The Saturday before last, my wife took me to a Braves game for my birthday. She knows nothing about baseball except that Atlanta is close to Clemson, the Braves play in Atlanta, and Atlanta has good shopping and the CNN center. It was a beautiful night, not too hot, not too cold and we had decent seats. And I immediately started to complain that we had paid too much for parking, hot dogs, a "collector's cup" of soda, and about how I should be writing my dissertation, and about the "job market." As Dennis talked about Sunday morning, I was murmuring.
She rightfully got a little upset and said, "Can't you just enjoy the moment? Can't you see how lucky you really are?" Fortunately for our domestic tranquility, I shut up, started to appreciate the wonderful night, the beautiful game, and even though the Braves were shut out I was happy. I even calmly answered all of her questions.
This got me to thinking about something that C.S. Lewis discusses in The Screwtape Letters. I am paraphrasing (and I couldn't find my copy to verify), but he talks about how the devil wants people to live in the future and the past, anywhere but in the present. This is not to say that we can't plan for the future or learn from the past, but Satan wants us to concentrate and focus on anything but the present and the opportunities we have right in front of us.
The devil wants us to always be looking to the future for something better, something different, some thing that feels better. This obsession with the future is an underlying premise behind evolution, communism, fascism, premillennialism, procrastination…. (What is the ultimate end of evolution?) The devil wants us to dream about tomorrow, wants us to dream about some unknown, wants us to be worrying about finishing dissertations instead of enjoying the baseball game right in front of us. The devil wants us to take our sights off God and righteousness in favor of some future promise, some future Messiah. This "longing for something different" and the destruction it brings is a central theme of the Old and New Testaments. For example, Paul discusses this in Thessalonians with in his warnings against idleness.
In similar ways, the devil wants us to live in the past. Because much of the past is sin or as one songwriter put it "that jealously, that bitterness, that ridicule." It is our old self. It is historical precedent. It is also an underlying premise of evolution and communism. (What is the "missing" link?) The past is my complaining, and my worry about how much I spent on parking and hot dogs and things I should have done for my dissertation. It is the lack of forgiveness that we some times cling to, and the vengefulness that it can bring out of us. It is those things that we must repent of. (In economics, we call these sunk costs.)
But Christ died for our sins, for our past, and He gave us the greatest hope in heaven. A hope that once we walk with Him that nullifies any worry about the future. A Christian's future is heaven and Christ lived and died, so we could be forgiven of our past and so we could have a true and un-worrisome hope for the future. He died, so we could live.
Walking with Christ gives you the peace of the present, the joy of being able to live in and for the moment. If you haven't given your life to Christ, if you have any need, please come forward as we sing.
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