There are many things in life that put us in an urgent frame of mind. These include but are not limited to the rush and urgency you feel when you haven’t eaten all day long and you are trying to get something savory to satisfy your hunger. How about when nature calls and you are unable to get to the bathroom for whatever reason? There is an urgency to get your Christmas shopping done, to finish up the last-minute touches on that paper or assignment you procrastinated to finish. There can be a sense of urgency to patch up a relationship that may be floundering due a hurtful thing you said or an argument you regret. When you are late to work or school, your heart thumps with urgency, especially when you’re sitting in traffic and the minutes continue to tick by.
Maybe you experience urgency when you’re standing in line at the grocery store, and the cashier seems to be taking his or her sweet time, and you think about all the things you have to do for the rest of the day. We aren’t very patient by nature, and when we want something, we tend to want it immediately. Many things vie for our attention, they scream our names, and pull and tug for our focus. We rush around and bump into walls and people and feelings and situations recklessly and thoughtlessly, harried and trying to move on to the next thing and the next as best we can. We seem to experience urgency with things every single moment of every single day.
Why then are we so casual with our relationships with God?
Where is the urgency there? Where is the desperate motivation to further understand His word or to spend time in prayer with Him?
How funny we are as humans. How often we place priority on meaningless, selfish things. How often we neglect to prioritize or even place urgency upon the single most important thing we ever could: a relationship with Jesus.
I’ve been noticing it more and more every day: an apathetic complacency in what this world has to offer, and it’s been truthfully a bit unnerving. If we could strip away everything and truly see it as it truly is, we may be less inclined to defend our actions with justifications and excuses.
There are two sides warring for us: good and evil, and every day we tip our scale more and more in one direction or the other.
I think of Noah and the urgency he attempted to share to the early civilizations of the world. They had never experienced rain. They enjoyed their casual lives of redundant partying and worldly fulfillment. So, the old crazy voice screaming about a far-off flood fell on mostly deaf ears. His urgency painted him as crazy.
What have we become deaf to today? Is there a flood coming? Most definitely.
Ellen White writes in Steps to Christ some very powerful words that struck me deeply this morning. I felt impressed to share them:
“Beware of procrastination. Do not put off the work of forsaking your sins and seeking purity of heart through Jesus. Here is where thousands upon thousands have erred to their eternal loss. I will not here dwell upon the shortness and uncertainty of life; but there is a terrible danger- a danger not sufficiently understood- in delaying to yield to the pleading voice of God’s Holy Spirit, in choosing to live in sin; for such this delay really is. Sin, however small it may be esteemed, can be indulged in only at the peril of infinite loss. What we do not overcome, will overcome us and work out our destruction.”
Oh, how blessed we are to know that we are not in this alone, that the forgiveness of our sins is not left up to us. That we may simply come to Christ as we are, right now, in our broken, fractured states, and He will do the rest.
But that is the key, right now? Why do we wait? What are waiting for?
Perhaps there isn’t a voice out there bellowing about an impending flood. Maybe even the fractured state of our broken world isn’t clamoring for your urgency and your attention.
Perhaps its simply the quiet, still, loving knock of a precious Savior urgently pleading for your attention. A prayer. A moment. A breath. A thought.
What if we were the most urgent about our relationships with Jesus? What would life start to look like? I wonder.
Devin Anavitarte is one of the founders of Enspire Productions. He is currently the chaplain at Burton Adventist Academy.