Get Busy
3Endure suffering along with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4Soldiers don’t get tied up in the affairs of civilian life, for then they cannot please the officer who enlisted them. 5And athletes cannot win the prize unless they follow the rules. 6And hard-working farmers should be the first to enjoy the fruit of their labor. 7Think about what I am saying. The Lord will help you understand all these things. (2 Timothy 2:3-7)
Happy Monday Fam! Do you struggle with sin? Do you find yourself continually slipping into the pattern of not doing what you want to do, but letting the devil whisper in your ear to do what you truly do not want to do? Well, I have the cure to that.
The easiest way to push sin out of your life is to fill your life with doing the good work of Jesus Christ. In the three examples from Paul in his second letter to his prized pupil, Timothy, Paul uses three examples of society in the time just after Christ: a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer. He warns soldiers not to get involved in civilian affairs but to stay focused on their mission. He advises that an athlete cannot win a prize if he is not following the rules. And a hardworking farmer will receive the fruits of their labor first. Now, nearly 2,000 years after Paul wrote that letter, society has changed a lot, but we still have soldiers, athletes, and the hard-working laborer among us. The wisdom Paul captured back then is still true to us today and remains a good truth to follow to keep yourself too busy to sin.
In our work as a Christian disciple, we find ourselves fulfilling the roles of all three occupations. We are a soldier of Christ, and our mission is to grow the kingdom. We can fill our free time with reading the Bible to grow our knowledge in the Word; we can attend church and become active in those circles to surround ourselves with fellow Christian Soldiers; and we can actively participate in the mission of growing the Kingdom by getting out and spreading the Gospel.
We are athletes in our spiritual warfare, and we must train our minds and spirit for the race ahead. Again, we do this by spending time studying the Word of God, by getting repetitions in by exposing ourselves to the wisest minds in Theology, and by listening and absorbing the spoken word by Christianity’s greatest preachers. The devil has been training for this battle for who knows how long. We need to get in the best spiritual shape we can if we hope to compete in the race for our eternal prize.
And finally, as workers of the field, the harvest is plentiful. Our local head pastor gave what might be one of his final sermons as he marches proudly into retirement after being at the helm of Compassion Christian for the last thirty years. He threw a bunch of stats on the screen yesterday when talking about the number of people that are currently not followers of Christ in the United States. The current population in the US is 341,814,420, and the current number that profess to be followers of Christ is only around 72%. This leaves 28% of the above number as those that either profess a faith other than Christianity, or do not profess following any faith or belief in a God at all. 28% is over 92 million people that need to know who the one true God is, and that the only way to eternal life is by believing in His Son, Jesus Christ. The harvest is indeed plentiful, and we can easily fill our free time with tilling the field and not letting sin distract us from our mission here on Earth.
Pastor Cam has been preaching an amazing sermon called “The DNA of a Dangerous Church”, as he prepares for his final sermon in a few weeks. I wish they had yesterday’s message available to share today, but until then, I will just share his word from two weeks ago, and you can see for yourself what a church that pushes their congregation to be obedient soldiers, active athletes, and hard-working farmers, this is what a dangerous church can do against the powers of darkness in the world.
Need some music to motivate you for the mission ahead? Well, two of my favorites, Tauren Wells and Tommee Profitt, teamed up to make a remix of Tauren’s hype track: Take It All Back. Click the link below and get pumped to take this world back from the enemy. Let’s get busy doing the good work.
Common Sense Reborn 