Our Times Are In God’s Hands

“But I trust in you, Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands; deliver me from the hands of my enemies, from those who pursue me.” (NIV)

Introduction

We are servants, sometimes slaves, to our electronic devices; we are slaves to our watches, smart phones, ipads, alarm clocks, and calendars. And a few of us allow these man-made gadgets to rule our days, pushing us forward hurriedly, pressuring us to do more and do it faster. Wherever we are we find ourselves watching the clock relentlessly tick away as reminders of how far we have yet to go and how little time we have to get there. No wonder people are so impatient. Our impatience has caused companies and corporations to invent and/or create different products that are designed to assist us in maintaining and managing our time each day.

Yet with these brand new pretty and shiny gadgets designed to help maximize our time God’s children still appear at times to be stumbling through life. Many of us feel as if somehow we have been demoted and overlooked by life, when in fact, every step we take and every move we make is carefully planned; God Himself is orchestrating all our circumstances and endeavors. When we need to stop for moment to realize that God is in control. No matter how bad things may look at the moment—He is in control!

Here in the 31st Psalm, David is declaring that his entire life is in God’s hand. He makes it known in no uncertain terms that it is God’s timing and not his; it is God’s call upon his life goes according to God’s calendar and not his. Notice that David says, “But I trust in you…” his life was being threatened, to have someone threatened your very life would be extremely scary, it would indeed place most of us on edge for sure—but David says I’m really worried about it because no one can harm me unless God allows it—he seems to refer back to the 23rd Psalm a little bit when he says, “You are my God” just like you are my Shepherd, and because of this I shall fear no evil. When consider the fact that our times are in God’s hands, we also need to understand that His time is not our time. Because God often moves slower than we do, yet God always has us at the right place at the right time and absolutely nothing slips out of His hand. With God, there is never a wasted moment—He knows beforehand what we will face and go through; He is there before we get there in order to work it out for us. This is why David was so confident, this is why he said, “But I trust you…” what if we all could be like David in times of trouble? The answer is…we can. David was not the only one who knew that their time was in God’s hands.

1. Job Knew That His Times Was In God’s Hands

In Job 14: 5 we read, “A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.” (NIV) Have you ever been there? When it seems as if time is just wasting away—and you have not made the progress you thought you should have made by now? Job was suffering and he had no idea what was happening to him and why it was happening to him. By the time we reach the 14th chapter of Job we see that Job was starting to panic. He panic not only because of what he was going through, he panic because time was passing by and there was no remedy in sight—now I did not say there was no remedy, but I did say that the remedy was not in sight. When we are walking through a dense dark valley and we don’t see the Light at the end of the valley. It can and quite often does cause us to panic.

I have a dear friend who has reached the September of his life, and he was on the verge of panic one day because he felt that he lived his entire life with nothing to show for it. However, when he was reminded of how many people lives he touched he became clear to him that his life did have purpose. Although Job was in panic mode, although he was indeed suffering he never once blamed God for his suffering and he also knew that God provided his only hope for restoration. He knew that whatever it was that he was going through he still was in God’s hands. We need to get to a place in our lives where when pain, suffering, and trouble come we don’t panic. We have to say like, “But I trust God…” we must trust the providence of God and we must trust His timing. We all want good things to happen in our lives, but too often we want it now...not later. When it doesn’t happen that way, we are tempted to ask, "When, God, when?" Most of us need to grow in the area of trusting God instead of focusing on the "when" question. If you’re missing joy and peace, you’re not trusting God. If your mind feels worn out all the time, you’re not trusting God. If you feel moved to take things into your own hands you are certainly not trusting God. There has never been a time in my when I had foolishly decided to take matters into my own hands (and I have) that ever succeeded when doing so. I always fell flat on my face, and suffered for it. The late Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. (not Junior) once said, “If you ever want to learn how to trust God suffering will do it”, my experiences of trying to take matters in my own weak hands was a blessing because it taught me not try to work it out quicker and faster than God.