Romans 13:11 Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. 12 The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy and useless things.
I had a conversation with one of my small group guys and his parent last night about how the young man is doing. Part of this stems from a long history of laziness on his part and summer time is not really a great time to be on a schedule if you're not pushing yourself to be on a schedule normally.
Last night, in the message, we had a guest speaker who was talking about the urgent and important things in this life and how often we set aside both the important and the urgent for things that are neither.
In talking to this young man, he likes to play video games and sleep in. I don't think this is too uncommon in today's world. 100 years ago there were crops to plant and weed and then the produce of those same crops to harvest and store and at the end of all of that there was plowing the field back up to be ready for next years planting. There was really not much time to be a kid. The games consisted of a stick and a hoop you could run down the street with. Or there were some new team sports coming in like basketball and baseball. For the most part there was work and sleep just so you could eat that day and later on in the year. Families depended on all the family members to contribute.
On a strictly earthly level; is there really time to play all these games? Is there really time to sleep in late every morning? How can we expect our sons to be men and our daughters to be women if we allow them to do whatever it is they like all summer long? When will they ever get to be responsible? When will they ever be ready to be husbands and wives and then parents, if all they know is sleeping in and playing games? America is going the way of much of the rest of the world; hedonism is king.
If asking those questions of ourselves, as Christians, we must take the obvious next step and look at our spiritual "productivity". If we have looked at our earthly duties we must move to the more important arena of our souls. Do we really have time to play games and sleep in when there is spiritual work to be done? Sin does not wake up tired, and so as we turn over in our beds, does this extra sleep help us wage the war against sin more effectively? If the days already go by too quickly, how can we sit down and spend a couple of hours everyday doing mindless things in front of a screen; this includes video games, but also videos, movies and surfing the web aimlessly.
We live in a culture that is focused on self, but if we really and truly were concerned about ourselves we would spend more time in the Word because this is where we find the strength to finish each day. We spend hours planing, preparing and then eating our physical food, and we do need to eat, but then that takes away the time we could be spending in the Word, which is the food we truly need to eat.
The trivial far outweigh the truly important and urgent. We need to battle sin and strive for the Prize and yet we are sitting, or laying, around as if we have plenty of time for that in the future. The "future" is right now. There are people all around us, who know there is a God, yet suppress the Truth, and we are too busy doing the unimportant and trivial things, which makes it so we don't have time to do what we are called to do.
Just because we are older doesn't mean that we are immune to this kind of frittering; the frittering just looks different now. It now looks like spending lots of time at ballgames allowing our kids to think that playing a game is somehow more important than spending time in the Word. We get a "family hobby" like camping or boating and then all our weekends are taken up and all our extra minutes during the week are consumed with planning for the next weekend. Satan has done a masterful job at keeping us distracted from the important and urgent.
2 Tim. 2:1 You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, 2 and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. 3 Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. 5 An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. 6 It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. 7 Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.
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