How often do I think about my death?
That was the question of the sermon yesterday morning, preaching on 1st Corinthians 15: 35-58. The pastor raised the point that we do not ask two questions of ourselves daily that the early church asked:
1) Will I die today?
2) Will Christ come today?
The key to wasting your life, he stated, is to live like you have tomorrow.
That strikes me as funny, because so much of modern American life - of my own life- is built on the idea that we do have tomorrow. Plan for advancement, plan for retirement, plan for the weekend - always something is set off for tomorrow, which by default we assume we have. Not to be given as a gift, but to have as a divine right.
Not that there is anything wrong with planning. But planning presumes that tomorrow will be there. And tomorrow may never come. We make our plans and so often fail acknowledge the sovereignty of God in our lives and the universe:
"Come now, you who say 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit'; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or than.' But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil." - James 4: 13-16
If I believed tomorrow would not come - if I knew that tomorrow would not come how would that change today?
If I knew that I would not wake up after I put my head down on my pillow tonight, how would I pray differently? Serve differently?
What am I clutching to my chest as mine that I would release if I knew I would never use it again?
And now that I ask myself all of these questions, what am I going to do about it?
What are you going to do about it?
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