Sunday, November 05, 2006

"An Acceptable Time"

As always Pastor Threlfall preached an excellent sermon today. Today was communion and he preached out of Psalm 69. When I turned to the passage my eye instantly fell on this verse out of the chapter:

Psalm 69:13 (NASB)
But as for me, my prayer is to You O Lord, at an acceptable time;
O God, in the greatness of Your lovingkindness, answer me with Your saving truth.

The phrase "at an acceptable time" really struck me. So I wrote the verse on a card using the above colour scheme and illustrated it. The main part of the illustration (for me) is a green clock with no hands: the "acceptable time" is always for us to come to God. Yet I think that the "acceptable time" also applies to God. The "acceptable time" could also apply to when God will answer us. When the acceptable time is for Him to answer us according to "the greatness if [His] lovingkindness". The hand-less clock could still apply in this situation as well: we do not know Gods clock.

I really needed this verse and am going to claim it as mine. I do not know God's timing for my life but I need to continue to rely on Him and wait on Him and His timing and not try to do things when it is not in "an acceptable time".

I actually prefer the ESV (note the punctuation):

Psalm 69:13
But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord.
At an acceptable time,
O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love answer me in your saving faithfulness.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I will use your verse tomorrow as I wait in the Hospital with Dad. Thanks for the insight - a blessing to me!

Becca said...

Thanks, Joanna. I needed that.