Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
Psalm 51:10
We just started the One Month To Live Challenge at my Church and the initial reaction is really amazing. I had the opportunity to take part in this study when I was at Prestonwood and it had a profound effect on the way I viewed things. Now, leading others through the challenge has really opened my eyes to how precious each day we have really is.
If you aren’t familiar with it, the One Month To Live Challenge is fairly self-explanatory. What would you do if today, you found out you had one month to live? You start to identify what is and what isn’t important and you also quickly think about some of the things you do that you could easily do without. Looking towards the future with a limited time available allows us to see things very differently. Your thoughts turn from “someday, I’m going to _____” to “I have to get _______ done right now”. But more importantly it lets us see that many of our daily routines and habit just aren’t really that important.
If you had One Month To Live, how much of the next 30 days would you:
· Spend watching TV
· Gossiping with your Co-workers· Spend watching TV
· Trying to find a party or place to “hang” with your friends
I would guess very little would be the answer that most would give to those questions. And why is that, because they just aren’t that important. Not important but how much time did you dedicate to those things in the last 30 days?
In Ephesians Paul says that we are to live a life worthy of the gift we have received. Our gift is salvation and eternal life and there just isn’t anything else you can receive that comes close to comparison. I have seen so many receive Christ in their lives and find the joy and passion of that union. They are on fire for God and have a passion that lights up a room when they enter. Then a few months later that same person just blends into crowd the radiance is not so evident.
So what happened? They came down with a bad case of the “Someday’s”.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8
As a Christian our ultimate goal should is to find the will of God and how we can be of use to Him. How our worship of Him can be complete. And while Peter paints a very dramatic picture of Satan in the above verse, the world paints one quite a bit different. The world tells us we have all the time we ever need. The world tells us “why do today what you can put off until tomorrow”. The truth is the world we live in is charged by the king of the air to do just that. The Bible tells us the devil has dominion over the world we live in and that becomes more evident as you attempt to look through the eyes of Christ.
Once you ask Christ into your life, he will never leave you nor forsake you. The life of a Christian can be one of unparallel joy or one that is very average. Satan can’t take salvation away from you but he can sure try and keep you from doing anything with it. And the number one way he does this? By convincing us that we have all the time in the world. Do it later.
Life can change in the blink of any eye. It’s a little after 6am as I write this and I have an idea of how my day is going to unfold but it could be drastically different, we can’t really know these things. It could be significantly better or worse that I predict. But as the saying goes “That’s why we play the game”. And in any game we make a plan and a good plan includes offense and defense.
Jesus said the end will come like a thief in the night, in other words we aren’t going to be expecting it. So are you ready?
Grace and peace,
Jeff
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