Life’s Too Short To. . .Play It Safe, prt. 1
Life’s Too Short To, prt. 1
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
4/3/05
[video clip – “carpe diem” from Dead Poets Society]
It seems kind of depressing, but I’m convinced that the only way we can get our lives into proper perspective is to realize they won’t last long. I believe this is key to living the kind of lives we are meant to live – that without this understanding, we will squander our time, waste the moments we have been given, allow precious opportunities to slip through our fingers.
Psalms 90:12 (NIV)
12 Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Teach us to “number our days,” – make us aware of how fragile, how brief, and therefore how precious our lives are. And this is the key, this is the necessary condition for us living wisely. In the NLT, this same passage reads:
Psalms 90:12 (NLT)
12 Teach us to make the most of our time, so that we may grow in wisdom.
Numbering our days means making the most of our time. As depressing as it sounds, I believe this is where we must begin if we are to live life properly. Show me a person who thinks he has unlimited time and I’ll show you a person whose life isn’t coming to much.
I can prove it to you. Just watch Groundhog Day. When it appears that Bill Murray is literally going to have the same day over and over and over again, what does he invest his time doing? Everything, right? He becomes an expert at playing the piano, is able to time every single event of that day to the exact second, learns the likes and dislikes of every single individual he meets – but what is the end result for him? Depression, right? A nagging realization that no matter what he does, it doesn’t mean anything. There is no urgency, indeed no real point to any of his incredible accomplishments, because he’s just trying to stay busy passing infinite time. In fact toward the end, he uses all of his time trying to find a way to end his life – in other words, to bring time to an end for himself – because there’s simply no point to his life.
Teach us to number our days, or make the most of our time. The Apostle Paul echoes the sentiment found in the Psalm in Ephesians 5 where he writes:
Ephesians 5:15-17 (NIV)
15 Be very careful, then, how you live--not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.
In other words, Paul says that to live wisely is to number your days – to make the most of the time you have.
One of the supreme questions of life is: “How are we to live in light of the fact that our days are numbered?” Today we’re going to start a seven-week series called “Life’s Too Short To…” and we’re going to examine seven different issues in light of the fact that we have limited time on this earth, that our days are numbered. In this series we’ll look at how Life’s Too Short to: play it safe (today); carry a grudge; work all the time; live in the past; worry about the future; follow the crowd; and go it alone.
Folks, life’s too short to play it safe. We have two natures. We have a physical nature – a body, which seeks to preserve itself at all costs. Our bodies desire stability and safety. We fear sickness and disease and death because they are bad for our bodies, for our physical nature. But we also have a spiritual nature. And I believe that our spiritual nature craves and needs something very different. Now before I go any further, the question I have for you is: are you a spiritual being in a physical body, or are you a physical body that just happens to have a spiritual nature? The answer to that question is important. If you are a physical being that just happens to have a spiritual nature, then your spirit should be serving your body. If you are a physical being first and foremost, then preservation of your body – the priorities of the physical world like security and stability and safety – should be and will be the highest priorities in your life.
So is that what you are? Are you just a big lump of tissue, somehow organized in such a way that you happen to be aware of yourself, unlike dogs and cats and squirrels? Are you just kind of out there doing the equivalent of gathering nuts – slaving away to build your little Kingdom, protecting and preserving the things that bring your physical body a sense of security? If you are a physical being that just somehow happens to have a spiritual nature, then you don’t need to worry too much about things like sin, like taking risks, like the pursuit of personal growth – your spirit can just kind of be there to bring you moments of inspiration when you watch your kids play; to help you feel that maybe there’s some kind of meaning to your life. Your spirit can serve your physical body.
But what if that’s not all you are? What if you are not a physical body that just happens to have a spiritual nature, what if you are primarily a spiritual being that just happens to live in a physical body? What would that mean for you? What impact would that have on the way you make decisions, on your willingness to take risks?
The Christian message is that you are first and foremost a spiritual being that just happens to live in a physical body. In fact, even your living in a physical body is not a coincidence. Some religious groups have splintered off from the church and begun teaching that the desires of the physical body – desires for food, sleep, water, and especially sex – are evil, because they say body and spirit are opposites. Buddhism and Hindu look down on the body, and see the physical body as nothing but a hindrance to reaching God.
But Christians have this unique, amazing event called Christmas – where God slipped into a physical body and came to earth to hang out with the rest of us physical folk. In doing this, Jesus glorified the human body. In doing this Jesus showed that the body can be consecrated, devoted wholly to God, used for noble and holy purposes – that the desires of our bodies can be brought into the service of our spiritual natures.
God created your body. God created us as spiritual beings who live in these physical bodies. But because of sin, because creation has moved away from God’s design for it, our bodies – along with everything else in creation – have suffered corruption. In Genesis we see the account of how not just the spirits of Adam and Eve suffered when they sinned against God, but how the entire created order changed – came under a curse – at that moment:
Genesis 3:17-19 (NLT)
17 And to Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit I told you not to eat, I have placed a curse on the ground. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.
18 It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains.
19 All your life you will sweat to produce food, until your dying day. Then you will return to the ground from which you came. For you were made from dust, and to the dust you will return."
After they sinned, Adam and Eve found themselves at war with one another, at odds with God, and their spiritual and physical natures suddenly divided from one another.
The natural order of things has been corrupted so that often we find our spirits are in service to our bodies. Our bodies seek the immediate satisfaction of every desire, and our minds and spirits seek to justify what our bodies want. Our bodies seek to avoid the pain of discipline, of guidance, and our spirits and minds come up with theories and reasons why we should not have to pursue discipline or seek guidance.
If you believe, as I do, that you are a spiritual being in a physical body, that will have drastic implications for the way you choose to live. What furthers the interests of the body often does not further the interests of the spirit. As we looked at two series ago, the body often does not really want to pray – the body wants to keep moving, to stay busy, to entertain itself with constant distractions – but the spirit needs prayer. If you are a spiritual being in a physical body, then you must seek to bring your body into the service of your spirit, placing the priorities of spirit above the priorities of body. This does not mean you reject your body, believe your body is evil, or come to believe that every time you have a desire you must ignore it, eliminate it, or pray it away. It simply means that we come to understand that as spiritual beings, the priorities of spirit must always come before the priorities of body.
Once we come to that place where we accept and believe that we are primarily spiritual beings who are physically located (for the time being) in material bodies, the great challenge of our journey is learning to live in a way that places spirit before body. That’s our main focus today – how the urge to play it safe all the time is a self-preservation instinct that springs largely from our bodies. Again this instinct is not entirely bad and there are many times we must listen to it, but our problem is that many of us get to the place where we listen to this self-preservation instinct that arises from our bodies at the expense of listening to the voice of the spirit – that part of us that is not nearly as concerned with what is safe, what is comfortable and convenient, even sometimes with what might seem rational.
I mentioned before that the physical part of us serves the primary objectives of safety, comfort, and convenience – it is about ease and the fulfillment of every physical desire. But the spiritual part of us has very different priorities. I think that part of our nature that is spiritual (what I believe is the most important part of who we are) has four basic needs:
1. To live passionately, in other words to FEEL something.
2. To live prudently, in other words to have a code or standard that brings guidance.
3. To live permanently, in other words, to make an impact on this world that will outlast our physical bodies.
4. To live purposefully, in other words to believe there is a reason for one’s existence and to find that reason and live according to it.
Just like a few weeks ago I told you I believe all human beings are on a search for acceptance, security, and significance, so I believe that the spiritual part of our nature craves passion, prudence, permanence, and purpose. The reason for this is clear. Why does your body crave food? Your body craves food because food contains the building blocks of what makes your body what it is. Your body craves the things that will make it more of a body – whether that be more muscles, more fat, more bone, more hair, or whatever. It is not a coincidence that your body craves food. Your body’s craving for food is a reflection of what your body IS. Your body’s craving for sex is a reflection of where your body came from. Food, water, shelter, sex, all of these desires you have in your body are not a coincidence, they are directly connected to the things that make your body what it is.
The same is true with passion, prudence, permanence, and purpose. Your spirit craves passion because it was created with passion. It craves prudence because it was created by a Being who because of HIS nature defines what wisdom, what proper limits, are for us. Your spirit pushes you in this world to do things that make a lasting impact for what reason? Because your spirit is permanent – it will never die – it really WILL last forever. And your spirit needs a sense of purpose why? Because you were CREATED for a purpose and part of you knows it.
Now earlier I said that your spirit and your body have different priorities. And they do. Your spirit craves passion, prudence, permanence, and purpose, whereas your body craves comfort – what feels good; convenience – what comes easily; and above all – cost-less-ness, in other words, to never have to pay a price for anything, if that price is paid in the currency of convenience or comfort.
You know what I’m saying is true because that struggle between your spirit and your body plays out in your life all the time. This morning we will look at our need for passion and the struggle we have to reject playing it safe and pursue passion, and then we’ll deal with the remaining three next week.
“Carpe Diem.” Seize the day. Make the most of every opportunity. Seize – the day. Notice the phrase is not “with utmost care and caution, after you have worked out the cost/benefit analysis and determined that there is no logical reason why all systems should not be go, and have assured yourself that the risk is zero, or as close to zero as is theoretically possible, slowly and timidly reach for the day, keeping eyes peeled at every moment for other factors which would render that decision less logical than previously expected and mitigate a sudden and calculated pull-back from the day-seizing operation.”
SEIZE the day. Take the day by force. Grab a hold of it and wrench something out of it. And it’s not TAKE the most of every opportunity, it’s MAKE the most of every opportunity (creativity, energy, and effort) realizing your time on this earth is limited, and passing quickly, and will soon be gone. Make something happen. Carpe diem. There’s something in our spirits that cries out for this – something deep inside that wants to FEEL something – that wants to know the passion that comes from SEIZING the moments of our lives – from proactively going after them with everything we have.
Yet at every step our bodies stand in the shadows and say, “That’s a bad idea, you know. If you do that, you don’t know what will happen. Things could really go south on this one. Someone might laugh. Someone might dismiss you. You might run out of money. You have responsibilities you know. Be an adult. Play it safe.
And we are paralyzed with fear, and we cower, and we shrink back, and too many times we fail to seize the day because as much as we want to let go and just FEEL something – be exhilarated by a challenge – we cave in to fear, to the needs of our bodies to always be comfortable. To paraphrase John Ortberg, we allow the yes of faith to be trumped by the no of fear. We want to not only have dreams, and not only make wishes, we want to spend our lives in pursuit of those dreams, and make them happen. But because of fear, because of our bodies that don’t ever want a cost to be involved in terms of comfort and convenience, we wait – we say we’re waiting for a better time and sometimes we believe it. But whatever God has out there for us – joining a small group, serving in a ministry, even committing our lives to Him and letting Him be our forgiver and leader – requires a spiritual step and get this folks: Every spiritual step will always, always, always come at the cost of a little bit of your sense of stability, security, and certainty, and that will be a bit uncomfortable and inconvenient. Do you need to join a small group? You can’t be sure it’ll work out. Do you need to step across the line and commit your life to Christ? You can’t know exactly what that’s going to mean, or what it will require of you. Do you need to get involved in serving in a ministry at Wildwind? You can’t be sure you’ll find the right place for you right away. Whatever God has out there for you will require a spiritual step, and spiritual steps always, always, always come at the cost of a little bit of your sense of stability, security, and certainty. If waiting for that better time means waiting until you can take that step without paying the price, you will never see God’s dream for you become a reality in your life.
And here’s where things get ugly. Your spirit needs to be passionate – to step out and take risks and live the adventure – so badly, that if you don’t step up and take the risks you need to take, and stop playing it safe, your body will begin to take risks of its own. Your need to feel something will come out one way or another. Through an adulterous relationship, an addiction to substances or pornography or soap operas or gambling, even a self-destructive risk-taking tendency, or a sink into self-centered depression. You cannot suppress this need because your spirit will make itself heard. Your body will scream NO to the passion of your spirit and insist on expressing that need in its own way, and that will always end up a dead-end. You are made to live with passion, and for your spirit, surrendered to God and led by Him, to direct you to pursue God and His plans for you with passion:
Psalms 84:2 (NLT)
2 I long, yes, I faint with longing to enter the courts of the LORD. With my whole being, body and soul, I will shout joyfully to the living God.
I decided after writing this message and covering all four items – passion, prudence, permanence, and purpose – that I would do you a huge favor and break them up into two messages. We will discuss prudence, permanence, and purpose next week, and the way the need of our bodies to play it safe can keep us from pursuing these deep spiritual needs in appropriate ways – in fact, can cause us ultimately to self-destruct or miss God’s adventure for our lives.
Folks life is short. We need to realize how short life is because that is where we can find the perspective we need to quit playing it safe – to live the adventure God has for us that will frequently call us beyond the narrow confines of our bodys’ needs for comfort, convenience, and cost-less-ness.
Where have you avoided risk in your life recently because you were giving in to comfort or convenience, or because you didn’t want to pay a price to take the next step? Are you primarily a physical being that just happens to have a spiritual side, or are you first and foremost a spiritual being who lives in a physical body? If you believe it’s the second one – if you are a primarily spiritual being – are you prepared to live in a such a way as to bring your body into submission to the needs of your spirit? Or will you be content to live your life feeding the endless needs of your body for comfort, for convenience, and for cost-less-ness? Will you force your body beyond those limits when you have to, in order to pursue passion, to live the adventure God has for you, even when it calls you out past what’s comfortable, secure, stable, and convenient? In what area of your life do you need to stop playing it safe? Carpe Diem.
