A refrain from a Ben Abraham song cycles through my mind every few days: “Time waits for no man.”[1] Or the Johnnyswim lyric, “Time is the worst kind of friend—always there when you need it, then gone in the end.”[2] Then Solomon whispers from gold-gilt pages:
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in [our] hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.[3]
I appreciate that God can redeem everything for beauty, let alone that He has committed to do so. Verses like Romans 8:28 and Genesis 50:20 give me no small amount of courage. And I’m grateful for His kindness to plant eternity in our hearts, though I don’t really understand what that means. (I also don’t really get that He “inhabits” eternity Himself.)[4] But I have to chuckle that the wisest-man-ever-second-to-Jesus has to then conclude, “But we don’t really have capacity to wrap our little minds around what He’s doing.” Jesus Himself, in His last conversation before His Ascension, affirmed our inability to access time-related information under our Father’s jurisdiction.[5] Paul did receive revelation about the eternal purposes of God, that is quite the “big picture”:
…the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places, according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him.[6]
I hit a birthday this year that put me squarely on the friendly side of forty. This means nearly three decades have passed since I “said the prayer” and two decades since I solidly reckoned with what Bonhoeffer would call the “cost of discipleship.” Every decision I’ve made in these years has been informed by a driving sense of urgency and a gamble on the ethics of Golgotha. I’ve often asked myself, “What am I going to wish I did, when I’m looking back at this from my fiftieth birthday?” Or, more soberly, “What am I going to wish I did, when I’m 80 and it’s too late to change anything?”
What story do I want to be held accountable for when the Son of Man judges the quick and the dead?[7] How do I “walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, fruitful in every good work,” with ever-increasing “knowledge of God and His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding”?[8] Evidently, we must begin with the knowledge of God (or, as A.W. Tozer put it, The Knowledge of the Holy).
Now, we live in a world of war and escalating controversies and collisions and betrayals and generally bad news everywhere we look.[9] In general, I think we are barreling towards the Day of the LORD and that will ultimately be the best thing that could ever happen to us,[10] though it’ll get a bit gnarly in the meantime. I’m spending the summer with hoses locked and loaded on standby for anytime Hezbollah tries to burn my house and Golani village down (we are 2-0 at press time).[11] It is easy to get obsessed with the big picture and bogged down in the bad news. It can be harder to find the joy and fun in the smaller details. But then Jesus goes and says something like, “I have come that you may have life, and life abundant.”[12] He Himself didn’t quite seem like that abundance is relegated only to the ages to come; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John make it clear that Jesus was pretty present with the people around Him (John Eldredge’s Beautiful Outlaw is a wonderful meditation on this).
I don’t adhere to a “prosperity gospel” that promises “your best life now” if you just “say yes to Jesus.” He is not a vending machine or cotton-candy stick at a carnival hyping you up on some sort of sugar trip, setting you up for a hard crash afterwards. To be sure, the hope that is the “anchor of our souls” is forged in us through an assembly line of trouble, persevering through said trouble, thus producing character conformed into the Image of the Crucified One, that ultimately (somehow) anchors us in steadfast trust in what He has promised through the Gospel of the Kingdom.[13]
Yet you are alive right now, and what you believe about Jesus as you go through this process right now is, as Tozer theorized, “the most important thing about you.”[14] He explains:
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man's spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.[15]
This thesis—that what my mind entertains and calls “God” when I think about God is the most critically indicative element of my life—had a tremendous impact on my life as I first read it (for leisure) in my final semester of university. It implies sober consequences in such a way that I was pressed into the Scriptures for clarity, and ultimately found the beauty of God’s very real Good News of the Kingdom soon-to-be restored. This is the journey that ultimately gave me clarity on the Jerusalem-centricity of the Scriptures, and I now firmly believe we will miss Jesus if we miss Jerusalem.
Yet, perhaps the fundamental premise of Tozer’s thesis is simply this: thinking about God. Henri Nouwen, an advocate for listening to the “voice of love” (rather than the voice of accusation or the voice of self that often agrees with accusation), asserted the spiritual practice of discernment, and discerning both the knowledge of God and His will for your life (especially in order to obey it), is simply finding God in the mundane moments of life:
Discernment is a spiritual understanding and an experiential knowledge of how God is active in daily life that is acquired through disciplined spiritual practice. Discernment is faithful living and listening to God’s love and direction so that we can fulfill our individual calling and shared mission.[16]
For all of the swirling circumstances of your life, for all the quagmire of global politics, for all tumult of “hopes deferred”[17] and the daily wrestle against the “cares of this life,”[18] the most important thing about your life and mine is that we—right now, today—remember we have a good Father in a good heaven whose good pleasure is to give us a good Kingdom.[19] And: He will give you glimpses of that goodness here and now, in this age. As an aged David put it:
I once was young, and now I am old
But I have never seen the righteous forsaken.[20]
So look up. You have a Father in heaven smiling over you. The Olympian Eric Liddell famously said, “When I run, I feel His pleasure.” Find whatever it is, however your Creator has wired you, that you feel His smile over your life. I, for probably obvious reasons if you know anything about me, especially enjoyed Cory Asbury’s decision to “get the dog” instead of the big ministry platform.[21] “Seek first the Kingdom,”[22] and all the secondary stuff falls into place. All the big-picture-macros. He knows the best answers to all the anxiety-laden questions keeping you up at night. He will meet you in the mundane, in all the moments reflected upon in Dante Bowe’s “Voice of God” song[23] (that I often listen to when I need a reminder to calm down and lighten up).
It is by, adopting Brother Lawrence’s language, “practicing the presence of God” day-to-day that will give you courage to face the larger issues. And, frankly, you are who you hang out with; connecting with Jesus every day won’t just make you more like Him—it’ll make you less unlike Him (meaning, He is less cranky and more fun to be around than we tend to be). Friendship with Jesus is the best and most magnificent use of your very limited time in your numbered days of this present evil age.[24] The most important thing in your life isn’t learning all the Bible trivia to pass a test or, certainly, to win an argument on social media. It’s that you have an abiding friendship with the Word Himself, who took on flesh so He could dwell amongst us.[25] Call it simple devotion, call it friendship; He calls it “abiding.”[26] So, “abide in the Vine” that wants to give you life, today and forevermore. He wants to be with you.[27]
Maranatha.
Stephanie Quick is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.
[1] Abrahams, B., “Time,” 2016. Secretly Canadian. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/NsGJNwrv95k?si=pME5j3Xw_Pp5O_XC
[2] Ramirez, A.; Sudano, A., “Georgica Pond,” 2016. Big Picnic Records. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/58-b3YhDTJM?si=Cpx5kCEW0NHGOd9T
[3] See Ecclesiastes 3:11
[4] Isaiah 57:15
[5] See Acts 1:7
[6] See Ephesians 3:10-12
[7] See 2 Timothy 4:1; Revelation 20:11-15
[8] See Colossians 1:9-10
[9] FAI, “Good News Among the Grieving,” 10 Nov 2023. Retrieved from https://fai.online/articles/good-news-among-grieving
[10] See John 16:21
[11] FAI, “Rocket Fire in the Village,” 16 May 2024. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/6drU4aNvFaA?si=a2MuQk1hyF_puEjP
[12] John 10:10
[13] See Romans 5:3-5; 8:29; 12:2; Philippians 3:10, 21; Hebrews 6:19; 11:1
[14] Tozer, A.W.. The Knowledge of the Holy. Fig. Kindle Edition.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Nouwen, Henri J. M.. Discernment (p. 3). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
[17] See Proverbs 13:12
[18] See Matthew 13:22; Luke 21:34
[19] See Luke 12:32
[20] Psalm 37:25
[21] Springer, R., “Cory Asbury’s Unfiltered Thoughts on the Church and Worship,” 20 June 2024. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/WuLgdKkNYw4?si=C7XVn73AuaW9HhSo&t=3425
[22] See Matthew 6:33
[23] Bowe, D., ft. Gretzinger, S., & Moore, C., “Voice of God,” 2021. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/hP5u4BUcq_U?si=ZXVxFBPz2n0Ty6Bn
[24] See Psalm 90:12; Galatians 1:4
[25] See John 1:1-5
[26] See 2 Corinthians 11:3; John 15:1-17
[27] See John 17:24
