 Throughout my life I've increasingly found that reading Scripture in public isn't just about feeding our own spirits and minds, but about rehearsing the mighty acts of God for God's glory. So let's think together about Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 1. And first, let's have some tea. For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. My father once told me to my surprise that his favourite book of the Bible was Ecclesiastes I've never met anyone else who's said that, but I think looking back on my father's life I understand why it was. And indeed this passage, Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1-8, was hanging up as a little picture beside my father's desk because my mother, knowing it was important to him, had done needlepoint, had stitched it together into a beautiful little coloured picture to everything there is a season, a time for every matter, every purpose under heaven. The passage goes on, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, and so on and so on. I think the reason this meant what it did to my father came from his reflection on the way his life had worked out. He lost two uncles in the Great War, the First World War. My grandfather's brother and brother-in-law were both killed in the 1914-18 war. Then my father growing up through the 20s and 30s was kind of inured to the fact there might well be another war and when it showed up in 1939 he signed up and by 1940 he was a prisoner of war and at the age of, in his early 20s, he found himself as a guest of Adolf Hitler being moved around Europe, Austria, Germany, Poland. Even with minimal food, if any, and often in bad conditions and thirsty as well as hungry and cold and tired and particularly the sense of not knowing whether there would ever be a future of the thought that he had imagined when he was growing up. And then after the end of the war when he was astonishingly released and came back home about literally half the body weight that he had been before and within a year or two he had married my mother and first my sister and then I came along. But times were hard, there was still food rationing and the work that he was doing in a small family business was very hard and not guaranteed to make very much money but verses like this kept him going and I think this was rooted in his experiences during the war that he had learned through the worship in the camps, through the singing of the Psalms, through the teaching that he'd received from some clergy who were in the camps, he had learned that actually we are not given to understand the great sweep of God's purposes. It's been easy for people of my generation to imagine, oh well, through the 50s and 60s, things are getting better, the world is getting more prosperous, the Western world is a happy place, we have all kinds of stuff going on and we can put the bad times behind us. Well, I think in the 21st century we have learned that that ain't necessarily so and the old book of Ecclesiastes has a lot to teach us about the gritty wisdom of saying, yes, there is a time for this, there is a time for that. Our task is to be faithful, not to try to understand everything from the beginning to the end because if we do that we'll either go mad or we'll become very arrogant and imagine that we have the key to it all, which we probably don't. One of my father's hobbies was making and mending clocks. And I think this was closely tied to this passage. There is a time for this, a time for that. My father had clocks which were set so that there was a little bell that would ring, whether it was time for lunch or whatever it was. And he kind of took pleasure in the fact that there was a time, there was a time for this and a time for that. And I see in that with great gratitude, a sense of wisdom, not the wisdom which understands everything, but the wisdom which says, God understands it all and we simply have to be faithful and patient and follow where he leads. So may God give you faith and patience to know that there is a time for every purpose of God, to wait for God's time, to take it when it arrives, to be grateful and faithful without necessarily understanding where it's all going. Amen. How is this passage speaking to you? Let us know in the comments. Like and subscribe or check out our other videos.