The Gift -- 2nd Corinthians 5:17 / Matthew 6:34
The Beatles’ “Yesterday”
held the number one position on Billboard’s charts for four straight weeks in
October of 1965. “Tomorrow” helped
propel 1977’s “Annie” to receive Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Musical
Score. Isn’t it interesting that with
the amazing popularity of those two songs, for many of us, a song entitled “Today”
doesn’t readily come to mind? In fact, I
didn’t know there was such a song until a friend told me that John Denver had a
song entitled “Today.” Why haven’t many
of us heard of it? Because it is not
among the forty songs that John Denver had place anywhere on the Billboard
music charts. It was not a popular song.
Why would “Today” not
carry the same power as “Yesterday” or “Tomorrow”? Is it just about differences in musical
style? Not really, John Denver did have
40 other songs on the charts, including four that made it to number one. Or, is
it just because today is not as popular or valued as yesterday and
tomorrow. The truth of the matter is, we
spend so much of our time hung up on yesterday and tomorrow, that we often
dismiss today.
How do we get hung up in yesterday? There are many ways. I’d offer three this morning.
First, we get stuck in
being focused on “the good ol’ days.” We
look at where we are now and long for how things used to be. The trouble with this, is that we focus so
much on our minor difficulty in the present and how we didn’t have that
struggle in the past, that we forget the reality of the past. Consider the Israelites wandering in the
wilderness…though God had provided for them over and over in the wilderness
despite their unfaithfulness and complaining.
They still weren’t satisfied…they went to Moses complaining, ““Was it
because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the
wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this
not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the
Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to
die in the wilderness.””[i]
““If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat
by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into
this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.””[ii] ““Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill
us and our children and livestock with thirst?””[iii].
The Israelites, because they weren’t happy, longed to go back in time,
remembering quenched thirst, full bellies, and evidently freedom from
danger…while forgetting that they were treated so poorly as slaves that they
cried out to God to save them, that those who couldn’t work were beaten half to
death, and that the Pharaoh at one point, had commanded all their children be
killed.
How often are we like the
“back to Egypt committee,” complaining that life was much easier in the
past? Is life complicated now? Yes.
Are there troubles brought on by technology and modern conveniences? Sure.
But the good ol’ days? How many
of you want to go back to the days of no air conditioning? How about walking out to the outhouse on a
cold winter day? There are many ways the
good ol’ days were not always good, but we remained trapped in yesterday,
believing they were. Moses, and those
after him, even to this day continually reminded the people that God had
liberated them and the good ol’ days were not necessarily good.
There are other times
where we only remember the bad things and they affect the present. Something traumatic happens to us and we live
in that trauma in the present anytime something similar may happen. Maybe we had a close friend who stabbed us in
the back, and so we hesitate to make ourselves vulnerable like that again,
keeping a wall up between us and others.
Maybe we lost a job, found ourselves broke, and ended up homeless, and
now we either hold onto money so tight that we not only don’t enjoy life, but
we are unwilling to help others who might be in need, or maybe we tense up and
become afraid when times get tight. Maybe
a something happened to us or someone we cared about and it affects us deeply
now, causing fears and phobias. That was
the case with my grandmother. When I was
about twelve years old, my aunt and uncle and two cousins were at the Outer
Banks. My youngest cousin, who was about
six years old was walking in the edge of the water when the undertow swept his
feet out from under him and swept him out into the Atlantic. My uncle went in after him and had a heart
attack. Both drowned. I don’t remember my grandmother being that
way before, but after that, the thought of herself or a family member being
near a pool, lake, or the ocean terrified my grandmother. She couldn't enjoy the day because she was
stuck living in yesterday.
Maybe it isn’t
Swiss-cheese memories of the good ol’ days or trauma that leaves us stuck in
the past. Maybe it is the decisions we
made in the past that we allow to limit today.
Maybe it was decision to get into drug use…maybe it was the decision to
engage in inappropriate sexual relations…maybe we were financially
irresponsible…maybe we spent years cheating others…maybe we emotionally hurt
someone…maybe we either figuratively or literally took someone’s life. We feel trapped by the past. We feel like we can’t break free from those
decisions we made years ago. We feel
like we are forever marked or tainted.
We feel hopeless and condemned to live in yesterday forever.
To these last two, Paul
says, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has
passed away, see everything has become new!”
My brothers and sisters, when Christ comes into our lives, today no
longer has to be marked by yesterday.
Were we traumatized? Christ comes and in his resurrection we are assured
that nothing, nothing that has happened to us can every separate us from the
love of God. We don’t have to fear what
happened in the past, because we know, that even if it were to happen today, it
has no hold on us. As far as our sins
go, the blood of Christ has cleansed us from them. Every day we surrender our lives to Christ,
we are given a fresh start and the opportunity in the power of God’s Holy
Spirit, to live today in a different direction.
Yesterday has passed away and we never have to feel held by it.
What about those who live
trapped in tomorrow? How do we end up
trapped in tomorrow?
Sometimes our plans leave
us trapped in tomorrow, unable to enjoy today.
We deny ourselves the opportunity to enjoy today because an opportunity
doesn’t fit in with the plans we have for our future. Maybe our plans are to become a successful
businessperson and be able to retire by age 50, so we spend night and day
working toward that goal—making business connections, but not deep abiding
friendships; not taking time to date or get married; putting off starting a
family because children would slow down the plan. Maybe we have a family already, and we are
determined to provide a secure and easy future for our wife or children, yet as
we spend all that time working, we miss their awards assemblies in school or
their first ballgame or their chorus concert.
We are trapped in tomorrow.
Jesus told a story about
a farmer trapped in tomorrow: ““The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do,
for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I
will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my
grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods
laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him,
‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things
you have prepared, whose will they be?’”[iv].
The author of Proverbs puts it this way, “The human mind may devise many plans,
but it is the purpose of the Lord that will be established.”[v]
James, brother of Jesus, puts it this way, “Yet you do not even know what
tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a
little while and then vanishes.”[vi]
We also end up trapped in
tomorrow when we live in a constant state of “What if’s”. Similar to living trapped in the past because
of trauma—this is a life of being trapped because of we worry about what might
happen in the future. We refuse to take
chance on a relationship because “what if” we get rejected. We refuse to be generous because “what if” we
lose our job tomorrow or our investments fail.
We refuse to commit to serving on a mission project or in a ministry
activity because “what if” something else we’d rather do comes along.
Jesus talks about those
whose “what if” worries caused them to worry about having clothes to wear or
food to eat in the future if they committed themselves to following God
today. He said, “So do not worry about
tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough
for today.” Jesus is saying, focus on
today, don’t get trapped in the future worrying about what might happen.
A friend at Biscuitville, Arthur, shared with me a quote that we tracked down variations of with Kung Fu Panda,
Joan Rivers, and Eleanor Roosevelt among others, that kind of sums up what
Moses, Paul, Solomon, James, and Jesus say in all of this: “Yesterday is
history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God’s gift, that’s why we call it the
present.”
My friends, let’s not yearn
for yesterday or tomorrow…let’s not be trapped by the past or threatened by the
future…let us enjoy God’s gift of today…living fully for Him without limitation
right here and right now in the present!
In the Name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!
Amen.
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