Don’t Waste Your Life
What is your life about?
We live in a world that encourages us to pursue our own goals, our own comforts, and our own preferences.
We can make our church attendance fit around our schedule, or our church membership about our personal preferences, rather than the body as a whole. We can make our lives about pursuing the American dream, a bigger house, a higher salary, or perfect family rhythms.
What is your life really about? What would a stranger think, if they saw how you lived, saw how you spent your time and your money? If they heard your interior monologue, what would they guess your life is about?
We are not kings of our own kingdoms, gathering more and more wheat into bigger and bigger barns, we are ambassadors for Christ’s coming kingdom.
This means we may need to give up some of our preferences, comforts, and desires.
We may need to sell our beautiful homes, leave our beloved friends and family, and move to join church plants.
We may need to change the way we spend our time, giving up some hobbies to free up time and resources for us to be shaped and spent for the sake of the kingdom.
We may need to sacrifice some of the wonderful gifts that God gives us to obey God in the Great Commission.
“One life will soon be passed, only what is done for Christ will last.”
Cities Church, don’t waste your life. All of our lives will one day end. What will your life have been about?
Prayer of Confession
Heavenly Father, we confess our self-centeredness. We confess how we sought to build our own kingdoms. We confess how we prioritize our comfort over the spreading of the Gospel. We surrender all the lesser things that have tied us down from following after you with complete abandon.
We come to you desperate for you to fill us with such a passion for the spread of the Gospel that we will be willing to forsake our comforts, our desires, and our preferences for the sake that your name would be lifted high for all to see, and that many would be drawn by our heart felt appeals for repentance and faith.
May our only fear be of wasting our lives for anything less than the glory of your most holy name.
Thank you for the blessed gifts we have received from you. Help us to delight in you the giver of good gifts. Forgive us for how we have drunk from shallow wells that deplete rather than satisfy, and that drains our passion for you.
You have created a path for us to walk in, and have commanded us to follow you, so give us the grace to obey. Help us to live for you and you alone, to surrender all earthly loves, to love you as our magnificent obsession, to obey your commands and to sacrifice our time, our evenings, our money, our energy, our careers, our homes, our comfort, for the sake of making much of you and to go boldly to make disciples. Set our hearts a flame with the holy passion for Christ, where we will count all things as loss for the sake of Christ!
We confess these sins and others to you now in this moment of silent confession…