Today Is the Day!

Today is the day—the only day we have.  We think we have tomorrow and many more tomorrows after that, but we have today.  That’s it!  We hope for tomorrow, most of us wisely plan for tomorrow, but we live today—today only. 

I almost didn’t write the above; and even after I wrote it, I considered deleting it.  It sounds a bit too much like the preaching with which I grew up.  My memory may be faulty at this point.  It may be that I’ve allowed a few Sunday sermons to fill a larger time-frame.  Whichever may be true, the preachers I heard as a childhood and adolescence spent a lot of time urging their hearers to respond to the gospel TODAY.  Every revival preacher of the day had at least one good story about the lost person who was in church one night, was under conviction, but refused to respond, and died in a car wreck on the way home—still lost—burning in hell.  After a dramatic pause, we would be reminded that TODAY IS THE ONLY DAY YOU HAVE.

Over time, those stories lost their punch.  My teenage friends and I became capable of anticipating when the story would be told.  Now that I am older, I wonder how many of those stories were true.  Perhaps there was just one story that passed from preacher to preacher with the names and details being altered to fit a particular audience. 

Yet today is the day—the only day we have.  It is the only day we have to live.  It is the only day we have in which we get to decide what we will do with this Jesus that the Christian faith holds before us.  What we decide and do with Jesus today matters.

It matters for today.  Declaring today that Jesus is both Christ and lord and submitting our wills and way to him changes how we live today.  Doing so assures us that no matter how the day ends and no matter what the outcomes of the day may be, the day will have been a better day than it would have been otherwise.

Should we have a tomorrow, it matters because today’s choices and actions will shape tomorrow. 

It matters because there will be a tomorrow.  One of those tomorrows will find us having stepped across the chasm of death.  Scripture seems to be clear that how we live our todays has implications for how we live the tomorrows that lie across death’s chasm.

Today is the day—the only day we have.  So, who do you say Jesus is?  It’s the question of questions.