It Begins Today

Ask her when it starts and she will tell you, quite sincerely, that she is in a season.

She is not being evasive. She means it. She would tell you that this is a season of waiting, and she would say it with real faith in her voice, because she has faith, and because she is not sitting there sulking. She prays. She reads. She serves in small ways. She is not idle and I will not have anybody call her idle.

Now ask her the follow up question, which almost nobody asks.

How long is the season?

And there is a pause. And then she says something about God's timing, which is true, and it is not an answer, and she knows it is not an answer, and something in the room goes slightly still.

Here is what I want to put on the table, and I want to do it carefully because there is a real thing called waiting on God and I am not about to trample it. Scripture is full of it. Some of the best work God does in a person happens in a stretch where nothing visible is moving, and anybody who tells you otherwise has not read much of the Bible or lived much of a life. The Holy Spirit keeps people in those stretches on purpose and He is not in a hurry.

But there is a difference between a season and a sentence, and it comes down to one question: who set the length.

A season has a length that God sets, and a person in one is listening for the end of it. A sentence has a length that somebody sets, and if you go looking for who set this one, here is what you find.

Nobody did.

No leader gave her a term. No court handed anything down. God did not say a number and neither did anybody else, and when you ask her directly what would have to be true for the season to be over, she cannot tell you, and she has never once been able to.

That is the tell. A person waiting on God is listening for something. A person serving a self imposed term is waiting for enough time to have passed, and enough is a quantity that never arrives, because it was never a number to begin with.

I am not going to ask you what happened. Not one line of it. God has it and you have it and there is no third party in this message.

What I want is the length.

The verse puts the word now in twice

Paul quotes Isaiah and then does something with it, and the doing is the whole point.

For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.2 Corinthians 6:2

Watch the structure. First the quotation, which is in the past tense: I have heard, I have succoured. Then Paul turns and applies it, and when he applies it he changes the tense and adds a word, and he adds the word twice.

Now. Behold, now is the accepted time. Behold, now is the day of salvation.

And in front of each one he puts behold, which is a word you use to make somebody lift their head.

He is not making a general point about God's kindness. He is pressing a specific thing on people who had been treating the acceptable time as something located somewhere else, either behind them or ahead of them, and he takes it and puts it in the room they are standing in.

Here is what that hands you. You are inside the accepted time and not waiting for it to open, and 2 Corinthians 6:2 says now twice with a look up word in front of each, and the Holy Spirit is not counting down a term that nobody ever set.

Now let me be careful about the real thing, because I said I would be.

There genuinely are seasons. There are stretches where the door is not open yet and pushing at it is not faith, it is impatience. If God has said wait, then wait, and the waiting is the obedience, and you will know it because a season God sets has something you are listening for in it. It has a shape. It has a live conversation running through it.

What you have does not have a shape. It has a vague sense that not enough time has passed, and a quiet arithmetic that you have never written down because writing it down would show you there are no numbers in it. 2 Corinthians 6:2 has no numbers in it either, and the Holy Spirit is not holding one back from you.

Those are two different things and the difference is not subtle once you look at it.

You have been given today rather than a release date, and 2 Corinthians 6:2 makes the acceptable time the present one, and the Holy Spirit has been at work in this whole stretch you have been calling a season while quietly serving it as a term.

And notice what accepted means in that verse. It does not mean permitted. It means the favorable time, the good moment, the one that has been chosen. God is not tolerating today. He has named it.