One summer years ago I was invited to enjoy my evening meal with an older couple.  After supper we sat on the porch for a while, watching (and feeling) the hot June sun bake the earth.  After a few minutes of idle chatter, the man remarked, “I wish we’d just stay on God’s time, and not go on Daylight Savings Time.  That extra hour of daylight every day just about burns my garden up.”

I want to use that little story to springboard to the topic of this article and of my sermon on Sunday.  It’s about time.  God’s time.

There were three things that God created in the beginning.  One was matter, another was space and the third was time.  These three are inextricably bound together: matter, space, and time. They are all created entities.  That is, time, matter and space have not always existed. They began at the beginning when Genesis 1 gives us that information about the start of all earthly and heavenly beings.  Before then, of course, there was no such thing as time.  And time is limited.  Someday it will come to its end.

When our Lord Jesus returns there will be no such thing as time.  At the second advent of Christ He will stop all the clocks and calendars and, once again, there will be only Eternity.   That event will happen right on time.  But the first advent was right on time, too.  According to Galatians 4:4-5a, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law….”  The fullness of times means that when God's purpose was ripe, when the appointed hour had come, when all of history beforehand had prepared for the coming of Christ, at exactly the right moment, Jesus Christ was born into this world.  There is nothing accidental, nothing haphazard about God's providence or His working. Christ came exactly at the right moment—on God’s time.