It's About Time [ Page 3]

It's About Time...Continued from page 2

He adds this warning: “Anyone who knows what is right and doesn’t do it sins.” Like Jesus, James brings the believers back to the moment in front of them. You shouldn’t be spending your time saying, “Here’s what I’m planning to do; here’s all I anticipate doing.” You should do what you know you should do in the moment in front of you.

Don’t put off until tomorrow telling the people you love that you love them. Don’t put off until tomorrow doing what you know the Lord is calling you to do today. In each moment be obedient, in each day be faithful, because that’s the moment you have, that’s the day you have. We grab our day planners. We circle dates in the future and we say, “On that day this will happen. On that day I will be there and I will accomplish this kind of business and I will take care of these things on that day,” as if those days are already ours. They’re not. Tomorrow isn’t promised to you, nor to me. You’re supposed to say, “If the Lord wills I’ll be there Thursday. If the Lord wills I’ll be at my appointments tomorrow.”

Yet you know, as I know, that is not the way we think or the way we live. Sudden things can happen. The ambulance comes to your house, or picks you up at your office, the doctor comes in and shakes his head and your plans change. I don’t care what was on your calendar – things change. You think you’re in control. You think time is yours.

Just saying the words, “If the Lord wills,” makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it? “I have an appointment tomorrow. I’ll be there, if the Lord wills.” Well, I’m sorry, Jesus, I’m booked tomorrow from 8:00 in the morning until 5:30 that afternoon. If I have to die tomorrow it would be Tuesday before I fell over. I don’t have time.

If the Lord wills I’ll be there. Tomorrow isn’t mine. Tuesday isn’t mine, nor is Wednesday. It’s not yours either. What you have is this moment, right here, right now. Nothing else is promised. We want to live like those children who anticipate the parents coming back, and so we put off doing what we know we should do. We think we will get it done on another day.

A husband puts off responding to his wife’s request to another day. A parent ignores a child for another day, always assuming there will be another opportunity, another moment. That’s not always true is it? You know like I know the stories of a wife – she has begged her husband, who is over-committed at work, to come home. He is stressed out; he has little time for his wife, little time for his marriage, and little time for his children.

Then somewhere in a hotel room, in a city he can’t remember the name of, this man comes to his senses. He goes home and starts making the changes his wife asked him to make years before, and it is too late. “I’m doing everything she asked me to do,” he will tell me, “but it’s too late.”