The act of booting up my console is usually a happy one… I hear the familiar sounds of it lurching to life, see the intro screen load, and after selecting my profile from the menu I am ready to jump into a game and have some fun. But nothing can bring that joyous feeling crashing down to earth faster than seeing that familiar but dreaded icon show up on my Xbox landing page… “Game Pass Titles Leaving Soon”. I don’t even want to look, but I do it anyways because it is possible that the very game I was looking forward to playing might be on it’s way out of the “Game Pass” program. I scan the titles that are being removed from the service and I am almost home free when I see a game listed that stops me in my tracks… it isn’t the game I was planning on playing today, which is a relief. But it IS a game that I had planned on playing and had even installed onto my hard drive in the hopes of playing it next… and now I realize that I have run out of time. It will be removed in a few short days, and because I took it for granted that I could play it anytime I wanted, I missed out on my chance to enjoy it as a benefit of my Xbox Game Pass membership. The easy accessibility of selecting and downloading games to play from the Game Pass service can often make me forget that they aren’t all going to be here forever… and because I am busy doing a great many other things in my life, it is easy to push them to the back burner until it is too late to enjoy them at all.

My experiences in the real world play out much the same as my Xbox Game Pass predicament… with the sheer volume of things to do, places to go, projects to complete, and pursuits to enjoy, I find myself continually adding things to my “wish list” in life even though the reality is that with each passing day I have one less day of life left to complete them. And with the sands of time slowly but surely passing from one side of my hourglass to the other, what I choose to prioritize has a direct correlation with the things that I allow to remain incomplete or perhaps not even started… and that means these decisions on what I will permit to remain undone are both critically important and potentially final.

If I am being honest, the “business” of simply living life can easily get me so caught up with being “busy” that I neglect some of the things I claim are most important to me… specifically the missions I feel the Lord placing on my heart to do. And if I am being BRUTALLY honest, the reason why many of these things remain incomplete, undone, or never even started is because I feel they will always be there for me to take care of them later. Like a Game Pass title that I was given access to, these things that I fully desire to do in my life are sitting right there on my dashboard just waiting for me to press start… but I tend to take my access to them for granted, believing I can start them at any time and it would be just fine. This isn’t mere procrastination on my part… it is something far worse. It is PRESUMPTION. It is the foolish act of me presuming that the Lord has given my an infinite amount of time to perform what He has given me to do… and the book of James has much to say on the dangers of putting off until tomorrow what the Lord has guided us to do today. The secret is in the last verse of the chapter…

James 4:13-17 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.

James starts out with reminding us that our lives are little more than a vapor… an exceptionally short period of time with a limited but invisible amount of “tomorrows” available to us. Because our “tomorrow” isn’t guaranteed, we should be mindful of the expectations we place on it… and more intentional with what we decide to do with “today”. And as James concludes his thoughts on what we choose to do today and what we think we have time to do tomorrow, he makes a startling connection with the phrase, “Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.” Full mic drop. If we know that the Lord has guided us to do something for Him today and we arrogantly presume that we will have an endless supply of tomorrow’s to do it, this is not simply a bad idea on our part or even misplaced faith. James bluntly calls it a sin… because believing we can decide to do the Father’s will at a time and place of our choosing is still ultimately an act of disobedience.

We all have a limited amount of time on this planet (Job 4:5, Hebrews 9:27), and that means we must be about our Father’s business as our top priority (Luke 2:49). We don’t know what tomorrow holds, or how many of them we have left… and we don’t know what options will be taken off of the board that we thought we had plenty of time left to do. Knowledge of our exceptionally temporary dwelling on this planet shouldn’t cause us to be fearful or anxious (Matthew 6:31-33), but it should act as a catalyst to do what we know we cannot afford to leave undone. These opportunities will not be here forever, and if He has placed the burden of doing something for His kingdom in our hearts, we cannot afford to let that slip through our fingers because we are too busy carrying items of lesser importance.

Time is a gift to be handled with care… it is the ultimate non-renewable resource. The Lord has granted us both the gift of time on this planet as well as a mission to complete with that gift… and He expects us to be good stewards of both (Matthew 25:14-30). He gave us enough time to do the work that needs to be done… but He didn’t give us enough time to waste any of it. Let’s not wait until we see that “Leaving Soon” sign on the dashboard of our life to finally get around to doing what He placed us here to do… let’s take the first steps on the journey and start on that mission today.

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