“Procrastination is an ever present and dangerous obstacle lurking in our shadows, always seeking to kill, steal and destroy what is rightfully ours”.
It has been appropriately said that, procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried. It is opportunity’s assassin.
We have all been guilty of procrastination.
And we all, in some way or the other, more often than not, have paid the price for procrastination.
For many of us that procrastination has cost us dearly.
Our pride will never want to admit that, but it is a fact of life!
There are some things in life that do not offer a second chance. They are those opportunities of ‘now or never’.
And the decision we choose to make will determine either a lifetime of regret or gratitude.
Disappointments caused by procrastination sometimes can be got past through healthy positive attitudes.
And it can teach us some valuable lessons of life.
There is also no doubt, a lot of wisdom in patiently waiting for the right timing, for that right moment.
And when that moment arrives, and the path is clear, we would then need to seize, lay hold of and embrace that precious and priceless moment with everything we’ve got.
Theodore Roosevelt put it well:
“In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
And procrastination has just about everything to do with that.
Waiting Is A Trap
When it comes to “the most important” decision of our lives, which concerns our eternal destination, waiting is a trap.
For when that all important and crucial moment arrives that will determine where we spend eternity, the stakes are extremely high.
And it is at this crucial moment when the spirit of procrastination will forcefully jump into gear.
The spirit of procrastination will always give you enough reasons to wait.
The truth is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results.
And reasons simply don’t count, especially when it comes to making that all-important decision regarding our eternal salvation.
Why is this so important?
We don’t know what tomorrow will hold. Life is precious and we don’t have any control over life and death.
We may have control to varying degrees over every aspect of our lives, but not when it comes to life and death.
We did not get to determine our moment of birth and neither do we get to determine our already appointed time of death.
We’ve had it rightly told to us so categorically and so often never to take life for granted.
And there is not a person alive who would disagree with that.
We all know that several millions will go to bed tonight.
And the next morning there will be several millions of every age that will not wake up.
You and I could be one of them!
That is not negative thinking, but rather a sad, hard and harsh reality.
The Most Dangerous Place In The Universe
This planet earth of ours is or at the least has become the most dangerous place in the universe.
For those of who are not familiar with the term “The Doomsday Clock”, it symbolically represents the man-made global catastrophe.
Started and maintained by this club of atomic scientists in 1947, this clock determines something called “Minutes to Midnight”.
This “Minutes to Midnight” basically represents the amount of time it would take us to self-destruct this entire planet.
In July 1945 the United States possessed the first nuclear atomic bombs.
Just one month later in August 1945, these very bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
The visible effects of the nuclear radiation caused in that attack have carried on to this very day.
This was the first time that nuclear weapons were used by man against men.
After World War II ended in 1945, new hostilities emerged between the Soviet Union and the United States.
This began what was known as the ‘cold war’.
Four years later in1949, the Soviet Union exploded an atom bomb, which set off what is called the “nuclear arms race”.
In the last seventy years, which brings us to where we are today, technology has grown at an incredible pace.
The first atom bomb is an antiquated piece of junk compared to what is there today.
Weapons Of Mass Destruction
Today’s nuclear arsenal all now comes under that category of “WMD’s”, Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The possession of these weapons are no longer restricted to the Untied States and Russia. The rest of the world has them too.
The “Minutes to Midnight” on the “Doomsday Clock” was originally set at seven minutes in 1947.
Today in 2021, it stands at just one hundred seconds.
That makes it just over a minute and a half.
This means that as we press that self-destruct button, it would only take a minute and a half to destroy this entire planet.
It would totally and utterly destroy and annihilate everything that moves, breathes and crawls.
And let’s not be disillusioned by the thought that humanity will not do this.
Oh yes they will!
If we truly understand the history and fallen nature of man, rest assured that man would do so without fail.
What happened in Japan in 1945 was just a precursor to what is about to happen any day now.
This planet earth is a ticking ‘time bomb’.
Precious human life as we know it, has never faced a real and existential threat as it does today.
To add to all this, today we live in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. This novel disease has taken out 1.7 million people in 2020 alone and sickened over seventy million more.
And those figures are what are on the record. What is ‘off the record’ is far worse.
We are indeed living on the most dangerous planet in the entire known universe.
Man’s Deepest Desire
To live forever is man’s deepest desire.
We have all grown up with fairy tales beginning with “once upon a time” and ending with “lived happily ever after”.
As kids we loved hearing these bedtime stories as we drifted off into slumber.
We passed on the same to our children down the generations.
The themes of these stories reflected that deepest desire of man to live forever.
And that desire still exists as the “desire above all desires” in the heart of man.
As we write this article, news has it that Jeff Bezos has resigned from Amazon.
HE has teamed up with the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to co-found a company called ‘Altos Labs’.
The development of something called, ‘age reversal therapy’ to help humans live longer is the aim.
This anti-aging start-up is aimed at “biological reprogramming”, which could help humans live FOREVER.
There are going to be no shortage of takers, which will probably make it a huge money-spinner.
However, this project will be nothing short of a “wild goose chase”, a futile pursuit, for eternal life comes only from the Eternal Creator.
It’s more possible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than biological reprogramming to produce eternal life.
But the point is that, so strong and so deep is this desire of man to live eternally.
And this desire is not something that has just come out of the woodwork.
It’s there because the Eternal Supreme Creator God has placed it there in the unfathomable depths of the human heart [Ecclesiastes 3:11].
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end”.
God Has Made The Way
God has categorically and judicially made the way for every person to have that wonderful desired eternal life.
And HE has done that through Calvary’s Cross.
When Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden after creation, God blocked off access to the “tree of life” [Genesis 3:24].
God had no choice but to do so, or else man would continue to live forever while simultaneously falling deeper and deeper into depravity.
Six thousand years of living evidence of that is all around us.
God could not afford that and neither can we.
That is the reason why Altos Labs “biological reprogramming” project is guaranteed to fail.
But man will still try for he still wants this eternal life his way in his fallen sinful condition.
And this attempt will be as successful as was the “Tower of Babel”.
The Flaming Sword
That “flaming sword” of [Genesis 3:24] is still very much in place.
Every attempt of man to makes inroads into heaven was, is and always will be a futile one.
The cross of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is the only legal and lawful way.
There are going to be no illegal immigrants in Heaven. In other words, man’s way in any form or shape will just not do.
The legal entry into heaven is by FAITH ALONE!
And this is where the Gospel of Grace of Jesus Christ comes in strong.
Paul the apostle of the gentiles to whom this Gospel was revealed to for all of us puts it this way in [Romans 1:16]:
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth”.
There is NOTHING that is added to that word ‘believeth”. Not baptism, nor repentance, nor church membership, nor anything else.
God will not have it!
Apart from truly believing, man has no other role to play in being saved.
It’s believe + nothing else.
The Gospel Of Grace
This is what we are all called to believe unto an eternal life in heaven as found in [1 Corinthians 15:1-4].
“How that Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures;”
“And that He was buried and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures”.
This alone is the Gospel of our salvation, unto eternal life in heaven.
There is no salvation outside the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This is what Paul the apostle refers to as “my Gospel” in [Romans 16:25], revealed only to him for us.
And Paul says in [Romans 2:16] that, “God shall judge the secrets of men according to ‘my Gospel’.”
So anyone who slips out into eternity without Paul’s Gospel is in big trouble.
This salvation, which God is offering to every person unconditionally, is a free gift.
And it’s free, not because it’s cheap, but because we cannot afford it.
When something is truly unaffordable, there are only two possible options.
We can have it for nothing, which makes it a gift, or never have it at all.
And that is what Salvation is.
Indeed, the Creator God has fulfilled that deep desire of man to live eternally.
It is speculatively derived from Scripture that the eternal youthful look will be that of about thirty years of age.
We understand that age to be the “prime of life”.
How can we turn down and neglect this incredible offer that God is unconditionally offering every single person on this planet?
The Moment Is Here
The ‘moment’ we mentioned earlier is here standing right before us.
Here is how God through Scripture in this Age of Grace puts it across to each one of us in [2 Corinthians 6:1-2]:
“We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain”.
“For HE (God) saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee:
“Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
“NOW IS THE TIME, TODAY IS THE DAY”, says Paul the apostle.
So how are we to respond to this invitation?
Are we going to allow ‘procrastination’ to say “ not now, wait, you can do it later”?
For herein lies the greatest danger of procrastination.
The “Not now” very soon can become “NEVER”.
