Kairos Moments

OUTLINE

1. INTRODUCTION

Overview of Discipleship and the benefit of Kairos moments

2. EXPLANATION OF KAIROS VS CHRONOS TIME

3. JESUS’ ANNOUCEMENT OF A KAIROS MOMENT (MARK 1:15)

4. OTHER KAIROS MOMENTS THROUGHOUT OF LIVES –

When God uses life’s trials to enter into your reality and offers an opportunity to align yourself more closely with his Kingdom reality.

5. THE KINGDOM RESPONSE TO KAIROS MOMENTS – REPENT AND BELIEVE

6. RESULT – BREAKTHROUGH AND GROWTH IN DISCIPLESHIP

Kairos Moments (Chuck Gohn)

Well, good morning. If you have your Bibles, you will want to open up to Mark 1:15. Just one verse today. It is good to see you all here, considering it is the Sunday after Easter which is traditionally a low-attended church service. It is good to see you here, but it is even better to see that spring has finally sprung. Amen! Which means we can back off from picking on that groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil. He missed it by four weeks, but he is back on track for next year. Anyway, because spring is here, we are back to doing the things we love to do like planting flowers and bushes and pulling weeds and mowing the lawn and that sort of thing, but it also means, because we are past Easter, we are back to looking at our four core values: worship, discipleship, outreach, and community.

Today, we are going to revisit that value called discipleship. A disciple is just simply a learner. Someone who is interested in learning about the Triune God, about the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Learning about himself. Learning about the world and how to operate within that world. As we know, there are a variety of ways to be a learner, a variety of situations, and a variety of places. You can be a disciple sitting in a small group, a home group, maybe in a bible study. You can take the posture of discipleship even sitting at home and just reading the Bible. As valuable as those places are, what I have come to realize is the best place to be a disciple, to take a posture of learning, is just simply in life. In particular, those life experiences that I refer to as those severe life trials, those painful moments. If you have been a Christian for a while, you can look back on some of those most painful moments and you can see that God was involved in some degree. As painful as it was and you wouldn’t want to revisit it, God had somehow entered into your pain, entered into your reality. If you were patient, if you took a posture as a disciple, as a learner, he may teach you a lesson or two or three or possibly even four. When you came out of that experience, you found that, at a minimum, you experienced some sort of a growth spurt. At a maximum, it might have launched you into a whole new life, a whole new ministry, a whole new career, or a whole new relationship. I refer to those times where God intervened directly into the midst of your trials as kairos moments.

A little bit of background about what the word kairos means. It is a Greek term and, as many of you know, just like the English language, the Greek language has different words to represent different ideas or concepts. The Greeks have at least two words that kind of relate to this concept of time. They have two words. They have chronos and kairos. Chronos time is just basically ongoing time. It is where we get the word chronology. It is kind of like the time on your watch. It is just never-ending time. The thing that characterizes chronos time is that really there is nothing special about it. It is ordinary time. If I was to say do remember what you were doing on September 22, 2012? With few exceptions, I suspect most of you wouldn’t know. That is because it is kind of ordinary time. It just falls within chronos time.

But if I was to ask you what were you doing September 11, 2001? How many of you would know what you were doing? That would be closer to kairos time. Because kairos time has a special mark to it. Obviously, September 11, 2001 was when the terrorists struck the Twin Towers so we remember that. We remember what we were doing. I remember that I was down in Johnson City, TN. I was in seminary. I think it was my first year of seminary. I just remember getting up and getting ready to go to class and just glancing at the TV and seeing those airplanes strike the Twin Towers. What we are looking at here is kairos time has this special component to it. It actually is something that leaves a really heavy impression on you so much so that it is difficult to forget about it. That is kairos time. When we think about kairos time as a special time, a time that leaves impression, it really doesn’t get totally to the heart of what we are talking about in kairos. The Greeks saw kairos times as not just the special times that leave an impression. They saw kairos as the time that the gods would begin to pierce the veil between the spiritual world and the earthly world. In fact, there is a Greek god named Kairos who happens to be like the god of time. Kairos was a winged god, which is where we get the words time flies. This god Kairos represented time and he had wings. Not only did he have wings, he supposedly had a long beard and long hair. What would happen, apparently, the people believed as the legend goes, was this winged, long-haired god would hover around the earth. If you were fortunate enough if he got close, he would give you an opportunity to yank on his hair or yank on his beard and pull him into earth, pull him into your reality. He would give you a few opportunities and a lot of times they would be missed. That is where this idea of kairos comes from. It has a sense of a god piercing the veil between the spiritual realm and the earthly realm. One thing we know, we don’t worship a god who you have to somehow entice to get close to and pull his hair to get him to make himself known. We worship a God who has made himself known initially through the birth of Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ came, he began to reveal that not only was He God making Himself known, but he was ushering in his whole kingdom.