Sunday Thought – 27.10.24

Have you altered your clocks? Last night the UK’s timezone changed from BST to GMT, a concept created in the past in an attempt to make best use of daylight hours. Outside of farming the effects of this are limited and each year there are the debates in the media as to whether changing the clocks every Spring and Autumn are actually beneficial.

Whatever you think in this debate, changing clocks doesn’t change time. Humanity has no control over the wider physics of the world and universe: we can change how we measure things like time but we cannot actually order it. Christians believe that everything was made at God’s command and originally in perfect detail (such as the Earth being the exact distance from the sun needed to support life) and that we are ‘stewards’ of this creation. The sun still rose this morning at the same point on the spinning Earth, according to God’s timing, but the residents of one nation have just chosen to call it an hour earlier.

There is a particular (and unusual) account of God’s power over time in the Bible: “‘This is the Lord’s sign to you that the Lord will do what he has promised: I will make the shadow cast by the sun go back the ten steps it has gone down on the stairway of Ahaz.’ So the sunlight went back the ten steps it had gone down” (NIV, Isaiah 38:7-8). This morning, whatever timezone you live in, are you coming to worship the same God that Isaiah spoke of, a being who has authority over all things yet has a heart to listen to human prayers?

Prayer Points for the Week:

• Pray for the victims of Alexander McCartney and for their families supporting them.
• Pray that the declarations and promises made at last week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) would be kept.
• Please pray for the situations in Ukraine and the Middle East. For peace; for aid to get through to those in need; for those mourning the loss of loved ones.