What are you doing with now?

I have been fortunate enough to be invited to preach at Good Springs and Ashland City Free Will Baptist Church in the last month.  At both churches I preached the same message, a modification of the message I delivered at the National Association in 2014, based on Galatians 6:7, 8.  I have often chided my friends in denominational ministry for having only a few “traveling sermons” that they use over and over again.  My not so subtle jibe was that, unlike local church pastors, they did not do the week- in week-out study, preparing a new message for each Sunday.  Their counter to this is that, unlike pastors, they don’t have blocks of time in which they could study.  Why not fall back on what they think of as a sure-fire sermon rather than throwing something together in the snatches of time available? 

Ok, I see and will even grant their point, but what was my excuse?  After all, I am retired and have all day to pour over the Bible and ponder how to present the truths I find in it.  The fallacy in that logic is that I have been quite busy over the last month.  More than one friend has asked me about how I use my “free” time, now that I have so much of it.  Well, I have been an “online facilitator” for Welch College for about five years now.  When I was pastoring I would only take on one class each semester so that they would not interfere with my primary responsibility to my church, but at retirement I decided to increase the workload.  I may have overdone it.

I am now working on the third unit of study in a row.  This involves knowing the class material better than the students, being thoroughly familiar with the textbooks, and spending hours on my computer interacting with the students.  An additional load came my way when I was asked to be the teaching assistant for one of the classes at Welch which would be using an internet format for a couple of weeks as construction on the new campus was completed.  The operative phrase in that sentence is “a couple of weeks.”  I remember thinking, “I can work through anything for two weeks!”  That two weeks became four and demanded more time and attention than any online classes I have ever worked with.  The first week I spent a little over 30 hours at my computer!  I told my dear wife that this was way too much like having a regular job!

Does all of that justify not having a new sermon for Good Springs and Ashland City?  I think so, but the friends I mentioned earlier may not.  I will say that I have a new appreciation of their world and will not be nearly so critical of it in the future.  A final point though arises from that sermon which spurred me to write this blog post.  The passage I spoke from centers on the truth that “Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap!”  One point I tried to make was that our destiny is dependent upon how we use the present moment, the now.  Keeping with Galatians, if we want to harvest the fruit of the Spirit, then we must cultivate that now.  In my message I quoted the great evangelist D. L. Moody who said, “It is a solemn thing to think that the future will be the harvest of the present – that my condition in my dying hour may depend upon my actions today!  The opportunity for sowing will not last forever; it is slipping through our fingers moment by moment; and the future can only reveal the harvest of the seed sown now.”  So I conclude with the same question I began with, what are you doing with now?  I have tried to show you what I’m doing with my now.  What are you doing with yours?