Sunday Sermon … What Would You Do if You only had One Month to Live?
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People who come to the end of their life often do the important things and leave other things undone. Tim McGraw has a song called “Live Like You’re Dying” that depicts a man living his last days. Part of the lyrics are “And I loved deeper, And I spoke sweeter, And I gave forgiveness I’ve been denying.”
What would you do if you only had one month to live?
Four principles from the life of Jesus. He knew when He would die. How did He live?
- Live Passionately
- Love Completely
- Learn Humbly
- Leave Boldly
We’ll be looking at one of these each of the next four weeks, but today is the introduction.
Psalm 139:16 – God has already determined how many days you will live. … The problem is that we don’t know how many days we’re going to live. … In France, André-François Raffray made a deal with Jeanne Calment. Raffray agreed to pay Calment about $500 a month until she died in exchange for her apartment when she died. He payed a total of $180,000 before he died. Calment outlived the person who was looking forward to living in here apartment after she died. She lived to be 122. … We don’t know how long we’ll live. … In the assassination attempt on President Reagen in 1981, Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady was shot. Frank Reynolds announced that Brady had died. Brady, although in critical condition, was alive. Two years later, Frank Reynolds died and James Brady is still alive today.
Let’s look at two prayers in the Psalms.
Psalm 39:4-8 – David prayed, “Show me my life’s end and the number of my days.” What does this mean? … David is asking God to remind him how brief his life is. … The span of our lives is nothing compared to God, like a breath on a cold day. … the busyness of our lives is on vain. We build up wealth that we don’t know who will get it. it will be someone else’s when we die. … Our hope is in God. … We don’t need to sin with the way we use our time. There is no need for us to be foolish.
Psalm 90:1-12 – Gos is eternal. … Man’s life is brief. … Moses prayed, “Teach us to number our days aright.” What does this mean? … Moses is also asking God, “teach us to realize that life is brief so we can gain a heart of wisdom.” … Maybe this also means, we should live in the present, not the future and not the past. … We should do the important things, not all the little dated things on the calendar.
Here’s a story about the devil: The devil asked three young demons what their strategy was to decieve humans. The first on said, “I’ll tell them there is no God.” Satan shook his head and said, “they know there’s a God.” The second one said, I’ll them there is no Hell.” The devil replied, “deep in their hearts they know there is justice, consequences;they know there’s a Hell.” The third demon said, “I’ll them there is no hurry.” Satan grinned; he said, “go. You’ll destroy them by them the thousands.”
Thank you for this post, the last line is very striking, because this is where the church has been deceived in a very big way, we have lost the earnestness of the second coming of Christ, we are not as conscious of Christ’s imminent return as the early church were, we think in ourselves we have a lot of time to work, but we must re-evaluate the times we are living in.