Beloved, this month we began a new series, and I want to tell you plainly what the Lord put on my heart to call it: The Rhythm of God. Our theme for this month is Catch the Rhythm, and I want to tell you why that word matters.
Here is the premise I laid before our church family on the first Sunday. Everything in creation seems to run automatically. The grass grows. The trees produce. But there are times when they do not, and anytime something does not function the way it is supposed to in creation, it is because the rhythm is off.
Think of the fig tree. Leaves, but no figs, in a season it should have been producing. And the keeper says: give it another year, let me dig around it, let me fertilize it. All of that digging has one purpose. To get the tree back on rhythm.
That is our memory verse for August, and I have been calling it our pivot verse for a reason. Keeping in step is not a feeling we work up. The rhythm of God is not something we force. It is something we catch. It is the pace God has already set over every season of our lives, and the Spirit is given to us so that we can do what nature does without fail.
But here is the difference between you and that tree. The tree has no choice. You do. God gave you a part of His own nature, which is consciousness, so you get to decide whether you will move to His beat or your own.
And when you are on beat with God, things begin to happen naturally. So I asked our church to turn and say it to one another that morning, and I am asking you to say it again now: no more manufacturing. I do not want a substitute for something God has already given me. I want the natural.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). The question this month is not whether God has a season for you. He does. The question is whether you will step into it.
On the second Sunday we went to Isaiah: “You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” The word for mind there means formed, fashioned, shaped. The Creator has a cadence for your mind. And the word stayed means to put your full weight down, to lean with everything you have, so that if it moved you would fall.
That is trust. Not my best option. My only option.
So this month, beloved, make up your mind. Get acquainted with the truth, and then be anchored in it. You cannot be anchored in the truth and associated with a lie at the same time.
Catch the rhythm, beloved. And let us keep in step.