Elevate To The Next Level - "Living Intentionally

Elevating to the Next Level

“Living Intentionally”

Watch on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDsFY6vQAU8

As we are continuing in our series on elevating our discipleship to the next level, I thought it would be beneficial to look at how are to live our lives in this crazy mixed-up world. So far, we’ve looked at in-between and meanwhile living, along living life in the stretch. Today, I’d like to look at intentional living, which is about our need to reassess life, that is, to live our lives intentionally given the fact we only have so many days left to live.

This reality drove King David to live intentionally when he realized that the end of his life was only a single breath away.

He begins by saying, “Show me, O Lord, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” (Psalm 39:4 NIV)

As we begin the process of reassessing our lives, what we’ll find is that those things we considered to be important might not be that important after all. Therefore, to reassess our life, we need to ask, “Are we doing what is most important?”

In other words, why wait for our days to be numbered by someone or something else before we start doing what we should have been doing all along. Living intentionally is about getting our lives rightly focused, because in this life we only go around once.

Life is not cyclical but lineal. There are no mulligans or do-overs once this life ends. Once it’s done, it’s done. Once this life is over, either heaven or hell are in our future.

The Bible says, “It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27 NKJV)

We could think of it this way; right now we’re going 67,000 miles per hour. That’s how fast the earth’s orbit is around the sun. How fast is 67,000 mph? In terms that we can relate to, it’s faster than the spin cycle on a washing machine.

And so, here is our dilemma, what if we had only a couple of spins left; or not even a complete spin; how would we live our lives, and what would we live our lives for? Would we make them count, or waste them?

King David understood how fleeting life really is, which prompted him to ask the Lord how many spins he had left, and then how was he to live his life given that knowledge.

We see this as David continued, saying, “My life is no longer than the width of my hand. An entire lifetime is just a moment to You; human existence is but a breath.” (Psalm 39:5 NLT)

The Apostle James said that life is here one moment and gone the next, that it’s like a puff of vaporized water. Poof, and its gone!

He said, “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.” (James 4:14 NKJV)

To understand David’s thought process and why he was asking, is because early on he lived under a death sentence. King Saul literally put a hit out on David’s life, and as a result David lived his life on the lamb, dodging spears along the way.

Key Point: King David understood how fleeting life really is, which prompted him to ask the Lord how to live his life under a death sentence.

All David knew is that God promised him a kingdom, and that Saul wanted him dead before that kingdom could be realized. Therefore, David asked God to help him know how to live his life under a death sentence.

Knowing that our days are numbered, and that our lives are likewise under a death sentence, we really should begin to reassess our lives, and change how we live, that is, living for God’s glory; instead of living the way we want.

Instead of waiting until we hear the words, “You only have a week, a month, or a year left to live,” we should be seizing the day, seizing the time we have left for what is truly important.

Psalm 90 is a prayer believed to be written by Moses. It says that life is like a whisper, or a sigh, and then it says that the average person will only live 70 to 80 years. With this knowledge, Moses asks God to tell him how to live his life accordingly.

The Psalm was probably written close to the end of Moses’s life, which was toward the end of their wilderness wanderings. What this means is that Moses would have witness and presided over all who died in the wilderness, and we’re talking about a whole lot of people, that is, the whole adult population of Israel, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, and that generation rebelled against God when He first told them to cross the Jordan River.