The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Reliance - Knowing The Time 2024.09.18

Episode Date: September 22, 2024

God bless the Menking Family! 

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together. A time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance, a time to cast away stones,

and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to seek, and a time to lose, a time to keep, and a time to cast away, a time to tear, and a time to sow, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak, a time to love, and a time to hate, a time for war, and a time for peace. Lord, thank you for the wisdom that we gain from your word. Thank you for your manifold blessings, your mercy towards us. Thank you, God, for the beauty that you have created and for your holiness and righteousness. Thank you, Jesus, that you are a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Thank you that you are good and your mercy endures forever. Thank you for your ceaseless advocacy for us and intercession for us.

advocacy for us and intercession for us. Thank you for being our Redeemer, our Savior, our King, our Lord, our High Priest, our Friend. Lord, we love you, we bless you, and we pray that you would redeem this time. Holy Spirit, quicken our hearts, be present with us as we dive into your word and we seek your face, your truth, your guidance, your will, your way. a great sensitivity to what you are doing in our lives, in the lives of those around us, and everything in this world. God, show us what time we are living in. Show us what moment and what season we are in in our own lives, and help us, Lord, to be content, to be reliant on you, to come to you with everything that we need. Lord, we need forgiveness. I need forgiveness. We all need forgiveness. We thank you, Lord, that you will provide forgiveness as we repent,

as we come to you seeking your face. Lord, heal what needs to be healed. Show us what needs to be changed. Move us from where we are to where we need to be. Transform us from image to image and from glory to glory. Lord, according to your word, according to your will, your perfect will, and your love for us, God, help us. We cannot even recognize what to do without you, without your leadership and your guidance, Holy Spirit. Be with us now as we come together and worship in your name. We love you, Jesus. We pray these things in your glorious name. Amen. When we think about what time it is, the answer is going to be different for everyone, even literally when we think about time zones and the way that we measure time on the

earth. But when we examine this passage from Ecclesiastes 3 and we think about what's going on broadly right now, it is no paradox or no conflict. It is no contradiction that for one person, it may be a time to weep, and for another, it may be a time to laugh. For one, it may be a time for war, and for another, it may be a time for peace. And we may even feel this in our hearts at the same time. On one front, there should be war, and on another front, there should be peace. On one front, we should be building, and on another front, we should be disassembling. On one front, we should be searching, and another,

we should just let things go. Now, the duality inherent here doesn't show us that there's a time to be obedient and a time to be disobedient to God. That is certainly not in the scripture. It doesn't tell us that the instructions and the commandments that God has are void. So we shouldn't look at verse 8 where the Bible says there's a time to love and a time to hate and immediately say, well, that's in contradiction with what Jesus taught in the New Testament. Now, again, keeping in mind that hate doesn't mean the same thing that we apply in our English definition to it. There's a time to show forth love and then there's a time to restrain certain ways of demonstrating it. There should be love in

our hearts and if it exists towards even our enemies then it is a supernatural love. It is not something that we are making up out of the fiber and fabric of our own will, of our own being. So let's dispense with the notion that this passage has some problems for the consistency of scripture, and let's reflect on how it can apply in our own lives. It should bring us peace. It should allow us to be content. Because for so many people, dare I say for almost everyone, when circumstances and situations change, relationship, financial, spiritual, location, geopolitical, macro, any of these things. Even just the passage of time itself.

Change is going to be a part of that. become accustomed to things, when we become used to particular situations, then as those things no longer persist, it can feel like we are losing a part of ourself. And we've all experienced these bittersweet moments in our own lives, in the lives of our families, whether it's changing careers, graduating from school and going to a different place or a different situation, moving on from a relationship that ends, going through a process where we see someone close to us pass away. There are different times and we have to be able to take the value, the lessons, and everything else from the times that we have had in the past without getting stuck there. We have to continually be ready to look towards the future while remaining in the present,

where we can receive from the Lord direction and guidance and counsel and correction so that the future can take shape in a way that is in accordance with God's will. And brothers and sisters, this is something that I personally don't do a perfect job at. And that's probably even being overly nice. I don't do a good job of this. And I have a sneaking suspicion that most of us don't. It is difficult to let things go. It's difficult to change posture. When we see a dramatic shift, we will typically have a tendency to wonder, well, where is this coming from? Particularly if it's from something that feels good to something that feels bad. There's an asymmetry to this. When we go from

a valley to the mountaintop, when that kind of shift happens, especially with the clear presence of the Lord, we can say it's easy for us to, or easier, I should say, for us to praise the Lord and to celebrate his deliverance and his healing and his power in those moments. But when the opposite happens, it is more difficult for us to do so because we are in this world, we are in our bodies, we feel these things in a different way, positive and negative emotions. There are chemical aspects to this that are part of the very nature of our makeup, physiologically, at the deepest level of the systems inside of the body that we are inhabiting.

But when we look at these things and we see the Apostle Paul talking about being content in all circumstances, talking about knowing how to abound and knowing how to lack, knowing how to abound and knowing how to lack. Part of that is a general understanding that there are different times, there are different moments, there are different seasons, and they are not all going to look alike. Keep in mind that this is one of the general criticisms that is levied against the idea of an eternal heaven by people who are either not as familiar with the doctrine of heaven in the Bible as they should be, or who fail to appreciate

what the words of the Bible really say and imply. There is this viewpoint that imagines people with wings playing harps in a cloud forever and ever and ever, and it feels like versions of this kind of argument when you're talking about the exhaustion of all possibilities and just the nature of infinite time itself. There are some technical questions here to go through, but suffice to say, if we have a static view of heaven, there is something in us that says, yeah, that just for whatever reason doesn't feel desirable. So let's understand that when the day-to-day moments and the season-to-season periods of our lives transform, even in a way that moves from some place that we see as good and valuable to other places that we see as less good and less valuable, we, of course, can't just shrug our shoulders and say, oh, I guess a variety is the spice of life

and offer some trite aphorism and then move on and grin and bear it. We should have a deeper understanding that the purposes of God are made manifest in all sorts of different ways and all sorts of different places and that we can learn from these different experiences in a broader and more comprehensive and more vast way than we could in other times and from just being in the same situation the entire time. If we are never experiencing the adaptive stress of coming to grips with a new situation. If we're never learning how to navigate change, then we're never going to be prepared for it. And if we can face it and say, this is something that I am here for. This is something that is happening to me. Of course, we should examine our own hearts and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to us. If there is something

that we are doing that is negatively impacting our lives, then the Holy Spirit will call it out and we must repent of it and move away. And maybe that does fix a problem that has arisen. of it and move away. And maybe that does fix a problem that has arisen. This idea of being content in different seasons doesn't necessarily mean that we should be passive and say, oh, I guess this is just what is happening to me. We have agency here. We have responsibility. And if the transformation of something valuable or good into something that is really difficult or just moving in a completely different direction, it is incumbent upon us to understand, well, why is this happening? But we have to come to grips with the idea that we may not have or get a full explanation of it. Yes, if there's something the Holy Spirit brings to mind and we are seeking first the kingdom of God and he brings it to our attention and we repent, maybe we can regain what that was.

But maybe, just maybe, in certain situations, we can't hold on to these things so tightly. It doesn't mean we should throw them away before it's time either. It doesn't mean we should throw them away before it's time either, right? If there are times and appointed seasons for different things, and God's will is going to be accomplished, and of course there's all sorts of underpinning questions here about our own free will versus determinism versus God's sovereignty and how we parse all of those things together, I'm here not necessarily to unpack all of those things together. I'm here not necessarily to unpack all of those things, but I'm here to simply speak to people who are going through a time where they are seeing or have seen significant change and they don't necessarily know how to

deal with it. The first thing would be to pray, to seek the face of God, to go to him in worship with the understanding that he holds everything in his hands. And that if there's something about our circumstance that is our responsibility that we are not taking care of, that there's something that we haven't repented of that we need to, there's something that's going on where our own activities are impeding the work of God in our own lives, then the Lord needs to draw that out and we need to be receptive to that so that we can get back on the right footing. But absent something clear and direct there, we need to have a posture of contentment. And that comes with knowing that God is in control, understanding that

there are times where things are up, there are times when things are down, and understanding that the trials and these periods will work patience and perseverance and will ultimately strengthen our faith. When I think about, if you'll permit me a clumsy analogy here, people who are experienced investors and financiers, people who have been dealing with these sorts of things for a long time, one of the things that they will say is that it's very important for people to have lived through different market cycles to see how behavior patterns change. Because even if you have all of the data, even if you know all of the numbers, even if you have all of the reports written about

a particular period in time, there's something different. There's something that is more potent about living through it yourself where there is a felt and experienced reality that you have. Even if we would assume that that is unreliable in terms of recalling all the details, maybe our memory warps some things in one way and other things in others, leaving all of that aside, the lived experience of going through periods of plenty and periods of lack is incredibly important. And this is something that happened in the run-up to the financial crisis, and it happens any time there's a long stretch of things going well, generally speaking. People simply assume that that will continue in perpetuity, and we have a very short memory

when it comes to these sorts of things. We see this in the Bible as well, whether it's Joseph talking about the seven years of plenty in Egypt followed by the seven years of famine as foretold in the dream of the Pharaoh. And all of these different places, the entire book of Judges, when there is deliverance and leadership and people turning to God, and then in the course of one generation, a turning away, a falling away from the Lord, the pollution of worship and the spiritual adultery taking place. So we see these cycles, but the cycles don't have to govern us. It doesn't have to be the case unless God has spoken it and it's a thus saith the word of the Lord that we are absolutely in

this time. Being content in all circumstances does not mean that we should not endeavor to change those circumstances. It means that while we fight, while we fight the good fight of faith, while we intercede for the people of God, while we stand firm on the truth of scripture, while we spread the gospel, while we endeavor to be transformed by the Holy Spirit so that we can have love for all others, including our enemies, especially our enemies, as a way of distinguishing and showcasing the genuine supernatural love that can only come from a loving God. When we find ourselves in those situations, those situations, we have to contend. We have to be content, but we have to look for circumstances that can be changed. We have to pray for circumstances to be changed, to be improved. We want to work towards positive outcomes in our own lives and more broadly. And so it's a delicate balance because if we follow the instruction of being

content and we have that kind of complacency that can set in that masquerades as contentment and this apathy appears, then we're not going to be properly equipped to handle ourselves in the right way when that time comes. We will have a tendency to shrug our shoulders and say, well, I guess that's just the way it's going to be. I'm content. Now I'm following the will of God. I'm following the Bible. That's what the Bible says. After all, there's a time for these sorts of things to happen. We're guaranteed trials, all of these different proof texts. And so I guess that's just the way it is. But maybe not. If we get too complacent, if we stick in that kind of mindset,

then we are failing to take on the necessary responsibility. But on the other side of the coin, we can't fall into the trap and into the ditch of saying, okay, well, I am putting all of this on my shoulders and I'm going to do everything in my own power to bring about the kind of outcome that we want. Even if we justify it to ourselves and saying, well, this outcome wouldn't just be good for me, it's going to be good for everyone. Wouldn't it be better if all of these good things happen and all of this beneficial circumstance came to pass? Even if we are right about that, there's a time to let the Holy Spirit lead us to knowing. So to avoid all of these traps from a discipleship standpoint,

the critical importance is, are we hearing from the Holy Spirit or not? Because if we're trying to figure things out using our own reason, our own strength, our own emotions, then sooner or later, and most likely sooner, most likely right now, we are going to get something wrong. But the Holy Spirit knows what time it is. Whether we're going through a trial

and our job is to endure it and that's being obedient, or whether something is coming against us and our job is to withstand it with everything that we have. Whether it's a time to celebrate and not feel guilty for celebrating, or whether it's a time when even if things appear to be going properly and that it is a time for celebration, that maybe we should be more muted. Maybe we should be paying more attention to the people who are not in that particular phase. Maybe we should be more generous and full of charity and focused on others. So it's complicated. It's a case-by-case basis. And the case-by-case nature of these things, again, as we said at the very outset, it doesn't contradict or

conflict with the absolute commandments of the Word of God. But we need practice. We need leadership. We need guidance from the Holy Spirit in order to understand how to walk these out in every single moment, in every single season of our lives. And we need to recognize that there is a time for different approaches to the same thing. And the Holy Spirit will be able to give us insight that we might not have otherwise. the Holy Spirit will be able to give us insight that we might not have otherwise. In dealing with our families, maybe there is an appropriate and proper time for a heightened level of severity or sternness. And maybe there's a time for maximum gentleness. It's so difficult to pick up on all of those cues, especially as a man, as a husband, as a father. If we let what is necessary be governed by just what we feel in the moment, then we're going to make mistakes, and those mistakes are going to be damaging.

But if we let the Holy Spirit guide us, then certainly we will stand a better chance of delivering what is needed in those moments. If we pray for wisdom, if we worship God and just understanding how complex and how delicate and how sophisticated, like every word that we say can have a tremendous impact, not just the words themselves, but how we say it, the exact time that we say it, everything that we do while we're saying it, what we do after we say it, what we do before we say it. It's too much for us to parse. We just don't have the energy or the capacity to scenario plan and go through all of this, that, and the other thing to try and figure

out, okay, well, here's the optimal strategy. Here's the optimal approach. We've really broken it down and now we understand. There are great mysteries even living inside of us. We are opaque. We don't know and certainly couldn't articulate with a degree of precision where it's communicable to others everything that's going on inside our own minds and our own hearts and how we would be impacted by any various number of scenarios that would come up. So the same is true for others, if not more so. It is so difficult. It is so challenging that we shouldn't fall away in despair, but we should say, okay, it is perfectly reasonable. The only thing I can do is to go to God and say, Lord, you know everything.

You love me. You have promised to guide me, Holy Spirit. Help me to clear out anything in my life that is preventing me from hearing from you. Speak to me. Show me what it is I need to do and give me the supernatural resources that I need to do it, to obey. And it's just that simple. And all of this complexity of different times and different seasons, and what if I make this mistake or that mistake? Or what if I go over here when I was supposed to go over there? What if I stay put when I was supposed to move? All of those questions can go away if we are actively walking with the Lord. He cares for us.

He loves us. He wants to guide us. And just as a father guides his children, you build them up so that they can be stronger in their own faculties. Now, we will never be independent of God. We are so dependent on even just his sustaining power to keep the entire universe going. There's never a time when we are going to be independent in a way that we hope our children grow to be, even to that kind of extent, in terms of our relationship between ourselves and God. But the Lord does want us to grow and to mature and to become more effective

for his kingdom. Why? For the sake of the glory of his name, the spread of the gospel, the expansion of the kingdom of heaven, and for the sake of those who need to hear about Jesus, who need to be saved, and who can be saved, and who will be saved. So let's understand the stakes. We have gone through all of these different complexities and challenges, and at the end, we've simply said, we can't figure it out, but that should be a good thing, because it means that quite naturally, we can let go of whatever inhibitions or blocks that we have in our minds and our lives and our egos and simply say, God, I need you to direct me. There is absolutely no way for me to figure out what time it is. And maybe it's time for different things in different situations. Navigating all of that is extraordinarily challenging. There are just too many variables,

too many components, and just flying by the seat of our pants and using our instinct, well, we know that's going to lead us astray. So, Lord, we need your help. I hope that you would join me in that prayer and join me in that sense of surrender, of just saying, I don't know what to do, and even if I think I do, it is more rational for me to conclude that I don't.

But the Bible tells me that we have a guide. We have a counselor. We have the Holy Spirit living inside of us. So let's stop grieving him and move towards his will for our lives in all of the unique situations that we find ourselves in. Lord, thank you for your guidance. Thank you that once we have examined all the complexities that we can return to a simple truth that you are here with us,

that you love us, and that you have promised to lead us. We need you to lead us, Lord. We need you to show us what to do in our own hearts, in our own circumstances and everywhere. We need your will to be accomplished in our lives and not our own. We need to know what time it is, Lord, and we need you to equip us to do what needs to be done in order for your will to be accomplished in our lives. Help us to be obedient. Help our ears to be opened. Unstop our ears, Lord. Break away anything that is clogging them or getting in the way of us hearing from you.

Help us, Lord. We need your help so desperately in this generation. Lord, for the glory of your name, for the sake of your will, for the sake of your kingdom, let it be done in our lives. Help us, Lord, to humble ourselves. Help us, God, to come to you with an understanding and an awareness that you know what time it is for us in every single different situation. Help us to stay on that track, to stay on that narrow path, because we can't walk it without you, and we can't even find it without you, Lord. Thank you, Holy Spirit, that you are close to us, that you are near to us, that in our awareness of you, Lord, we understand the firstfruits, the down payment, the deposit of the glorious inheritance that you have placed for

us and placed in us. God, help us in this generation. Help us to make the right decisions. Help us to have ears to hear and eyes to see, and help us to know what time it is. We love you. We praise you. In Jesus' name, amen.