Today… is the opportunity

It doesn’t take much to inspire me. If you relate, you may detect it’s the fruit of the Holy Spirit that causes us to ascend. It’s what God nurtures within when we devote ourselves to God. What I’m about to say is nothing about some happiness, name-it-claim-it mumbo-jumbo.

The spiritual experience in Christ is about depths unfathomable and imperceptible. We never can gaze into heaven’s courts without having had some direct knowledge and experience dealing with the heat in hell’s kitchen. The deeper we go there with Christ at our side, the higher we go with him in his kingdom.

Today is the opportunity, just as tomorrow is tomorrow’s opportunity, just as yesterday we either took or did not take our opportunities.

God is faithful and just and continues to give us opportunities, and especially where we don’t take them immediately, he gives us second chances. Until our time is up.

None of us know when our time is up, which is why our opportunity awaits just for today.

Today is the opportunity to learn. As human beings we’re geared to learn. It has been set in our nature. It’s the way we are stimulated. Learning brings us to life. Life is the learning ground. When we learn, we grow.

Today is the opportunity to grow. We can grow as much as we want to, knowing that life is a choice to grow or to recede. Plateau is recession, and growth is survival, and those who grow certainly thrive. But God has ordained a pace with which to grow, and that we must accept.

Today is the opportunity to accept. To accept others, to the degree that we honour their lives, in and who they are, in their very being. This is a major undertaking, and certainly much harder than the following task of change, even if it seems easier. The first job we have is to live harmoniously, at peace with everyone, as far as it depends on us, despite how they choose to live, trusting God has their lives in his hand as he has our lives in his hand. It is hard to accept when people do things against us, but it is easier to accept this when it happens, when we understand we cannot change people. They can only change themselves through God’s power. If we have the power to accept things we cannot change, we also have power to change the things we can.

Today is the opportunity to change. Nobody can do the change apart from us. And this presumes that change is about what we need to change; nobody else. We can change no other human being, and we never ought to covet the changing of another human being. That would be manipulation, and there is far too much of that goes on in God’s name. Yet the God imperative in our lives is to go and be God’s disciple, to be holy and set apart for the Jesus purpose alone. We’re called to take responsibility for our lives and our lives alone. Acceptance and change are grand, but the difference between the two is not always easy to discern. Wisdom is in the discernment.

Today is the opportunity to discern. Never more relevant is this opportunity before us; the key to living the wise life. Our affections are constantly being held to ransom, and our biases and vices and prejudices, where we don’t acknowledge and rectify them, will cause us to sin. Every time we align ourselves with anything but God, we ought to be aware of what we’re doing. But be aware of this: be especially careful of aligning yourself with things in the name of God that truly don’t represent God’s interests. We’re pawns. The more we can see the world clawing at our affections, the better chance we have of doing the will of God.

We must discern the will of God before we can do the will of God.

Today is the opportunity to be at peace with the past, to take the present as it is, and to trust God for the future. In this trifold state, we may quickly realise it is a humbling reality to live life truthfully. It will never be easy, but it will perennially be worth it.

Image by Darren Deloach on Unsplash