with Christ at its center. But God gave free will to all people equally, so receiving Christ or not receiving him is each person’s own will. That is why they have no right to slander God. Even if people believe there is an afterlife, they cannot enter heaven unless they acknowledge that Christ is the key to heaven.

King Hezekiah fell mortally ill, but when he prayed earnestly to God, he was given fifteen more years to live; John the Baptist rebuked Herod for the wrongs in his family life and met an absurd death. Look at how people like Hezekiah and John leave the world at a time they did not expect. Then you see that the owner of life is God. God, the Sovereign, has made all the affairs of the world come to pass in their time. Wisdom, then, is to think hard now about how you will live the life you have been given.

God has entrusted you with faith, time, wealth, health, and people so that you can make the life you have received into a fine work of art. Every time you said the materials were running short, he always filled them up again, and when you lacked wisdom, he taught you the right purpose and direction. He gave us the wisdom to try portraying our children as flower petals, but sometimes we grew too greedy and painted colors we did not want, and sometimes we copied other people’s works and failed. If we have received much from God, all we need to do is share it with those who have nothing, but sometimes we let it rot and were rebuked for it.

Many times he corrected what had gone wrong in our lives, yet we often ruined our lives by always comparing them with other people’s works. But God told us to lay down our greed and our temper and start again; he gave us the chance to have faith, and he waited for us. What we thank God for is that he did not tell us to live like robots; he told us to use our free will and think hard about how we can make our lives beautiful.

God gives even greater ability to those who understand his will and are bringing their work to completion, and he helps them finish it successfully. People receive the same time and grace, but how their lives look differs depending on the heart with which they live. Our mission is to guard with our very lives the salvation we received freely from God, and God’s will is that we tell the fact that the Son of God came into this world and atoned for sin. If someone lives a holy life according to that will, God will boast of that person to many people and will make precious use of that name. May each of you be one of those holy believers, with a name that precious.

Ecclesiastes 3:4

4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

One and the same event in the world can be something to laugh about for one person and a sad thing that brings tears for another. It is the way of human affairs that the same thing, depending on the situation, can be sad or can be joyful enough to dance about, as it was for the mother of the salt seller and the umbrella seller. When people watch a game, they are overjoyed if the team they support wins, and they get worked up as if disaster had struck if it loses; but once time passes, that game too is only a pastime they came across in life. To those who get so worked up over a lost game that they turn to violence, the game must be that important; but in God’s eyes they are simply foolish people who do not know what matters.

You must have the wisdom to judge whether the event you are facing now is a spiritual problem or a problem that can come up in the course of life. To have this wisdom, you must be born again in God; only then can you discern. Human wisdom cannot know a time to keep and a time to cast away, or a time to build up and a time to break down. To judge rightly, you must block the attacks of evil spirits by faith, you must not be swayed by your emotions, and you must not be deceived by what people say. Only when you can see the world through the word of truth can you live by a good conscience. Even when the Holy Spirit leads you, you may not respond sensitively at first, and at times your own thoughts are so strong that you ignore the Holy Spirit. But when you mature through the Word, you can recognize at once when the Holy Spirit is at work, and so you come to have the wisdom to judge spiritually.

1 Peter 2:4-5

4coming to him, a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God, precious. 5You also, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

The Bible describes Jesus as a living stone, a rock, a white stone, and so on. The Jews were called to be built up as a spiritual house, like Jesus the living stone, but they had no wisdom; they judged that Jesus was not fit to be a stone for building the temple, and rejected him. But Jesus became the chief cornerstone of the house of God. Even now, many people think Jesus is worthless.

Jesus, who died powerless on the cross, looks so shabby to them and seems to be of no help at all in life, so they throw him away without hesitation. But we must know that a time will come when they regret their choice and cling on, begging for one more chance. If there is someone around you who slanders Christ or persecutes Christians, do not be afraid; proclaim the truth boldly. To share the gospel you must always embrace people with love, but when you come under spiritual attack, you can collapse before you have even shared it. That is why you need to stand on the rock of faith first. You must love the soul even of an enemy, but if you do not know the Word, you can be defeated spiritually by that enemy. So you must grow first.

God, too, loved the Jews, yet when they fell into spiritual corruption, he rebuked them; and Jesus told his disciples that when they preached the gospel and people persecuted them, they should shake off even the dust from their feet. This is a word telling us that we must love souls, but be clear about a time to embrace and a time to cast away.

The apostle Paul, too, staked his life to save souls, yet he said that he had delivered to Satan those who divided and hindered the kingdom of God. Only when believers first know how to make this kind of spiritual judgment can they tell a time to embrace from a time to refrain from embracing. If we fear people and try to please them, we will not find the time to preach the gospel. The hearts of the people of the world are like a cliff whose bottom cannot be seen, so if we try to win people’s hearts first and then share the gospel, we will never find the time.

Preaching the gospel is not begging. It is proclaiming the holy word, and it is giving people spiritual food freely, for their sake, so that their souls do not fall into hell. Even with a tree raised with sweat and devotion, a farmer resolutely cuts off the branches that are not needed in order to get better fruit. If the time for cutting the branches is missed, not only the fruit on the other branches but the tree itself can die, so the time must be chosen well. People who cannot tell the way of truth from the way of the world and who trust in their own wisdom and knowledge can only perish in the end. If you want to receive God’s grace abundantly, you must not miss the time to cut off all the branches reaching out toward the world.

To those who fight evil spirits by faith, the Holy Spirit will make known the right time to cut off the branches that are not needed. Solomon, who did not walk with the Holy Spirit, regretted the life he had lived without distinguishing the times of the flesh from the times of the spirit. The Holy Spirit told him not to go any further toward the world and said that he must listen to the voice of a good conscience, but Solomon would not bend his will. In the same way, if you hear the words of the Holy Spirit and still, like Solomon, do not open your heart, no one can help you.

In winter a tree looks dead, but when spring comes, new shoots come out. Even if our lives are cold like winter, if we put down deep roots toward Christ, God will have us live in the eternal kingdom of heaven, where there is no anxiety or worry, no evil one, and no death. Believers who have received Christ will turn their vain lives into an opportunity to lift up God’s name, and, carrying out his will, will bring dying souls to life. God is looking for such believers and wants to glorify them.

Friends, no one can stop the passing years, but if you use those years as compost for bearing fruit, you can become a faithful servant of God. Though our life is like a pilgrim’s, I hope you will serve faithfully with all your heart, gather much fruit, and give glory to God.