We are all timekeepers.
Our clocks and calendars organize our days. Our time is filled with the mundane (sleeping, eating, working, playing, scrolling, watching, reading, and waiting) and sometimes the extraordinary. We organize our secular calendars to mark occasions and boundaries, like the academic year, football season, election season, and tax season. We measure our arrivals by whether we're early, on time, or late.
And even if we try to live free from the clock, our bodies keep time for us. We find ourselves getting hungry or tired around the same time every day.
Even creation keeps time. The sun rises and sets and seasons change. Timekeeping is all around us.
These rhythms of chronological time are real and meaningful, but they cannot carry the full weight of our lives or tell the fully story of who we are. What about celebrations, vacations, parties, adventures that live on in our memories? What about arguments, accidents, injuries, and illnesses that impact us? These moments shape us and carry meaning beyond the mere passage of time.
Beyond Chronos: Discovering Kairos
Two words help us understand time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is chronological time, measured by clocks and calendars. It tells us when to work, rest, and go about our days.
Kairos, on the other hand, is God's opportune time—the right moment, the divine intersection between our chronological time and eternity. Chronos tells us what time it is; kairos invites us to recognize what God is doing in that time.
We see this distinction from the very beginning of Scripture. In Genesis 1–3, the eternal God creates a paradise where humanity walks and talks with him. But sin fractures that relationship, and time becomes marked by decay, suffering, and death.
God's remedy comes at just the right moment. As Galatians 4:4 tells us:
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son...”
At God's opportune time, at kairos, he sent his Son into the world. This is the story of redemption: God entering our temporal world and drawing us into his eternal story—redeeming time itself. Through the cross, we are redeemed from sin and restored to the promise of eternal life (John 3:16).
We are not simply people moving through chronological time, waiting for our days to run out. We are inheritors of God's redemptive work, invited to participate in his story.
We are keepers of sacred time by learning to pay attention to God’s movement and presence in the unfolding story of our lives, as he has done through the Gospel. And one of the most meaningful ways we learn to attune our hearts to kairos is through living the liturgical year.
So here are four ways living the liturgical year is a formative rhythm for abiding in Christ.
1. It Is an Act of Resistance
Deadlines, appointments, productivity goals, and notifications constantly demand our attention. Living the liturgical year offers an alternative.
Rather than being consumed by the demands of chronological time, we intentionally seek kairos within chronos. We create space for the sacred so that all of our hours and days don't simply run together.
In her book Sacred Seasons, Danielle Hitchens writes:
“...the liturgies of the church year...patiently invite us into something deeper, something permanent and eternal. In them, we slow down and pivot our focus—for a few seconds at least—to snatch a glimpse of God's largeness, our own smallness, and the gift of being welcomed into his glorious kingdom.”
We slow down and pivot our focus.
The liturgical calendar invites us to interrupt the ordinary patterns of our lives long enough to remember that there is a much bigger story unfolding around us. When we slow down and pivot our focus, the hours and days don't all run together. They become opportunities to recognize God's presence and participate in His work.
2. It Invites Us into a Holistic, Corporate, and Experiential Faith
This is actually what faith has always looked like for the people of God, from ancient Israel through the early church—encompassing every area of life and ebbing and flowing with the changing seasons.
Faith was individual, but it was also corporate. God's people celebrated the same festivals, observed shared rituals, and gathered around common practices. These rhythms gave them a sense of belonging to something much bigger than themselves.
Faith was experiential, involving all the senses: food, fasting, singing, hearing Scripture taught, and gathering with others.
The everyday life of the believer was enriched by the liturgical year, permeated with the Spirit of God. The liturgical year invites us to bring our faith into our homes, our meals, our conversations, our celebrations, and even our ordinary routines.
3. It Teaches Us to Remember
One of the most important functions of the liturgical calendar is remembrance.
Danielle Hitchens writes in Sacred Seasons:
“As the people of God, we are the keepers of the gospel. We are the great bards who rehearse and perform the drama of the great story of God's kingdom from creation to second coming.”
We inhabit the story of God, rehearse it, and proclaim it. And this is important because biblical remembrance is more than simply recalling something that happened in the past. It involves experiencing it again, bringing it to life in the present.
This act of remembrance is a spiritual discipline. Consider Jesus and his disciples on the night he was arrested. They were celebrating Passover. In his final hours before the cross, Jesus participated in a meal rooted in the remembrance of God's deliverance of his people. He understood the significance of remembering God's work, and he gave his followers a practice through which they would continue to remember His sacrifice.
The liturgical year invites us into that same posture. It reminds us that our own lives are an entrance into God's much bigger story. And in light of Christ's resurrection, each season of the liturgical year invites us to tell the story again—to remember who God is, what he has done, and how his faithfulness continues to shape our lives.
4. It Shapes Us into the People of Christ
Finally, living according to the liturgical year shapes us. Through rhythms of preparation, celebration, and proclamation, the calendar habituates our minds, hearts, and bodies to live as Christ's own.
We walk through the story of Jesus again and again, not as mere repetition, but for transformation. Every time we feast and celebrate, we are filled with joy. When we fast and repent, we are filled with God's mercy and forgiveness. We wait with expectation. We proclaim with confidence. We learn to recognize the presence of God in both the extraordinary and the ordinary.
Each season teaches us something about how to live, how to hope, how to love, and how to worship. Over time, these rhythms become formative. They shape not only what we believe but how we live.
And isn't that the goal of discipleship? Not simply to know more about Jesus, but to become more like him.
The Spiritual Discipline of Sacred Time
Ultimately, the liturgical calendar exists to remind us that Christ has sanctified all of time. He has brought our whole human experience into the orbit of resurrection. We honor sacred time to bear witness and pay attention to all that God has done, all that he is doing, and all that he will do.
And at the heart of the liturgical year is worship. We worship by remembering. We worship by celebrating. We worship by preparing our hearts and proclaiming the Gospel. We worship by allowing the story of Jesus to become the story that shapes our own.
This worship is a habit and rhythm that cultivates faith; we move beyond simply knowing the story of God to actually inhabiting it. In this way, keeping sacred time is like a spiritual discipline that opens our senses to God's work in the world. It helps us remember the story of what God has already done, proclaim what he is doing, and join him in what he will do next.
Living the liturgical year teaches us to recognize that our days are not simply passing by. God is at work within them.
We are all timekeepers. We can measure our lives simply by the passing of hours, days, and years, or we can inhabit the story of God and learn to recognize his opportune time in all of our moments.
May we become people who keep sacred time, shaped by the redemptive story of Christ. May we learn to live every season in the light of eternity.