GOD’S FAVORITE TIME

“Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda… Here a great number of disabled people used to lie -- the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, He asked him, ‘Do you want to get well?’”  (John 5:2-6 NIV)

It doesn’t matter if it’s thirty-eight years, seventy-six years, or only thirty-eight seconds. God has no time limits. He has no limits at all. But He does have a favorite time, and that time is now.

Why not ask for help now?

Maybe because you hear the voices around you saying, “Not the time.” “It’s too late.” “It’s too embarrassing.” “Just wait it out and work it out.”

Maybe one of those voices is your own. You’ve drifted too far down the creek, and now you’ve given up and you’re resigned to drifting some more. But there is no distance, no time limit, no reason at all. Jesus will come to you when you are at the end of yourself. He’ll come when you’re helpless and out of power. The man in John 5 learned that even thirty-eight years wasn’t too late…

It’s not too late, and it never has been. And there’s never been a better time, a more perfect time, than the present moment. That’s always the one in which [God] wants to meet you. 

-- Kyle Idleman in “The End of Me: Where Real Life in the Upside-Down Ways of Jesus Begins”

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