Monday Musings: the urgency we need in 2020

Urgency.

I think we get what it means to live with a sense of urgency right now…at least with some things. Like…

We have a sense of urgency for schools to open back up again IN PERSON.

We have a sense of urgency for the outcome of the upcoming elections.

We have a sense of urgency for more local businesses to stay open.

We have a sense of urgency for all kinds of major cultural issues of our day…everything from abortion to racial discrimination to political and social divisiveness.

Not to mention that we live every day with the urgent feeling that our lives would just go back to normal.

You’re feeling that right now, right?

I think we all are.

We all get the concept of living these days with urgency.

But I’m not so sure that we get it where it matters the most.

Because, while all of the things that I just listed are important and are getting a lot of the attention and angst in our culture and communities these days, none of them address our most basic problem.

The problem of our everyday sins…

Both the obvious ones that are clearly seen and the hidden ones that we do our best to hide.

Both the sins that we commit intentionally and the ones we commit unintentionally.

On our best days, we confess our everyday sins to God and sense the urgency of killing them.

We become what we are…a new creation in Christ.

But, on our worst days, we tolerate or excuse or even ignore our everyday sins and have no real urgency to do anything about them.

And, the danger is that we end up slowly becoming cultural Christians who live our everyday lives more and more like the culture around us and less and less like the God who lives in us.

Instead of becoming what we are, we act like who we were without any real sense of urgency to change.

We get lazy in our everyday faith, while we play the waiting game for things to go back to “normal” or for Jesus to come back and get us out of here.

We forget that the ultimate goal of being a Christian is not just to spend eternity in heaven with God in the future, it’s to become more and more like Him in the everyday now.

And, in order for that to happen, we need to live with the right kind of urgency.

We need to live with the urgency for constant renewal and refreshing.

We need to live with the urgency to pursue God every day, growing in our knowledge of Him.

We need to live with the urgency and understanding that our everyday sin is not something to be excused or tolerated or ignored.

We need to listen to Paul’s words in Romans 8:12-14, when he says…

Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, you have no obligation to do what your sinful nature urges you to do. For if you live by its dictates, you will die. But if through the power of the Spirit you put to death the deeds of your sinful nature, you will live.

The bottom line is…if you are not pursuing God every day, you are pursuing death.

Think about it this way…

When you get up in the morning, and you open up your computer…maybe you’re like me, and you’ve left a bunch of tabs open.

So, you go to your Facebook tab or your daily news tab…and you find yourself staring at yesterday’s news.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

You hit the refresh button…and that is exactly what we need to do as Christians every day if we want to become what we are.

We need to be renewed and refreshed every day so that we become increasingly like Christ and decreasingly like who we were the day before.

Every day is an opportunity for us to say the old me is gone, and the new me is here.

Every day is an opportunity for us to live with the kind of urgency that seeks to kill the sin inside of us and become who we are in Christ.

And, that’s the kind of urgency we all need to live with now in 2020…and beyond.