Gearing Up
by Les Fleetwood, Pastor of Connecting and Equipping Ministries
How was your summer? Did you take a trip? Visit the lake? I guarantee if you had couples over for a cook-out, the men huddled around the grill. If it's spearing meat over flames with oversized goofy forks, guys are on it! There was actually only one cook, but the others made contributions.
Then one relaxing evening you notice a TV commercial reminding you that it is time to buy paper and pens, backpacks, and new clothes, and before you can say, "Make my steak medium rare," you realize fall has arrived. Schools gear up, kids gear up, even church programming gears up, and our lives get wound up. We’re out the door, running through our day. In all this running around, two missteps can occur.
One, we decide to skip gearing up at church because we're busy elsewhere. Or two, we gear up so much at church, doing every activity possible, that busyness becomes an end to itself. While it is difficult to balance, both missteps occur when we substitute other things for true worship of and service to God. Jesus says when the things that matter to Him become the things that matter to us, and we pray about everything, our anxiety will be replaced with His peace, perspective, and provision (Matthew 6:25–34).
So, how can we achieve a spiritual mindset in the midst of all the things we have to do? Paul says start each day by giving God access to all we are and everything we do, allowing His Word to infiltrate and change our worldly patterns of thinking (Romans 12:1–2). The choice is ours: gear up in our own strength and wear out from worry, or gear up by giving ourselves up to God’s agenda and His strength in us.
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