"Time: God's Palace in Time" - God With Us: Part 2 - Pr. Erwin Nanasi - March 14, 2026

There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year. Time is given equally to all. The difference is not how much time we have, but how we honor the time we're given. When God gave us the Sabbath, Scripture tells us that He sanctified the seventh day as a holy sign, forever set apart for communion with Him. This week, Pastor Erwin Nanasi continues his three-part series, God With Us, turning his attention toward this divine gift of time. Listen in to this important message titled "Time: A Palace in Time."

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Every person in this room possesses something incredibly valuable. It cannot be saved. It cannot be borrowed. It cannot be stored. Once it is spent, it is gone forever. You cannot buy more of it. You cannot manufacture it. And yet every one of us receives the same amount each day. 24 hours. 1,440 minutes. 86,400 seconds. Whether you are young or old, rich or poor, influential or unknown, no one receives more than 24 hours in a day. The real question in life is, how much time do we have? That's not really the question. The real question that we need to be asking is what are we doing with the time that we have been given? The poet Carl Sandberg once wrote this: Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. Most people are not nearly as concerned with time as they are with space, however. We strive to conquer space. We are obsessed with it. We build houses, we acquire lands, we construct cities, we explore oceans, we launch satellites, we reach for the stars. Human history is largely the story of mastering space. We build faster, we travel further, we produce more. And in many ways, this is a great human achievement. But it often comes at the expense of time. We have made time the servant of space. In the 19th century, there was a naturalist and Harvard professor, Louis Agassi, and he was once approached by the emissary of a learned society and invited to speak to the members. And Agassi declined the invitation. He said, I'm sorry, but this will take up too much of my time that I rather spend in research and writing. Well, the man persisted and says, Please do come. We have prepared a handsome amount of monetary appreciation for your lecture. He responded, that's no inducement to me at all. I cannot afford to waste my time making money. Have you ever heard someone say, I don't have time? Or perhaps you have said it yourself. But what we often mean is something else. We mean we have too many things, too many responsibilities, too many commitments, too many possessions to maintain. We gain things and then we spend our lives managing the things that we have gained. We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like. The bigger the house, the longer the maintenance list, the more devices we own, the more passwords we have to manage, the more success we accumulate, the less time we seem to have. We hurry through life and chase efficiency and output. We really measure worth by productivity. But no matter how much we possess, we do not become more by having more. Nothing we possess is fireproof. Nothing we possess is permanent. And even if we gain power in the world of space, that is not the same as growing in the world of being. Because time, not space, is the soul of our existence. When we acquire things, land, possessions, status, the temptation is to make them our sole concern. More land, more control, more influence. Could it be that, as Abraham Heschel puts it, in our attempt to conquer space, we sell ourselves into slavery to things, only to end up as broken utensils at the fountain of profit. God is less interested in the spaces we build than in the time that we share with Him. Space can be conquered, but time must be consecrated. To put it simply, people try to make places holy, but God made time holy. Throughout history, and we've looked at this, people continue to try to get God to be in space. Try to confine God to space. God is here, God is on this mountain, God is in this temple, He is in that building. But is that really where God dwells? Just last week we looked at a passage in John chapter 4, where the Samaritan woman asked Jesus a question that had divided people for centuries. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship. And how does Jesus respond? Woman, believe me, the hour is coming where neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will we worship the Father. You worship what you do not know, but we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is when the true worshiper will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. Notice the question. The woman asked about a space, and Jesus replies to her, with time. He tells her, The hour is coming. God cannot be confined to a mountain or a city. A God that can be confined is no God at all. A deity bound to space is merely a human invention, an idol. The Bible gives us a radically different vision. God seems more concerned with history than with geography, with events more than locations, with generations more than buildings. God works through time. Look at the opening chapter of Scripture, Genesis chapter 1, 1 to 3. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void. And darkness was o'er the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Genesis 1, 1, 2, 3. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And then the pattern begins. God speaks, and it is so. Evening and morning, the first day. God sees it is good. It continues. God speaks again, it is so. Evening morning, the second day. The third day, the fourth day, the fifth day, the sixth day. He sees, and instead now he says, it is very good. And you might anticipate now, well, there seems to be a bit of a trajection. If first it was good, every day was good, and then he looks at it all and says, It is very good. And you might think now he says, We're gonna go from good to great. But the Bible does something unexpected. Instead of greatness, God introduces holiness. Genesis chapter 2, verses 1 to 3. Read it with me, if you would. The heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. Now think about this carefully. What is the very first thing that he called holy? Not a mountain, not a temple, not an altar, not a rod, not an object. The first thing that the Bible calls holy was time. God blessed a day. Before there was holy space, there was a holy time. Before Mount Sinai, there was the Sabbath. Certainly later on, Israel built a tabernacle and Solomon then built a temple, but these came after the incident of the golden calf, where people tried to turn God into an object. The Sabbath was established by God as a sign of holiness and time. Then he communicated with them and said, I am holy, therefore you also be holy. Holiness in humanity. And then, yes, holiness in space, the tabernacle, which was then consecrated later. But let's be honest, for most of us, the order of priority is reversed. We look for holy spaces before we look for holy people, and for holy people rather than for holy time. But to God, the Sabbath is holy and of utmost priority to who He is and what He wishes for us to become. The Sabbath stands as a memorial that time itself is sacred. Six days a week, we live under the tyranny of space. We work, we produce, we build, we manage. But the Sabbath invites us to enter holiness in time. Imagine a violinist when they're tuning their instrument, over time the strings might drift out of pitch. Nothing dramatic, it's just the strings slowly drift. But before a performance, what does the musician do? The musician pauses and tunes the instrument. Could it be that the Sabbath is God's way of tuning the human soul? That all week the noise of life pulls us out of alignment. But on the Sabbath, God brings us back to the right pitch. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but on the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work now nor thy son nor thy daughter, nor thy mail servant, nor thy maidserver, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that lives within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Exodus twenty verses eight to eleven. The question is not only, are we keeping the Sabbath, but perhaps the deeper question is, is the Sabbath keeping us? On this day we do not pursue control. On this day it's about communion. We do not work to have, we rest in order to be. We step back from the machinery of creation and return to the mystery of it. The Sabbath is not merely an interruption, it is participation in eternity. Read this verse with me in Exodus chapter 31, verses 17. It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel, that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed. Or Ezekiel chapter 20, verse 12. Read it with me, would you? I gave them my Sabbaths as a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them. How beautiful! A sign? Think of moments perhaps where in your friendships, in your relationships, somebody has given you a special token. Maybe at a birthday, maybe at an anniversary, perhaps before somebody passed away and said, I want you to have this. This is a sign. This is a token. God here says that the Sabbath is a sign between Him and us. It's special to Him. The Sabbath is not just about rest, it is also about sanctification, about holiness, because it reminds us God is the one who makes us holy. This world is trying to tell us something else. It's saying, you are what you produce. But the Sabbath says, You are who God loves. Listen to the words of Jesus, Mark chapter 2, verse 27. The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is not a burden, it is a gift. Back when we used to live in Oklahoma in the southeastern corner, going a little farther east, almost to Arkansas, where the Arkansas, you know, forest is and mountains, there was an area called Broken Bow. And uh during COVID time, a lot of people tried to escape Dallas to go to their luxury cabins over there. And some of our members there were contractors, and they used to build these amazingly furnished cabins. These are not small cabins, 2,500 square feet, 5,000 square feet and above. Just beautiful cabins. Many times the workers would advise the owners that paid for the cabins and would tell them once this hits the market and you will buy it. We're sure that you're gonna put it on Airbnb and it's gonna be rented out. Just make sure that you block off time right away, because otherwise it might take you months until you can be in your own cabin that you own. Many times the owners had to wait for over a year to be in their own cabin. But ever so often, as a family with three boys and these contractors, they would just take such pride in what they would build. Ever so often they'd come, Pastor, you need to come and rest a while. Don't just do it during the week. But before we're selling this cabin, maybe you want to take your family and just have a time of rest. That was a gift. Now imagine that someone comes to you and says, You know, there's a beautiful lake house that I want you to spend every single week and enjoy. Would you respond by saying, What a terrible rule! I have to go to the lake house every week. No, you would say, What an incredible gift. A Sabbath is God's weekly invitation to step into his royal courts. Isaiah 58, verse 13 and 14. If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath and call the Sabbath a delight and honor it, then you shall take delight in the Lord. The Sabbath is not merely about stopping to work, it's about delighting in God. Do you delight in God on the Sabbath? Psalm chapter 1. The Psalm 1 says this, describes the person whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. If you go to Psalm 92, which is a Psalm 4, the Sabbath, the same imagery is there again. A tree, deep-rooted, stable, fruitful, not rushed, not dry, not frantic, securely planted, grounded. In our hurried, over-scheduled world, we measure worth by achievement. But the Sabbath teaches us to measure worth by relationship. We are not what we own. We are not what we produce. We are not defined by the things of space. We are called to live in fellowship with the Lord of time, Jesus Christ. King Solomon's words in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, he says, for everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. Time itself is God's gift to the world of space. Imagine for a moment a world of space but with no time. No time. Nothing would grow, nothing would change, nothing would live. Time is the medium through which God reveals Himself. And the Sabbath becomes the weekly reminder, a weekly realignment, if you will, a weekly calibration. It asks us, are we living for the temporary or are we living for the eternal? This is a beautiful verse. Isaiah 66, verse 23. Read it with me. From new moon to new moon and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the Lord. So even the rhythm of eternity will include Sabbath, which raises a question. If we do not delight in the Sabbath now, how will we delight in it forever? The Sabbath is a foretaste of eternity, not in what we can touch, but in what we can trust. Recently I saw something online about GPS systems and how they were first designed, and the software engineers that were thinking about how to best compute it. Did you know that when you open a GPS, it does not begin by calculating the route based on where you are? It begins with the destination. Only after the destination is set does the system determine the path that will lead you there. If it only focused on your current location, it could never really guide you to the right address. It would have so many different paths, and you wouldn't be happy with that kind of path where it would go. This makes me wonder about something. Could it be that the Sabbath was designed the same way? That God gave us the Sabbath with the destination in mind? A weekly reminder of where the story is going, a restored creation, a people at rest in the presence of their creator, spending eternity with him, but needing the weekly reminder so that we as a people know we are on track. Perhaps the Sabbath is more than a day of rest. Perhaps it is God's way of reorienting his people each week so we do not lose our way. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of modern life is that we have filled our days with so many things that we no longer have time for the one who gave us time. We run, we build, we produce. But the Sabbath comes each week with a gentle voice from heaven saying, Pause, stop, remember who you are. Remember who I am. Because before we were workers, we were worshipers. Before we were producers, we were children of God. Before we were managers of space, we were invited into communion with the Lord of time. Perhaps you want to join me in this poem. Lord, teach me to number my days. Teach me to slow my pace. Teach me to delight in your presence and walk with you in all of my ways. Help me faithfully labor through the six days you give, doing the works through which you call me to live. But when the seventh day gently arrives, remind me what truly sustains and revives. Teach me to rest. Teach me to worship and linger in prayer. Teach me to remember that you are there. For my life is not measured by all I achieve, nor by the trophies the world may perceive, but by the grace of the one who calls me his own, the one to whom my whole life now belongs. Because the Sabbath reminds us, holiness entered the world through time. And when God restores all things from Sabbath to Sabbath, all creation will gather before him again. So may the Lord give us a happy, a healthy, and a holy Sabbath. For it's God's palace in time. Amen.