Now This
Waiting for the Lord
Bill James
We can sometimes feel that we aren’t making any difference. Perhaps we thought and prayed about how to vote in the General Election, but ended up with an MP, or a government, which we did not choose.
That can be true in church life as well, or a difficult situation at work; however hard we pray, and seek to do the right thing, we are not seeing any progress. We might be tempted to give up, stop praying, and doubt whether God cares about the situation. Or perhaps be tempted to take matters into our own hands and get angry, vent our frustration, and respond in a less than godly way.
Are we throwing away our time?
‘I only have a minute. Only sixty seconds in it. … Just a tiny little minute. But eternity is in it.’ Those words by Pastor Benjamin Mays remind us again of just how precious the God-given gift of time is. Life is made of moments and none of us have an infinite supply.
The Bible has many metaphors that illustrate just how brief and temporary our existence is here on earth. It’s described as a breath, a flower that fades, and a wisp of smoke that appears for a little while. It’s a sobering thought that should you reach 80 years of age, you will have lived for around just 4,000 weeks. Life, we often learn too late, is in the living. Most people leave this world with a few pounds in the bank, but all of us leave it with no seconds on the clock. Time, therefore, is infinitely more important than money. Once it’s gone, all the gold in the universe can’t buy back a single moment.
Can you inherit faith?
We greatly appreciate the blessing of being brought up in a Christian home, but does this guarantee children from Christian families will all be converted?
A recent study by Pew Research Center conducted across the world showed that Christianity and Buddhism don’t have a very high success rate of passing on faith through the generations.