Before You Fill the Calendar
Pull up your calendar app right now. Go ahead, actually look at it. Count how many things are on it this week. Now ask yourself an honest question: how many of those things were appointed by you out of urgency, and how many were appointed by God on purpose?
If you’re like most of us, the urgent wins nearly every time.
This week we looked at a single verse most of us have read past a hundred times without noticing it. Genesis 1:14, the fourth day of creation. God hangs the sun, moon, and stars in the sky, and He tells us exactly why: “Let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.” That word “seasons” is the Hebrew word mo’adim, and it means appointed times. Set times, planned on purpose, for a purpose.
Here’s what should stop you in your tracks. That same word shows up again in Leviticus 23, where God gives Israel their entire calendar of feasts, Passover, Firstfruits, Trumpets, Atonement, Booths. Long before there was a temple, a law, or even a nation, God had already written appointed times of celebration into the sky itself. Israel’s festival calendar wasn’t a new invention. It was the unfolding of something God had built into creation before sin ever entered the picture.
That means rest and celebration were never God’s afterthought. They were His original design.
And this text doesn’t stop at Israel’s calendar. Paul tells us in Colossians 2 that every one of those feasts, every new moon, every Sabbath, was “a shadow of the things to come,” and the substance, the reality they were always pointing toward, “belongs to Christ.” The whole trail runs from the light God spoke into darkness on day one, all the way to Jesus calling Himself the light of the world, all the way to Revelation 21, where we’re told the New Jerusalem won’t even need the sun anymore, because the Lamb Himself will be its light.
So here’s the challenge we left with Sunday: before you put one more appointment on your calendar this week, put in your mo’adim first. Protect your time with God’s people on Sunday morning like it’s the most important meeting you have, because it is. Guard your small group night. Set aside even fifteen minutes with your family to pray and open the Word together. God didn’t leave the sun and moon up to chance. He doesn’t want your rest and your worship left up to chance either.
He wrote the calendar before we ever picked up a pen. Let’s start living inside it.
