Monday, April 13, 2009

What would you do if you knew you had one month to live?

That is the question the people of First Baptist Church Denton are asking themselves every day for the next 30 days. If some how you knew that you only had one month to live how would you live your life? It's a very clarifying question and a question that most of us cannot answer on the spur of the moment. It takes some time to think through it and really come up with an answer that reflects how we feel and what is most important to us.

Unfortunately most people don't get that one month "warning" before they die. Instead death comes unexpectedly or suddenly to most. However the reason we are asking that question every day for 30 days is not because we expect to be dead in one month, quite the opposite we expect to live many more years on this earth. The reason we ask that question is we want to be "fully alive" for however many more days God gives us here on this earth.

If you think about it we don't really get to choose many things. We didn't get to choose who our parents are, we didn't' get to choose when we were born or where we were born. We certainly don't get to choose when we die. Most tombstones have two dates and a dash. The date of the person's birth and the date of their death, the dash in between represents the time they were alive here on this earth. The one thing we do have a say in is what we do with our dash. We get to decide how we will spend the time we have here on this earth. We can choose to waste our dash or we can choose to live it with passion and purpose. That is why we are asking that question for 30 days. Because if we begin to live like we were dying then we will really learn how to live.

If you knew you only had one month to live I bet you would want to spend time with family and friends. You would probably want to restore any relationships that were not what you wanted them to be. If you are a believer in Christ you would probably want to tell some of your closest friends how they can know Him as well. If you had one month to live you would probably want to do those things and more. So the question we need to answer is this: why don't we go ahead and do those things now? Why don't we live our lives like we only had one month left to live.

That's what we are going to be exploring for the next six weeks or so at First Baptist Church Denton. Go to www.fbcd.net to find out more about the One Month to Live challenge and how you can get involved and how you can begin to live life to the fullest with no regrets!