Chronos vs. Kairos: Why God’s Timing Is Worth the Wait

The Rolling Stones were wrong—time does wait when eternity pierces your everyday routine.

The Rolling Stones had a song entitled “Time Waits for No One.” The idea behind the song and the proverb is that time must be seized because it is finite. We all recognize that time is our most valuable commodity. We may value money more because we feel its immediate impact on our lives, but time brings us to a startling reality when we realize we are just about out of it.

The good news is that God is infinite and eternal. He is not limited by time nor subject to it. Yet, He has chosen to operate inside of time so that finite beings might have encounters with His infinite Being.

Two Kinds of Time

Time, therefore, is God’s gift to humanity. It is a marker of moments. We operate in a finite cycle of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Each second is a potential moment of infinite occurrences.

The Greeks have two words for time. The first, chronos, refers to chronological or sequential time. The second, kairos, refers to a specific, appointed point in time. They intersect when kairos pierces chronos. This intersection is what we call “God’s time”.

Life becomes frustrating and discouraging when our chronos time never experiences a kairos moment. We can lose our motivation for being and relegate ourselves to despair. But it is what we do between our kairos moments that matters most, because kairos interrupts the continuum of chronos.

In his gospel, Mark records Jesus’s initial message: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The word Mark used for “time” was kairos. It was God’s time. The Jews had been waiting for their Messiah to come, deliver them from Gentile oppression, and institute the promised eternal kingdom of the house of David. Their calendar time, chronos, had been running for approximately 1,000 years. But in an instant, eternity intersected with time, and the people were living in kairos.

This was not the first time kairos had touched chronos in the history of God’s people. When the children of Israel were suffering under the oppressive slavery of the Egyptians for 400 years, they desperately waited for God to fulfill His promise to Abraham to bring them out of that darkness. That moment arrived when God appeared to Moses on the backside of the desert near Mt. Horeb and said:

“I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey…” (Exodus 3:7-8)

The children of Israel had been crying out to God in their chronos, and God came down in His kairos to deliver them in His perfect time.

Like the Jews of Jesus’s day and the Israelites in Moses’s day, we may be waiting on our own kairos moment. It sounds easy, but the wait is incredibly heavy. Like money, trials, tribulations, hurts, and pains have an immediate impact on our day-to-day lives. But thanks be to God that, unlike chronos time, we never run out of kairos time. The truth is, it is God’s kairos that guarantees our chronos. We can never exhaust our chronological time as long as our divine purpose has not yet been fulfilled.

While We Wait

So what should we do while we wait? Trust God. He is the Author and Finisher of our faith. Every word He has promised will come to pass in our lives because He has preplanned it, and He has the absolute power to produce it. When we trust in His unchanging character and His uncontested power, we are certain to experience the fullness of His promises in the land of the living.

This brings us back to where we started. The Rolling Stones sang that “Time waits for no one,” but they were wrong. Kairos is always waiting for chronos to intersect it. When it does, we know that we are operating in God’s perfect timing, not man’s.

Dr. Isaac Hayes is an Assistant Pastor at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Illinois, and author of Men After God’s Heart: 10 Principles of Brotherly Love. He also has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Follow Dr. Hayes on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube at @RevIsaacHayes.