A great message

I like the sermons the pastor of our church delivers. I've mentioned them here from time to time. I should mention them more and I will try to do that in the future. But this Sunday, we had a guest speaker because our pastor is on vacation. The guest speaker is a member of our church but isn't here often. He is a leader in a missions group whose mission is prisoners in jail - in this country and others.

His sermon was from 1 Timothy 2 : 1-7 and it was wonderful. But the line he used that affected me the most was (I'm paraphrasing here):

What we truly believe causes us to act.

In other words, it's easy to say we believe something. It's another matter, though, to truly believe something and it causes us to act. If I don't truly believe that this chair will hold me, I will not sit on it. If I don't truly believe that my next breath will draw in fresh, clean air, I will not breathe freely. So, if I truly DO believe that God has put me here for a purpose and has a plan for my life, how should I act on that? We all have mundane things to do every day. We can't do the Lord's work every minute of every day. But I know I can do more. I know I waste a lot of time. I need to keep reminding myself of this every day.

As a counterpoint to this, I am including this funny quote I saw attached to an e-mail message today.

It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.