Friday, June 23, 2017
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When you live in the Northeastern U. S. like we did, you usually pack up your shorts and T-shirts about November and file them under "See you in April." But it was January, and that's a big winter month where we were living and people were suddenly all over the place in their shorts and their summer clothes. It was 74 degrees! We figured either our calendar or our thermometer were wacky, but they both were right. It was a great experience - June in January. Unfortunately, the weather fooled the bushes and flowers in our yard. They felt the warm temperature and said, "Ooo, this feels good. Must be spring. Time to wake up!" Sure enough, the buds started appearing all over our yard. But I wanted to yell at them, "Not yet, guys! This isn't going to last! It's too soon! It's an ambush! This isn't going to work!" Unfortunately, I don't speak "Plant" fluently. And when the inevitable freezing temperatures returned, those poor early-bloomers were in for a terrible shock.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Blooming Too Soon."
Ecclesiastes 3:1 - "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven." God has set up everything in life to run in seasons, including your life. And things that happen before their season - a season He determines - are not going to turn out well.
So God follows in verse 11 with a fundamental principle of happy endings, "He has made everything beautiful in its time." Problem: His time is almost always later than our time. So we get impatient. We think it isn't going to happen or that we need to interfere to speed things up. And just like those early January blossoms, we get ahead of the season. We try to make it bloom too soon and, though it may look good for a little while, it ends up not working.
When it comes to the plan God is working out for your life, if you rush it, you ruin it. But, again like our early blooming blossoms on a warm winter day, you may be saying, "Sure feels to me like it's time for it to happen." And you get ahead of the timing of Almighty God.
Romance for example; that's one area where a lot of people just can't wait for God to do it in His time. Maybe you've been trying to make things happen romantically, you've lowered your standards to speed up the process, but it's not God's time yet and it's probably not God's person. It's your time, but it's not God's time, and it's going to turn out all wrong.
Maybe there's a financial situation where you feel you can't wait any longer for God to come through. You can't wait for Jehovah-jireh any longer. You're going to figure out how to solve this yourself. There was a time when our ministry was going through a particularly difficult time financially and we had a deadline that was only a couple days away. One friend offered to loan us money to meet the need. Man, I appreciated that kind of concern tremendously, but I said, "Let's not do anything yet. I've really prayed that God would meet the need, and I don't want to interfere with what He's going to do." You know what? Praise God, He sent us the miracle funds just in time.
My friend said, "I guess I was trying to do an Abraham and Sarah." Actually, he was just trying to show us some wonderful love, but I got what he meant. He was referring to that time when Abraham and Sarah couldn't wait anymore for God to give them the son He had promised them, even though they were too old to have children. And they arranged for a surrogate mother scheme that messed up their family royally. All because they couldn't wait for God to do it in His way, in His time.
So whether it's a relationship, or finances, a ministry goal, getting justice or meeting a need. Wherever you're tempted to try to make it happen, don't. Just remember those blossoms whose instincts told them it was time when it wasn't. If it's blooming too soon, it probably isn't going to make it. But in God's time, which is probably later than yours, in His time, it will be beautiful.