The Doing Of It

You may have heard the story about the two young boys sitting in a church service one Sunday. One boy was a regular part of the church family but the other boy was his visiting friend to whom church was a whole new experience. At the end, the pastor finished up his sermon and the new boy turns to his friend and says, “Is that it?”. And the other boy responds, “Nope, now we have to go do it.”

I love this story because it focuses the attention where it needs to be. Because most things in life are way easier said than done. But if we don’t actually get to the doing part, then we are not experiencing the truth in reality in our lives.And how often is our big problem our unwillingness to see things through?

But it’s tough isn’t it. Last winter and spring, we spent about 4 months re-envisioning the way we do church. ‘The Church Reboot’ which was a 7 week interactive series/work shop was a very meaningful time for us. We gained a renewed sense of vision for us as a church. And then we spent another two months fleshing out what God had shown us as the way to move forward. The tag line for the initial series was ‘reestablishing the priorities of our lives together around the passion of Jesus’. Very critical stuff. But this is most certainly one of those things that’s way easier said than it is done.

This week, at our Prayer Summit on Tuesday evening, Doug took us back to that weighty statement and challenged us to take note of just how big a challenge it really is. We have set this out as something important for us to do together. And yet, it will only happen to the degree that each of us as individuals are willing to make those necessary changes in our personal lives.

So, I want to take this opportunity to ask you, personally, how are you doing with that? Have you made significant changes in your own priorities so that they are more in line with the passion of Jesus? What does that look like for you? Or are you still defaulting to the way you have lived in the past, going through the motions, scrambling to handle a truck load of expectations because you think it’s easier than sorting through them? Have you made changes? Or are you unwilling to do the hard thing and say ‘no’ to someone? Who is that someone you can’t say ‘no’ to? Is it someone else or is it you? Or is it Jesus?