As followers of Jesus, we need to move beyond Sunday morning. It’s easy to pretend how much we love Jesus when we gather with other believers. I cannot help but see the disconnect in the lives of myself and others when we proclaim our devotion to His mission on Sunday but forget about it as soon as we walk out the door. Our lives are not centered on our Savior. They are centered on ourselves.
We are the center of our own universe. On any given day, how often do you think of yourself as compared to thinking about Jesus? What percentage of your thoughts are around what you need to get done around the office and the house as opposed to what you need to be doing for the Kingdom?
To put it bluntly, our devotion is a joke. We go to church on Sunday mornings, perhaps we even have a well-entrenched habit of daily prayer and Bible reading. But beyond Sunday morning and our quiet times, what are we doing for Jesus? Does your life look much different than that of your neighbors? Does mine? Sadly, I will tell you, it does not. We get up, go to work, come home, do some chores around the house, and go to bed. Tomorrow we’ll all get up and do it again. Where is Jesus in all this? Our lives are not ordered around Him. We’re squeezing Him into the margins. Consider the audacity of this!
The Creator and King of the Universe, the all-powerful God has chosen us to be His own. Our response? We try and fit Him in where we can, squeezing Him in between our busyness, daily habits, and time for ourselves. Pathetic. What are we doing? It’s laughable to think it will be okay to live like this and then expect Him to welcome us into His Kingdom when we die. We said our prayer. We raised our hand in church. We even walked down to the front of the church and got dunked in the water. We’re good, right?
Every day, thousands of people are dying without knowing Christ. People all around us are destined to Hell, but we can’t take the time to get out of line at Starbucks. Our lives are ordered around our whims and desires while the lives of those around us are quickly fading for eternity, forever separated from God. It’s okay, we’ll be back in church this weekend. God help us.
We’ve got to move beyond Sunday morning. We’ve got to move beyond ourselves. We are great pretenders. We practice every day. Let me say it again: thousands of people are dying without Jesus every day. If that doesn’t break our hearts and drive us to our knees, I have to question whether we understand what Jesus is all about after all. He came to seek and save those who were lost. He sought you and He sought me. For those of us who have chosen to accept Him as Lord of our lives, His mission is now our mission. We must go out to seek and lead people to a salvation existing nowhere else but in the person of Jesus. It’s time to get out in the world. It’s time we all moved beyond Sunday morning.