Too Busy

 St. Luke tells us that someone sitting at a meal with Jesus said, “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.”

But the Lord’s response gave me reason to pause:

“A man was giving a big dinner, and he invited many; and at the dinner hour he sent his slave to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, because everything is ready now.’ And yet they all alike began to make excuses.

“The first one said to him, ‘I purchased a field and I need to go out to look at it; please consider me excused.’ And another one said, ‘I bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please consider me excused.’

And another one said, ‘I took a woman as my wife, and for that reason I cannot come.’ And the slave came back and reported this to his master.

“Then the head of the household became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here those who are poor, those with disabilities, those who are blind, and those who are limping.’ And later the slave said, ‘Master, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and the hedges and press upon them to come in, so that my house will be filled.

“For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my dinner.’” (Luke 14:16-24)

I believe the time is soon coming in which the true Church (‘True’ as opposed to the Tares among the wheat as described in Matthew 13:24-30) – the True Church will hear the trumpet of God and be carried away with Him in the clouds “to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).

But as I came to this passage in Luke’s gospel, I had to stop and wonder, can I become so busy with the affairs of this life that I lose my longing for the next? Will the Lord Jesus rebuke me, as He did the faithful church at Ephesus, “I have this against you, that you have left your first love”? (Revelation 2:1-5).

Can it ever happen to me that I get to be so busy making excuses why I cannot do this or that for the Lord that I don’t even hear the trumpet? Could it ever happen to me that I stop ‘loving His appearing”? (see 2 Timothy 4:8).

These are not questions I should dismiss out of hand, as if such things could never be true in my case. I have too much experience with life’s twists and turns and tumbles to think I am immune to a creeping negligence of what should always be my primary focus.

Perhaps it is BECAUSE we are all susceptible to a creeping negligence, a slow drift from our mooring, that the writer to the Hebrews warns us: “Let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith . . . .” (Hebrews 12:1-2)

Fixing our eyes on Jesus.

“Richard,” I caution myself, “pay attention to those words. Fix your eyes on Jesus. Every day and through the day. No one else. Nothing else. He alone is the author and the perfecter of your faith.”