Are You Really Ready

Are You Really Ready?

Eccl 9:11-12 Matthew 25:1-13 Text Matthew 25:1-13

Sometimes in life we live for the deadline, and don’t take advantage of the present time. How many of you have had teachers who told you this assignment is due in three weeks so start working on it now? You spent the first week saying, ’I still have two weeks to get it done’. You spent the second week saying, "next week, I’m really going to get started." You then spent the day before the assignment due working at lightning speed to get it done, complaining the teacher gave you too much work to do.

There is a danger in living for the deadline. The danger is, we don’t know what is going to happen in our lives between now and the deadline. We deceive ourselves into thinking we are smarter than we truly are. We want to think we can control the future, but we can’t. One day a fish is swimming along in the ocean just minding his own business, when out of nowhere a net comes up and before long he’s being served at Red Lobster. The bible teaches us the same thing can happen in our lives.

One day we’re walking along with Jesus and enjoying it and we assume it will be like this forever, so we let our guard down. In our cruising instead of growing in the Lord, we make a few bad decisions on our parts and we’re trying cocaine just to see what if feels like. or we’ve gotten pregnant or gotten somebody pregnant in a relationship which is going nowhere or we’ve become addicted to something else in our lives and we can’t break free of it. We were not ready when the deadline or moment of decision came, and the result being we yeilded to things we should have resisted.

Jesus told us he was going away to heaven to take care of some business. He said in the meantime, I’ve got a job for you to do. I want you to tell everybody you can about me, I want you to make disciples of them and teach them my commandments. I also want you to start living a holy life. Use what I give to you to get the job done and be ready to give an account to me when I get back. Now I want you to watch until I come so you can be prepared.

Now many people in the church have completely misunderstood what Jesus meant when He said watch. When you were a kid, did your mother ever leave on a Saturday and tell you, "I want this house completely cleaned when I get back." You intended to clean the house, but there was something you wanted to watch or some game you wanted to play, or somebody you wanted to talk to on the phone, so you did those things instead.

But every now and then, you’d look out the window to see if she was coming up the street. The moment you got news she was coming you got busy and cleaned, but your final result showed, you hadn’t been cleaning too long. You can’t do the amount of cleaning in 5 minutes which should have taken a few hours to get done. Now you were watching for your mother, but that’s not the kind of watching Jesus was talking about.

Jesus used the term watch to mean pay careful attention to how you’re cleaning each room of the house. Watch it, don’t sweep the dirt under the rug. Watch, Don’t let anything distract you from getting the house in order. Watch, Keep in mind your mother is coming and she has a certain standard she’s expecting to find when she opens the door. So to watch means to literally take action now, so you won’t be caught when your job left undone.

When your mother comes through the door you’re going to want to be prepared. You ought to want to see the delight on her face from you job well done. You ought to feel proud inside with a yes, I got the job done. Or else you ought to fear her anger and disappointment at your disobedience.

I can tell you now, your mother is not going to be happy with the fact, you did a little of something in each room, but didn’t clean any room well. Nor is she going to be thrilled to know you were intending to get around to it. She’s not going to be snowed by you telling her how much you love her the moment she hits the door, if you didn’t do the work. The bottom line is, were you really ready when she came home.

When we think of meeting Jesus, do we see it as a lifetime walk or a deadline to meet. If its a lifetime walk, we’re watching for Jesus to return by gettin our live in order now.. If we see Jesse’s return as simply a deadline, we’re going to try to wait to the last possible moment to get ready to meet him. But my friends there are no one day cramming sessions to get enough Jesus in us to make us mature believers in Christ. We can not do spiritually in one week what the Lord has been calling us to become for years .There is no single event we can be a part of which will transform us from a worldly Christian to mature believers. Are we really ready to have Jesus come back?