OUTLINE
1. INTRODUCTION
Overview of Discipleship and the benefit of Kairos moments
2. EXPLANATION OF KAIROS VS CHRONOS TIME
3. JESUS’ ANNOUCEMENT OF A KAIROS MOMENT (MARK 1:15)
4. OTHER KAIROS MOMENTS THROUGHOUT OF LIVES –
When God uses life’s trials to enter into your reality and offers an opportunity to align yourself more closely with his Kingdom reality.
5. THE KINGDOM RESPONSE TO KAIROS MOMENTS – REPENT AND BELIEVE
6. RESULT – BREAKTHROUGH AND GROWTH IN DISCIPLESHIP
Kairos Moments (Chuck Gohn)
Well, good morning. If you have your Bibles, you will want to open up to Mark 1:15. Just one verse today. It is good to see you all here, considering it is the Sunday after Easter which is traditionally a low-attended church service. It is good to see you here, but it is even better to see that spring has finally sprung. Amen! Which means we can back off from picking on that groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil. He missed it by four weeks, but he is back on track for next year. Anyway, because spring is here, we are back to doing the things we love to do like planting flowers and bushes and pulling weeds and mowing the lawn and that sort of thing, but it also means, because we are past Easter, we are back to looking at our four core values: worship, discipleship, outreach, and community.
Today, we are going to revisit that value called discipleship. A disciple is just simply a learner. Someone who is interested in learning about the Triune God, about the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Learning about himself. Learning about the world and how to operate within that world. As we know, there are a variety of ways to be a learner, a variety of situations, and a variety of places. You can be a disciple sitting in a small group, a home group, maybe in a bible study. You can take the posture of discipleship even sitting at home and just reading the Bible. As valuable as those places are, what I have come to realize is the best place to be a disciple, to take a posture of learning, is just simply in life. In particular, those life experiences that I refer to as those severe life trials, those painful moments. If you have been a Christian for a while, you can look back on some of those most painful moments and you can see that God was involved in some degree. As painful as it was and you wouldn’t want to revisit it, God had somehow entered into your pain, entered into your reality. If you were patient, if you took a posture as a disciple, as a learner, he may teach you a lesson or two or three or possibly even four. When you came out of that experience, you found that, at a minimum, you experienced some sort of a growth spurt. At a maximum, it might have launched you into a whole new life, a whole new ministry, a whole new career, or a whole new relationship. I refer to those times where God intervened directly into the midst of your trials as kairos moments.
A little bit of background about what the word kairos means. It is a Greek term and, as many of you know, just like the English language, the Greek language has different words to represent different ideas or concepts. The Greeks have at least two words that kind of relate to this concept of time. They have two words. They have chronos and kairos. Chronos time is just basically ongoing time. It is where we get the word chronology. It is kind of like the time on your watch. It is just never-ending time. The thing that characterizes chronos time is that really there is nothing special about it. It is ordinary time. If I was to say do remember what you were doing on September 22, 2012? With few exceptions, I suspect most of you wouldn’t know. That is because it is kind of ordinary time. It just falls within chronos time.
But if I was to ask you what were you doing September 11, 2001? How many of you would know what you were doing? That would be closer to kairos time. Because kairos time has a special mark to it. Obviously, September 11, 2001 was when the terrorists struck the Twin Towers so we remember that. We remember what we were doing. I remember that I was down in Johnson City, TN. I was in seminary. I think it was my first year of seminary. I just remember getting up and getting ready to go to class and just glancing at the TV and seeing those airplanes strike the Twin Towers. What we are looking at here is kairos time has this special component to it. It actually is something that leaves a really heavy impression on you so much so that it is difficult to forget about it. That is kairos time. When we think about kairos time as a special time, a time that leaves impression, it really doesn’t get totally to the heart of what we are talking about in kairos. The Greeks saw kairos times as not just the special times that leave an impression. They saw kairos as the time that the gods would begin to pierce the veil between the spiritual world and the earthly world. In fact, there is a Greek god named Kairos who happens to be like the god of time. Kairos was a winged god, which is where we get the words time flies. This god Kairos represented time and he had wings. Not only did he have wings, he supposedly had a long beard and long hair. What would happen, apparently, the people believed as the legend goes, was this winged, long-haired god would hover around the earth. If you were fortunate enough if he got close, he would give you an opportunity to yank on his hair or yank on his beard and pull him into earth, pull him into your reality. He would give you a few opportunities and a lot of times they would be missed. That is where this idea of kairos comes from. It has a sense of a god piercing the veil between the spiritual realm and the earthly realm. One thing we know, we don’t worship a god who you have to somehow entice to get close to and pull his hair to get him to make himself known. We worship a God who has made himself known initially through the birth of Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ came, he began to reveal that not only was He God making Himself known, but he was ushering in his whole kingdom.
We see that very clearly in today’s verse Mark 1:15. It says “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) Again, if we look at the underlying word here, we are not talking about chronos; we are talking about kairos. What Jesus is saying when he talks about time, he is not referring to one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock or whatever. He is referring to a special time more like a season of time to where God is beginning to reveal himself in a mighty way. He is ushering in his kingdom. His kingdom is finally within reach. This is what you would call a kairos moment, a kairos time. In order to experience this time, there are only two requirements: to repent and believe the good news of Jesus Christ. He is telling the Jewish people that is all you have to do to experience this kingdom time, this kairos moment. All you need to do is repent and believe and you will be saved. Again, this was not just a one-time thing that was particular to the Jews. This kairos moment because it is a season is still a kairos moment that is available to all of mankind today. It has been available for the past 2000 years assuming we do the same thing. That we repent and believe the good news of Jesus Christ. What this is the first altar call and Jesus is giving it. Repent and believe in the good news and basically you will be saved.
As important as this scripture is and as important as it is to enter initially into the kingdom of God by way of this belief and repentance, really what I want to talk about today is not the one kairos moment where we first enter into the kingdom, but it is the numerous kairos moments that are available to us over and over and over again in our daily life, as we go through life, as we go through the timeline of life. It is all dependent on whether or not we are willing to go through a very simple process that I want to talk about in the remaining minutes.
Before I go there, what I want to look at here is kind of what I would say is a working definition of this word kairos or this kairos moment. A kairos moment is when God uses life’s trials to enter into your reality and offers an opportunity to align yourself more closely to His Kingdom reality. A positive response always results in spiritual growth. I will go through this slowly because there is a lot of stuff here. A kairos moment (again one of these special moments that leave an impression) is when God uses life’s trials (those severe life trials that we are all familiar with) to enter into your reality and offers an opportunity to align yourself more closely to His Kingdom reality. A positive response always results in spiritual growth. I anticipated that I would still get some blank stares here, which I did. What are you talking about? This is heavy stuff for nine o’clock. Can you simplify it a little bit? So I came up with another definition that I actually found from an author named Mike Breen who I actually borrowed a lot of these ideas from. Mike Breen writes “A kairos moment is when the eternal God breaks into your circumstances with an event that gathers some loose ends of your life and knots them together in his hands.” - Mike Breen. He takes those loose ends, those things that really don’t resemble the kingdom, brings them together, knots them together, gets them in the palms of his hands and begins to shape you into a kingdom-type person, a person that deserves to be in the kingdom and that begins to resemble a kingdom person. Still, I suspect that some of you still seem a little bit lost. You don’t know what I am talking about here. So I thought maybe I need to make it a little simpler. Maybe I need to even make it simpler. Maybe I need to have some images that will help you process through this and help you understand what this idea of a kairos moment really means. So that is what I did.
The first image is pretty straight forward. It is an arrow with the guy starting off at the beginning with a stop light that is green. The arrow represents a timeline and the timeline represents your life. Does everybody follow me so far? Not too complicated, right? Don’t make it more complicated than it is. We all have a physical life. That is one thing we have in common with everybody in all humanity. We have all been birthed into a physical reality, into a physical life. But the Christian understands that our life is a little bit different. Our life is special. In fact, we see our life not as a series of chronological events. We see our life as a journey. A journey where God is trying to shape us into kingdom people as we move along life. We enter into the kingdom at conversion, but we never fully manifest ourselves into that kingdom or the way we are supposed to be until we get to the other side. Until we ultimately get to the kingdom in its fullest extent. There are two aspects of the kingdom what they call a now and not yet aspect. We experience the kingdom right now when we have been saved. We experience an aspect of the kingdom called the now, but we also will fully experience it later on. That is the not yet. My point here is just to think about that your life is a journey. Because it is a Godly journey, a divine journey, you have to take the divine perspective, and you begin to look at your life like that. Again, the commonality is that we have been born in the physical life. The difference is that we see our life as something different. We see our life as a journey.
The next common trait, the thing we have in common with non-Christians is that we are all going to face challenges. We are all going to face what I call life trials. What often happens is those life trials are not predictable. They just kind of happen. You are going along life and all of a sudden you hit a life trial. It is like you stop. It knocks the wind out of you. Life trials can be anything. They can be all sorts of things. They can be severe or not severe but a severe life trial could be something like a death. It could be a divorce. It could be a bankruptcy. It could be a broken relationship. It could be all sorts of things. Those are the severe life trials. But a life trial is not always severe, at least from an outsider’s perspective. Somebody could look at your life and you are going through some sort of life trial and they don’t even know it. Or they just think why are you worried about this thing? It could be something as seemingly simple as maybe you were passed over in promotion at work. You really had set your heart on being promoted to a new position and you got passed over. Everybody is looking at you not even thinking about it, but you are thinking about it because it feels like you got hit in the stomach. You had invested all this time into getting this one position and all of a sudden you were passed over by that boss. That is a severe thing for you. Or it could be something as simple as maybe you are a student who was looking to enter into a particular college or degree program and you did all you could and you took the tests and you studied and you took all the AP classes and for some reason they rejected you. You weren’t able to go into this program that you set your heart on. But people looking in would say, oh big deal, just get on. But this hits you hard. It stopped you in your tracks because you were going. You knew exactly what you were going to do. Or it could be any other dream. Maybe you had a dream to be a professional athlete or a professional musician or something and because of an illness, because of lack of funds, because of lack of schooling, suddenly those dreams had to be put on hold. Those are severe life trials that hit you hard, hit you in the gut. You always wanted to start a business and you finally realized it is never going to happen. My dream is gone. I don’t even know what I am going to do now. Those are severe life trials that are different from the other severe life trials of death, divorce, and that sort of thing, but they are still severe life trials because the commonality is they tend to stop you short in your pathway of life. They stop you.
If you leave it unchecked, what happens is you can easily go into a pit of despair and that is what is going on here. You hit the life trial and that is the best stick figure I could find. It is supposed to represent chaos, anxiety, despair, and everything else and just freaking out. You are going through life and you hit this trial. You hit stop and you don’t know what to do. Pretty soon, you find yourself just falling into this pit of despair and destruction. Kind of like a sinkhole. I don’t know if you have watched the news lately but I am amazed at how many incidents of sinkholes happening in Florida and overseas. A sinkhole has got to be a scary thing. You are walking along the street or you are lying in bed sleeping and the whole earth just gives way underneath you and you fall 40 feet into this pit of despair, of darkness. I can’t imagine how bad that would be. When I began to think about it, this is probably not that much different than when you face other life trials. You are going along and all of a sudden the earth comes out from underneath your feet. You are in this pit of despair. You don’t know what to do and you begin to experience all sorts of emotions. The first emotion is probably shock. You ever get news and something happens so suddenly you don’t even know how to respond. You can’t process it because it is coming at you too quickly and you begin to go into this state of shock. After a while what happens is you start experiencing all sorts of other emotions. You might experience anger. You are enraged by this situation. Some people may go into just a state of crying or depression or anxiety or just fear. All these different emotions start coming into play depending on the life trial that you are experiencing.
Then like non-Christians and Christians what happens is they kick into survival mode. I have to get out of this thing. Depending on whether or not you are a doer or a denier is going to determine how you respond to the situation. I suspect there are a few doers in here. You get the pens out and you start making the lists. You start making the phone calls, sending emails, going on line, getting the information. Because information means you have power, you have control over the situation. You are trying to take control of it. On the other extreme, you have the deniers. The people that just say this isn’t happening. I am not going to accept it. They just check out. They refuse to acknowledge it. This is common for Christians and non-Christians, but again, the Christian is supposed to ultimately respond differently. In other words, they are not going to stay in this mode. They are to back off, take the divine perspective, take the heavenly perspective, and begin to see this as an opportune moment, a kairos moment where God may be willing to break into your reality and teach you a few things. It really depends if you are willing to take a posture of discipleship. Whether or not you are willing to go in and be a student. This is difficult for both the doers and the deniers. The doers say I don’t want to sit still. I just want to do. The deniers say I don’t want to think about this stuff. I don’t’ want to reflect on what is going on here. I don’t want to do that stuff. I don’t want to stop and think. But both of them know or should know that if they are willing to take a posture of discipleship and step into God’s schoolroom, and it is a big schoolroom, God is going to teach you two or three things. At a minimum, he is going to lift you up and pull you out of this pit. At a maximum, he is going to allow you to have some intense spiritual growth and possibly lead you into a new direction of life. But you have to follow the process.
Again, what is the process? The process is really quite simple. The process of getting yourself out of a pit and getting back on that road towards the kingdom is the same process you had to go through to get into the kingdom in the first place. Repent and believe – Mark 1:15. This is where you have to follow me a little bit. I could have spent a lot more time on this, but it is really quite simple. Don’t make it more difficult than it is. You have to go through this idea of repentance and belief. When we think about repentance it is kind of a churchy sounding word and people thing it is just being sorry for your sins. That is part of it but really it is not what you are letting go of, it is what you are embracing. You are embracing God’s kingdom vision for you and your life and who you are to be. In order to do that though, you have to stop and you have to take the time and you have to reflect. That is a tough thing to do but you have to be willing to enter that schoolroom and actually be not only the student, you have to be the subject. You have to be willing to let God put you up on the blackboard, whiteboard, or whatever they call it nowadays, the video screen and let God dissect you and let you study yourself. Isn’t that a scary thought? To open your soul up, to lay your soul bare and allow God to show you what is going on in the depths of your soul and reveal to you what is going on in this particular situation, what is going on in this crisis that he wants to teach you. It could be a crisis that somebody else brought on your life. It could be a crisis that you brought on your life. It could be a crisis that neither you nor somebody else brought on your life, but it just happened. You still have to go through the process of repentance.
For example, let’s say it was a situation where someone was going up for a promotion. They wanted to have that promotion so bad and then somebody got that job. Somebody out of the blue stepped in and got that position. All of a sudden you start feeling all sorts of stuff. You start feeling worried because now you can’t provide for your family. You start going down these roads. You are feeling anger because you are mad at this person for taking it. You are feeling insecure. You are feeling like a loser. What does God say? Maybe you are dealing with something here that you should have dealt with a long time ago. Maybe your anger or your insecurities or the fact that you never received the affirmation from your earthly father that you thought you needed. Now you are used to getting everything you want. You are used to getting affirmed by your teachers, by all your employers, and now you hit this wall and this guy isn’t affirming anymore. So you overreact. You go into this rage. God is saying don’t seek your affirmation from an earthly boss. Seek your affirmation from your heavenly Father. That is a life lesson that happens in a kairos moment.
Maybe it wasn’t something that was caused by somebody else. It was something that you brought on yourself. Maybe you are dealing with some severe anger issues and you got terminated from that job for whatever reason. I was watching the news and that coach from Rutgers has some anger issues. He was violent and abusive to these players, and he can’t deny it because it is on video and it is going to be on video for the rest of his life. I don’t know his spiritual walk with God, but I suspect if he is a Christian, he should see this as a kairos moment where he can sit down and lay his soul bare and allow God to point out some things that are causing him to act this way before he goes to the next job and experiences the same way. What is going on that is making you so anger? What are you dealing with inside your soul?
Maybe you are a person who just struggles with finances and every month over and over and over you can’t seem to meet the bills. You can’t make the rent payment. You can’t make the mortgage payment. You can’t make the car payment. Whatever it is. All of a sudden you lay on that blackboard of God’s schoolroom and you begin to see that God is showing you that you have some issues of greed. Maybe you are hoarding a little bit. Maybe you are just buying things to please others again to try to get your affection from people. You are buying things to please the people that you don’t like anyway. That is often what happens. God will teach you that in the schoolroom of a kairos moment. It could be something that you didn’t bring on and somebody else didn’t bring it on. It just happened like a death. Death happens all the time and health crises. That is also a time to repent.
Now you say well, Chuck, I follow you on the first two but why is there a need to repent during a death, during a moment of grief. I know there are people here that have gone through a loss of a loved one or a friend. I know you go through a variety of emotions. They just start rushing in. Why am I thinking this? Why am I feeling this? What is going on here? In fact, I have said before that the schoolroom of grief is one of the best classrooms. In Ecclesiastes it says “Better to be in a house of mourning than a house of laughter because death is the dusting of every man.” He is saying you learn a lot in the schoolroom of grief. You learn all sorts of things and things you might have to repent of. You start thinking about things like remorse, which is normal. Sadness, which is normal. What if that turns into guilt? What if the minute somebody dies the first thought you have is if I was only there, if I would have done more, if I would have reached out, if I would have talked to this person? I hadn’t talked to them in three years. I just knew I should have called them. I should have done this. You start experiencing guilt and you start this self-condemnation. Beating yourself up over and over again. Guilt. God is saying guilt is not a kingdom value. It’s not on the list. How do I know? Because Jesus didn’t play the guilt game. You know the story of Lazarus. Lazarus was a good friend of Jesus. Jesus was a good friend of Martha and Mary his sisters. Lazarus got sick and they said Jesus come here you can heal my brother Lazarus, and what did Jesus do? He took two extra days to get there and by the time he gets there, Lazarus is dead and had been in the tomb a couple days. He is starting to stink up the place and everything. The two sisters approach Jesus on the road and say Jesus if you had only been here, my brother would have lived. They go on to say but we know he will be raised at the end of whatever. Jesus says stop right there. I am not going to play this guilt game. I am the resurrection and life. Guilt is about death. I am the resurrection. Put your eyes on the resurrection. What we have going on here are moments of repentance that we have to enter into which involves taking the time to reflect on a situation and asking yourself the tough questions no matter how long it takes. If you are willing to go through this reflection time and allow God to begin to show you some things you desire to change and you actually desire to make those changes, then what you are doing is you are making around that pit. You are making your way around that circle and you are heading into the process called belief. You are entering into the place that you are beginning to realize if I make these changes in my life, my life is going to be different. It is going to be better and I am going to look more like a kingdom person. By faith you are believing that. But you know what? Faith is nothing without action. Faith is nothing without the willing to act. You know that from the Book of James. “Faith without works is dead.” You can have faith that an airplane will fly but you have to get in the airplane. You have to act to confirm that you do believe it. It is the same way with here. God has revealed to you this thing in his classroom all these things you need to change. You can believe you should change but until you begin to act, until you begin to make those baby steps, it is no good. The kairos moment has been wasted. You have to be willing to take those steps. And it can be baby steps. Let’s say it is an issue that you are upset because a co-employee received the promotion over you. What do you do? You don’t lash out at them. You don’t get secretive. You don’t practice passive-aggressive behavior. You love them. You call them up and say we are going to go to lunch today and let’s talk. I have to admit I really wanted that job, but I’m glad you got it. That is a tough one to do, but it’s a baby step is what it is. Maybe you are having trouble with finances and every month you say I don’t know what to do. Every month I don’t have money. Well, look at your iPhone bill or look at your cable bill or whatever and say do I really need full cable when I only watch three or four channels a week. Do I really need to spend $120 if I can get it for $30 or whatever? You begin to take those baby steps. You begin to make those changes that God revealed to you in this kairos moment. Even grief. You are feeling guilty. You say I am not going to feel guilty anymore. Instead of feeling guilty about the person I didn’t love, I am going to go love the people that are still alive. I am going to put a renewed focus on my family. I am going to appreciate the people that are here. I am not going to wallow in this guilt-grief mode that is appealing to no one and no benefit to anyone. That is what I mean by belief that involves action. The cool thing is, if you are willing to go through his simple process of repentance and belief, something amazing is going to happen. You are going to experience breakthrough. You are going to break out of that circle. The good thing is you are not only going to break out of that circle, you are going to break out of that circle as a new person. A person that has gone through some form of spiritual transformation. It may not even be evident to other people but you know that something has changed in you. You have experienced a spiritual growth spurt. Not only that. You may end up on a whole new path. A whole new trajectory of your life. A new career, a new relationship, new finances, new ministry, whatever. You end up on this phenomenal growth path that you would not have even experienced had you not allowed God to teach you the lessons he needed to teach you in the midst of that kairos moment.
As I begin to wrap this up, it’s pretty simple isn’t it? Some of you are thinking it’s too simple. You are making it sound too easy. You are making it sound too quick. My response is it is simple. It is one verse – repent and believe – but it’s really not easy. If any of you have gone through this, you know it’s not easy. In fact, if it was easy, more people would go through this process. But again, they go into denial. They go into doing. They take control of themselves. This is a guarantee that if you go through this process, you will come out a changed person. Again, it’s not fast. It looks like fast because I took it through quickly. But you know what, a kairos moment can last 2 minutes or 50 years. It really depends again on how willing you are to enter and stay into that kairos moment until you learn the things that God wants to teach you. The reality is people get into these pits and they get stuck. They experience the same thing and God reveals to them the same thing over and over and over again in different situations trying to teach them something about faith or fear or grief or whatever it is and they just refuse to listen. So they stay in this stuck mode. They never begin to grow up as a kingdom person. It is simple but it’s not easy and it’s not fast, but it is necessary if you are serious about growing up in your faith. About growing up and truly being a kingdom person so by the end of the line when you get to your death bed, you know that you look more like a kingdom person than when you left the baptistery. That you resemble a kingdom person. A person not perfect but a person who is closer to living to the kingdom reality than you were when you first got saved. In conclusion, the most important thing probably again that I can’t emphasize enough is that you have to first be willing to take a kingdom perspective. You have to be willing to step up, rise up and be mature enough as a Christian to say this situation will not own me. This situation will not destroy me. This situation will grow me. You will experience one kairos moment after another. One opportunity after another to have direct contact with the God of the universe as your teacher to give you lessons that you couldn’t get anywhere else that will leave such a mark, such an impression that you know you have encountered the Living God and you will never be the same.
I know that there are people here today that are experiencing life trials. I would say 75% in some sort of midst of a severe life trial. If you are not, you have just gotten through one or you are about to hit another one down the road. Right? Because life happens. It happens. These are going to happen. Again, when they happen, you don’t flip out. You don’t freak out; you don’t do what the world does. Or if you do it, you do it for a short time, you get ahold of yourself, and you say listen, I need to step back and give a heavenly perspective and understand that God is knocking on the window or whatever else and he is trying to break in to my world. If I am willing to get into the posture of disciple, he is going to give me as many lessons as I can handle. I will come out as a different person. The only requirement again is repent and believe. Go into that situation and ask God what is it about me that does not line up with your kingdom reality. What is it in me that doesn’t line up with a kingdom person? Accept that and take that and begin to commit yourself to making the necessary change, believing that God will do a great thing in you as long as you are willing to take the necessary action related to that change, related to that belief. If you do that, again you will not only have your foot in the kingdom door, you will begin to get immersed into the kingdom reality. You will begin to experience a fuller dimension of the kingdom reality than you have ever experienced before. You will be that much closer to it by the time you get to your death.
Again, it is simple. The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) Let us pray.
