Mowing Lawns

For a while, I lived in Indiana, and the last year I was there, I oversaw the maintenance in our apartment complex. I took care of the simple jobs such as shoveling snow, fixing minor household repairs, and mowing lawns. (The grass grew unbelievably fast!)

I was no sooner done with the mowing before I had to go back to where I started and do it again

The Christian life is not much different than that. You hear Sam Gipp talk about reading ten pages of Bible a day, and you dedicate yourself to Bible reading.

Then you hear Tom Williams preaching on prayer and realize you need to be more of a prayer warrior.  You decide that you need not only a prayer time but a prayer life, so you begin focusing your attention on prayer.

Then we have a spring or fall program and an emphasis on soul winning. Soon, you realize you need to build a Sunday school class or a bus route, and you begin working more in the ministry.

Then the pastor has a family conference or a couples’ retreat and you realize how much you need to work on your marriage or your family.

Soon you feel overwhelmed.  

That is the Christian life. Consistently, steadily going from one important thing to another important thing. The danger is when we think prayer is important and neglect soul winning, or we think Bible study is important and we neglect prayer.

All those things are important.

The Christian life is like going from one lawn to the next, mowing each one at the appropriate time, knowing that we will need to keep that circle going the rest of our Christian life if we are to be victorious.

I was told that the Golden Gate Bridge was always being painted. The people who do it (or did it at the time that I heard the story), started at one end and work their way slowly across the bridge and by the time they got to the other end they had to start over, never finishing the job.

Finishing the job is not the issue; doing the job is the issue!   Some jobs never end. My responsibilities as a husband will never end until one of us goes to Heaven. My responsibilities as a Christian will never end until I see Jesus face-to-face.

Let us enjoy living for God. Let us schedule when to pray and when to go soul winning. Plan when to read the Bible. All the while, know that we are doing the right thing at the right moment.

We are not to say one thing is more important than another. At each moment of the day, there is one thing that is most important. If it is my time of prayer, then prayer is more important than playing with my grandchildren.

If it is time to go soul winning, then that is what is most important. I am not to be distracted from that most important thing at that moment by counseling, getting the car washed, or any other thing. Do not think you are a failure if you wrestle with this, for most people do.  The key is knowing what you are supposed to do at a given moment and doing it, and that it is a constant, never-ending cycle.

Remind yourself that there are many good things that are important; schedule each one with purpose.

I watched a young couple looking over their phones at football games being played the following week, they were planning their week around the football games they wanted to watch.  That makes complete sense to me and I have no problem with it, as long as they planned time for prayer, and planned time for Bible, and planned time for soul winning and ministry as diligently as they did planning time for football.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time…”

 That’s the key – what time is it, and what are you supposed to be doing at that time?

Pastor