I’ve talked about this many times before, but I don’t think we get it yet. Perhaps we get it intellectually, but anecdotal observation of the lives of others and myself tells me we haven’t ingested it. We need to live with urgency. We must turn to Jesus now. Our best intentions to surrender our lives are nothing more than that if we never act on them. I certainly am speaking to myself here, as well as all my brothers and sisters in Christ.
As I survey the world around me, I continue to see Christians living a nominal faith that is more concerned with their well-being than it is for the lost, the Church, and the Kingdom of God. Though we claim to surrender all, we still live for ourselves. Our time isn’t given to our King, it’s given to entertainment and pursuing comfort. We eat and drink while tomorrow the lost will die.
Jesus is coming back. Everything we’ve done will be judged as good and faithful or as wasted. We are wasting our lives whenever we are pursuing anything other than the glory of God. We waste our time climbing the ladder of success. The time spent pursuing a comfortable life for your family is wasted. And our endless desire for entertainment is wasting our lives. Only Jesus matters, yet we run after everything except Him!
Paul urges us to live our lives in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ (Philippians 1:27). Is that what we’re doing? Can we honestly say how we are living, the things we are pursuing, are worthy of Jesus dying on the cross? Our lives were bought at a great cost, and an immense sacrifice. Can you imagine Jesus giving His life so you can buy a bigger house or a better car? Are we saying it was worth nails being driven through the hands of Jesus so we could take it easy and ignore the needs around us? Was the horrible, suffocating death Jesus endured done so we could overindulge in food and pleasure?
We’ve gotten things very messed up. Christianity has become a parody of what was intended. We need to repent, and we need to do it now. The moment we surrendered our lives to Jesus, everything should have changed. If it didn’t, your surrender wasn’t real. You can’t surrender one day and pretend you didn’t the next. That’s not how surrender works. It’s a once for all-time action. Surrender means we give up, admit our inability to live without Jesus, and devote the rest of our lives to serving Him.
But we are lazy. We don’t live with urgency, and we believe there will always be a tomorrow, always be another chance to live for Him. But there won’t. Look around. The world is spiraling down in complete lunacy and despair. Your days of ease and comfort have passed. We should have never lived for them in the first place, but now the die is cast. Decide for whom you will live. Then do it with urgency. Do it with intentionality. So, you say Jesus is Lord? Prove it by the way you live.