A Short Time to Get There

Can you hear Jerry Reed singing the theme from “Smokey and the Bandit”??  Can you hear Burt Reynolds laughing at Jackie Gleason??  If not, you might be one of my blog readers who doesn’t see what I did with the title of yesterday’s and today’s blogs.

To be honest, they are not really related to each other.  I just had to do it.  But today I wanted to write about the urgency we, the church, MUST have in doing the work God put us here to do.  IF we believe we were created with purpose … IF we believe we were created to do good works God created for us in advance to do … then we also MUST believe what Jesus said when He told us the end would come like a thief in the night, when none of us expect it.  And wouldn’t it be a shame for Christ to return and find that we have made NO PROGRESS toward the work God made for us??  Don’t we need to get busy?

Add to this a world around us that moves farther and farther from God every day.  A predominate cultural influence that continues to paint a picture of the church as a joke, and God as dead.  More and more people become aware of these things every day, and yet no one is showing them or telling them about the Love of God.  And statistics that prognosticate the conventional church might not even exist in 30-50 years.

I am convinced that as long as we DO the things God has called us to do, this will not come true.  If we slip into the ruts of our traditions, if we continue down some of the paths the North American church is on, we might just make that prediction come true.  And what a sad day if that happened.  Because the influence we can potentially wield in our communities and in the world will be gone, too.  What a sad day that would be.

Yes, we as a church do have a looooong way to go and a short time to get there.  And we need to put the pedal to the metal and move in the right direction.  The direction in which He is calling each of us.