[Faith-talk] Good Night Message for Thursday, January 10, 2013

[Paul]

Hello and good day to my fellow saints of the Most High God residing on planet Earth.  I hope and pray that, by God's matchless grace and His providential care, that you are all doing well, and that we in North America had a good day today and are preparing to retire for the night.

We turn again to that outstanding blind Christian author, the late Dr. Ralph Montanus, for an article entitled "Thoughts For The New Year," rendered as follows:

"This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." (Psalm 118:24)

Did you ever stop to consider that you can only live one day at a time? And how important each day is? The twenty-four hours just passed can never be relived.  Yesterday is gone forever; tomorrow may never arrive.  This is the day, today, to live for God's glory and for the salvation of souls.

Our Lord Jesus had much to say about "today." In Matthew 6:34, He said, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." In other words, the Lord was saying, "Live one day at a time."

Our main business in life should be not to see what lies in the dim future, but rather to do the things at hand.  We must ring down our mental curtains on our dead yesterdays and cease to occupy ourselves with the yet-born tomorrows.  Only then are we ready to live for today.

Tomorrow's load, added to yesterday's when carried today, makes even the strongest falter.  How many nervous breakdowns and mental disturbances of all kinds can be traced back to the fact that most of us try to jam a week, a month, and even a year, into twenty-four hours of life?

In the Lord's Prayer, He reminds us that the best way to prepare for the morrow is to concentrate all our mental and emotional energies on the work of today.  We would do well to begin each day with the words, "Give us this day our daily bread." Today's bread is the only kind we can possibly eat.  Yesterday's bread is either already eaten or stale.  Tomorrow's bread has not been baked yet.

Throughout this coming new year our motto should be, "Just for today." Just one day at a time for Christ, taking each task as it comes and completing it before moving on to the next.

When we try to do too many things at one time, we do nothing well or thoroughly.  If only we would heed Christ's admonition about being not anxious for the morrow, and live each day at a time, we'd soon find that the joy and peace of the Lord would be our strength.

We also have a tendency to put off living for the Lord each day.  We dream of what we will do, or how we will live for Him, but our dreams never become a reality.  God has so many jobs waiting to be done that only we, His children, can do.  That tract we were going to mail off, that visit to the hospital or to a lonely shut-in, the letter we were going to write to a bereaved one, witnessing to our neighbors, and hundreds of other things the Lord would have us do, but which we never seem to get around to doing.

Tomorrow may be too late! Today is the day the Lord would have us concentrate on!

Maybe you have been thinking about making a schedule and arranging your time so that you might read your Bible and pray each day at a set time.  You keep saying to yourself, "I'll start next week," but there are too many "next weeks" to fall back on! Don't procrastinate any longer, make your schedule right now and start adhering to it, and you'll be surprised how the Lord will bless you and how much faster the rest of your work can be accomplished.

If you will but begin to live for today, today, your life will be filled with happiness and joy in serving the Lord, with so many things to keep you occupied that you will not have time for loneliness or self-pity, yet not so much work as to make you harried or hurried.

Now is the accepted time:  Today is the day of salvation! May each day of this new year be your day to live and enjoy to the fullest the many blessings God has in store for you.  To this end we pray.

I realize that, in this so-called modern age such things as letter writing or going to a hospital to visit a lonely person are probably old-fashioned or out of date, but there are some things we can do to make our day count.  Thanks again to the late Dr. Ralph Montanus for his article written so many years ago.

And now may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and collectively, throughout this night or day and especially in these last days in which we live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Paul