1567 Not Tomorrow, Today

Have you ever noticed how incredibly hard it is to get yourself to do what you know you should do today? Gosh, we struggle with showing up as our best selves and giving our best effort.

For some of us, it’s been so long since the best version of us showed up to live a day, we don’t even know what she looks like. We have no idea what that girl would do in a day. How does that even look? For some of us, the memories of giving our best effort have become clouded with the pile of days we offered less than our best, and we hardly even remember the girl who really tried.

Who wins in this scenario? Not you! The enemy of your soul wins! The one who wants you living short of your potential and overwhelmed in your opportunities. The one who always schemes to trick you into settling for less than you could do, then invites you to the party where you feel nothing but bad about yourself.

Has he been winning? Has he stolen your days?

The truth is, most of us aren’t even putting up a fight anymore. We’re not fighting to take our days back. We’re not giving our best effort. We’re not pushing hard to live up to our greatest potential. We’ve gotten really out of touch with that girl. That life seems foreign.

Nope, instead, we battle the day from the very beginning. Oh how we fight with that alarm clock. We delay getting up and we wallow in defeat with every hit of the snooze. We are literally dismissing ourselves from opportunities. Counting ourselves out from the beginning. Denying ourselves of the chance to feel proud of who we are and how we’re living.

And eventually, it all becomes a battle. We know what we should do, but dang we don’t do it. James 4:17, “So if you know of an opportunity to do the right thing today, yet you refrain from doing it, you’re guilty of sin.” Yes, the Bible calls what we are doing SIN! Name it for what it is. Knowing what we should be doing but then not doing it becomes sin in our lives. And Jesus said in John 8:34, “Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.”

Ding, ding, ding. That’s what has happened here! The sin of not doing what you know you should do, when you know you could do it, is sin, and now that sin has you trapped as it’s slave.

Oh, Jesus, we need you to set us free! Here’s the good news, 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Let’s just come clean about this and let Jesus go to work on making us right!

We need to see the truth here. The truth of what the enemy has tricked us into by forfeiting all we could be doing with our days and settling for a mediocre existence of wasted hours. Scripture is brutally clear with this warning for us. Proverbs 6: 10-11 TPT “If you keep thinking ‘I’ll do it later’ or say to yourself, ‘I’ll sit back a while and take it easy,’ just watch how the future unfolds. By making excuse, you’ll see what it means to go without.”

And that’s precisely where many of us are. We’re going without. Without the relationships we most desire. Without the energy and health we want. Without the confidence. Without the joy. Without the growth. Without the change. And instead we’re stuck in this perpetual loop of dreading the day, dragging ourselves through the day, then regretting the day. And we do it over and over again. THAT IS NOT THE LIFE YOU WERE CREATED FOR!

What has caused this in your life? It’s the ol’ “I’ll do it later.” It’s the quest for easy. It’s the excuses you make up for yourself, then you accept them.