The time God gives us is a gift, not an entitlement. When a repairman is late, the call-waiting tunes seems interminable or the check-out seems ridiculously slow, it’s so easy to get frustrated and internally shout: “Stop wasting my time!” But at the end of the day, it’s not my time at all. God has given me my days to love him and love others. Each moment is a gift not a given.

Time is a funny thing. It goes too fast. Then too slow. We want it to stand still and then wish it didn’t. We love losing track of it but incessantly strive to find it. There are few things more frustrating and difficult than running out of time or wasting it. We just can’t seem to get it right! Why does time so often feel out of joint?

Now, I love a good book on time management as much as the next person, but surely if it were an easy thing to sort out we would have mastered it by now! Surely our struggles with time show there’s something deeper at stake.

The Bible has lots to say about time and about why we feel the way we do about it. And it contains some simple but deep truths that can really do help us become good time travellers—not in the sense of being able to jump forwards and backwards through time, but in that they equip us to journey through the days and minutes we have in a wise and joy-filled way.

Over three articles we’ll get to sweep through some of these truths but it’s worth starting with the most foundational one: the Scriptures introduce us to a loving time creator and time-keeper—the original and the best ‘Time Lord’.^[1]

Say Hello to the Perfect Lord of Time

The Lord God, time and again, is described in the Scriptures as being beautifully unbound by, and yet in control of, time. He is everlasting (Ps 90:2). He is the one holding the drumsticks and beating out the rhythm of the stars and seasons, of animals feeding and sleeping (Ps 104:19-22). But he also holds our times in his hands. Political leaders rise and fall, their eras and epochs open and close, at his bidding (Dan 2:21).

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