Friday, December 28, 2001
My wife was just a girl when her grandparents down the road started building a little farmstead to live in. Because she had expressed a desire to be a missionary someday, Granddad thought she needed to know how to do things for herself - including laying block for a building. So, she got to help lay the block for her grandparents' house. Now in the amazing, surprising ways of God, we are now living in that house - many years after it was built. We kinda kid my wife that the crooked blocks are the ones she did!
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Building Now What You'll Live in Later."
My wife could never have imagined it - what she built as a girl she would one day be living in! But then, all our lives are like that, aren't they? We live in tomorrow whatever we build today.
That's exactly what the Bible says in that famous statement in Galatians 6:7, our word for today from the Word of God. "Do not be deceived; God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." What you're planting today, you'll be eating in the future - what you're building today, you'll be living in later on. In a very real way, the life you're living right now - the things you love and the things you hate - it's the harvest of the choices you made months or years ago - except you may not have realized at the time you were making your choices. That's why it's so important to realize it now - about the choices you're making at this point in your life!
What you do with or to your body now you'll be living with down the road. The way you treat your parents - the way you treat your children - the way you treat the other people in your personal world - you'll be living with that in your relationships for a long time to come. You'll reap the sacrifices you're making, the appreciation you're expressing, the generosity you're showing. You'll also reap the criticism you give, the sarcasm, the meanness, the harshness, and the neglect. They will come back to you.
The way you talk to people, the way you talk about people - I hope it's something you'll want to live with in the years to come. Your words are seed you sow, and later you'll be living with the harvest of those words - a beautiful harvest or a bitter harvest. And one thing we're all building, for better or worse, is a reputation. You're developing a reputation for trustworthiness or unreliability, for honesty or deceitfulness, for moral purity or moral laxity, for consistency or inconsistency. And much of what you get in the future will be the harvest of the kind of reputation that you're building today. You really do reap what you sow.
So don't compromise just to get out of a jam, or to get a quick fix, or to cover up something, to meet a need today in a way that you're going to regret tomorrow. Draw out the lines of the choices you're making. Where's this going to take me? Am I going to end up where I want to end up? I'll be meeting what I'm sowing today later on. Live openly, live honestly, and live gently.
Just ask my wife - someday you will be living in what you're building today. Build something that will last, and build something you'll want to live in for a long time.