God’s Sovereignty, My Gratitude, and the Changing Seasons of Life
By Justin Pratt, Clear Springs Baptist Church Senior Pastor
Wouldn’t life feel so much simpler if it came with a remote control? Imagine holding a little universal device that lets you skip the hard seasons, pause the painful ones, rewind the good moments or fast-forward through uncertainty. With one click, you could fast-forward awkward conversations, redo the dumb decisions and mute people who drive you crazy! In Christian love, of course. We all know that life doesn’t hand us a remote. Instead, it hands us seasons: beautiful, unpredictable and usually always beyond our ability to control. Just like the turning of the calendar, our lives shift through moments of growth, loss, celebration, pruning, waiting and renewing. And while we can’t command the seasons to change, we can choose how we walk through them and what we learn from them.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon begins with a form of Hebrew poetry known as antithetical parallelism, where every line presents a pair of contrasting or opposite ideas. Each pair represents the completeness of the totality of the human experience: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to dance and a time to mourn. In total, fourteen seasons that address the meaning and the mystery behind the contrasting moments of life. We understand mountains and valleys; we have all celebrated the birth of a new baby and wept at the graveside of a loved one. Which of us has not felt the pain of trouble and celebrated the joy of victory? Gains and losses? Joy and sorrow? It’s a Biblical reminder that all of life is filled with rhythmic shifts that each of us understands from human familiarity.
This is the context in which verse 1 begins with, “to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun.” The same rhythmic shift ends with the fact that our Creator, “hath made everything beautiful in his time.” This means that even in these opposing seasons that span across a vastly comprehensive range, there is a sovereign God that encompasses all of the events of life, and that our circumstances are less random than we think and more regulated by God than we are aware. We are never commanded to control changing seasons, but rather to walk through them. From the creation of time until now, there has always been a sacred tension between the sovereignty of God and human control. While there are some things that we can control, there are ample amounts of things that we cannot.
Solomon, therefore, concludes in chapter 3 that whatever God does is right, and we need to stop asking questions and learn to live by faith, trusting that His plan is always right. From this posture, he says in Ecclesiastes 3:13, that everything that we have, “it is the gift of God.” Our deepest enjoyment doesn’t come from what we have, but in Whom we have. Gratitude lives not in what we understand, but in Whom it is that we trust. This is what mature Christians are made of: the ability to not allow thanksgiving to only be a reactionary comfort, but to be a response to sovereign control. This is what allowed Job to look at life in the face, having lost it all, and say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Something that all of us remember this holiday season is that, regardless of whatever temporary season we are going through, there is the stability and sustainability of God, who has an eternal plan. He is still working all things for our good, even when things are looking bad. It’s important to remember that gratitude is not only reactive to God’s gifts, but is responsive to His sovereignty. We don’t have to pretend that every season is easy, but we can have enough faith that every season has purpose. If we learn to trust God’s control in every changing season, then gratitude rises naturally, because I remember that the God who authors my circumstance is the same God who is faithfully shaping my soul.
