God-in-a-Minute

It sounds like a convenience food, doesn’t it? Like something you can pick up at the supermarket in aisle 17, next to the minute rice and the instant mashed potatoes. This past Sunday, I appreciated Pastor Keith’s emphasis on spending time with God. While there’s a place for fast food and a place for brief devotionals and short prayers, we need to understand something:

When we pick up the box of instant potatoes, we’ve decided that the nearly half-hour required to make homemade mashed potatoes can be better spent elsewhere. And when we opt for the short form of communication with God, we’ve again said that the time is better spent elsewhere.

Both decisions could be the right ones, under certain circumstances. But we could take a timely object lesson from the Mayflower pilgrims. That autumn feast in 1621 was long on preparation, from lessons in planting to prayers in waiting to celebration in harvest. It seems safe to say that at that first feast, NOTHING was instant. No Thanksgiving-in-a-bag. No meal-in-a-minute. So it’s appropriate that the meal you’ll eat this Thursday won’t showcase quick-order burgers and fries either.

Like the Thanksgiving feast we’ll enjoy this week, God Himself has prepared a spiritual banquet, and spared no time and expense in doing it. He calls us every day to a table loaded with promises and blessings. He sits at the head of the table, waiting for us to join Him… but too often He watches us race past the table, grabbing a leg-of-promise to carry off into our busy day. What’s that He’s saying as we rush past our empty chair?

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it… If you would but listen to me, you would be fed with the finest of wheat; with honey from the rock I would satisfy you” (from Ps. 81:10-16 NIV).

This week, let’s enjoy a feast for the soul as well as for the stomach. Let’s sit down with God in prayer and worship and fellowship, go for that stuffed-to-the-gills feeling of utter contentment in the spirit as well as the stomach... and accept His invitation to keep coming back to the table every day!