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This festival will be a happy time of celebrating with your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, foreigners, orphans, and widows from your towns. For seven days you must celebrate this festival to honor the LORD your God at the place he chooses, for it is he who blesses you with bountiful harvests and gives you success in all your work. This festival will be a time of great joy for all. Deuteronomy 16:14-15 NLT
Every world culture has its own ideas about what constitutes a waste of time.
In materialistic cultures, activities that do not promote wealth “waste time.” These cultures use metaphors like “Time is money” and “You’re killing time” to promote materialism—“As if you could kill time, without injuring eternity,” Thoreau said. For the Christian, eternity always trumps money.
So the question becomes, what do you “spend” your time on? In Deuteronomy, God wanted His children to “spend” seven days being happy, celebrating His goodness. Certainly, this would be a “waste” of time, though, in a culture where “time is money.”
Was coming to Jesus to touch His cloak a waste of time for the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years? Was asking to have his daughter brought back from the dead a waste of time for Jairus (Luke 8:41-56)? Was traveling to the temple to fulfill vows made when the psalm writer was in trouble a waste of time (Psalm 66:13-14)?
Does spending seven days happily feasting to worship God seem like a peculiar priority?
Prayer: Lord, on this Psalm Sunday, help me to evaluate my ideas about worship and happiness and time today.
Every world culture has its own ideas about what constitutes a waste of time.
In materialistic cultures, activities that do not promote wealth “waste time.” These cultures use metaphors like “Time is money” and “You’re killing time” to promote materialism—“As if you could kill time, without injuring eternity,” Thoreau said. For the Christian, eternity always trumps money.
So the question becomes, what do you “spend” your time on? In Deuteronomy, God wanted His children to “spend” seven days being happy, celebrating His goodness. Certainly, this would be a “waste” of time, though, in a culture where “time is money.”
Was coming to Jesus to touch His cloak a waste of time for the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years? Was asking to have his daughter brought back from the dead a waste of time for Jairus (Luke 8:41-56)? Was traveling to the temple to fulfill vows made when the psalm writer was in trouble a waste of time (Psalm 66:13-14)?
Does spending seven days happily feasting to worship God seem like a peculiar priority?
Prayer: Lord, on this Psalm Sunday, help me to evaluate my ideas about worship and happiness and time today.
