TIME AS ENVIRONMENT NOT SANCTIFIER

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

2 Peter 3:8

Sin has done frightful things to us and its effect upon us is all the more deadly because we were born in it and are scarcely aware of what is happening to us.

One false concept to which we cling tenaciously is time. We think of it as being a sort of viscid substance flowing onward like a sluggish river, bearing upon its bosom nations and empires and civilizations and men. We visualize this sticky stream as an entity and ourselves as helplessly stuck in it for as long as our earthly lives endure. Or again, by a simple shift in our thinking we picture time as a revealer of the shape of things to come, as when we say "Time will tell." Or we imagine it a benign physician and comfort ourselves with the thought that "Time is a great healer."

All this is so much a part of us that it would be too much to expect that the habit of referring everything to time could ever be broken. Yet we may guard against the harm that such thinking carries with it. The most harmful mistake we make concerning time is that it has somehow a mysterious power to perfect human nature. We say of a foolish young man "Time will make him wiser," or we see a new Christian acting like anything but a Christian and hope that time will someday turn him into a saint.

The truth is that time has no more power to sanctify a man than space has. Indeed, time is only a fiction by which we account for change.

It is change, not time, that turns fools into wise men and sinners into saints.

Or more accurately, it is Christ who does the whole thing by means of the changes He works in the heart.

Thought

Time does not change us, God does. He changes us as we walk by the Spirit.

Prayer

Forgive me, Lord, for trusting time rather than You. Change me, ever change me as I walk with You. For Jesus' sake.

https://www.cmalliance.org/devotions/tozer?id=483