“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10)

In the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln poses a simple question, “Do you think we choose the times into which we are born? Or do we fit the times we are born into?” Certainly the answer to the first must be, No. I believe the answer to the second is undoubtedly, Yes.

“For such a time as this” you were born (Esther 4:14). God who knows, sees, creates, and sustains all things, times, seasons, and cultures fitted you for this time and place you find yourself in. Time and place precede you.

If God for mankind has “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling” (Acts 17:26), then no one can ever truly say that they were born at the wrong time or in the wrong place. God saw “fit” that the boundaries of your dwelling would be here and now. God did not say, “I must fit this time and place to him/her,” but “I will fit him/her to this time and place.

And it’s not as if God is suddenly presented with more human lives than he was anticipating or “planning” on.  He sees and knows all lives past, present, and future at once. Time is God’s “unbounded now”.

But let us go further. For such a time as this you were born and born again (John 3:3, 7). Salvation and the Kingdom of God precede you, are bigger than you. To be born again is to be born into a new world and time. Incarnation means Christ came into the world he created to save humanity. Resurrection means a whole new world and humanity are coming into being in and through him.

You find your place, then, and therefore your value, in Christ—in his kingdom as “fellow citizens” (Ephesians 2:19), in his body as “individual members” (Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 12:27), in his temple as “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5). You are fitted for and fitted into the kingdom, the body, the temple of Christ.

Winston Churchill once said, “We live in an age of great events and little men.” What we are called to as Christians and disciples of Jesus, as his church, is to be men and women who are fitted in Christ by the Holy Spirit for the times and for the events of our present day and culture. We are a part of something bigger and greater than ourselves. We are always already participating in the saving and renewing activity of God here and now on this earth.