Day 5: Renewed Intensity

Bible Reading: 2 Kings 13:14-21

I hate it when people are sloppy! 

It’s especially more terrible when you’re handling something that’s really important. You can be as sloppy and sluggish as you want on your way to your bedroom or to the restroom or something. That’s your life- who cares?  But when you’re on duty in the labour ward where my wife is in labour? No way!  Or when you’re flying a commercial plane, you can’t be sluggish about it. We all know how annoying it can be when you take your spouse on a date and the waiter at the restaurant is acting all sluggish.

I think the point really is that when the stakes are high, the intensity must reflect it.

The intensity we put into anything is reflective of the weight that we attach to it. You could be reading for a test very passively in the assumption that it won’t even be graded, then you hear its a prerequisite promotional test and suddenly everything changes! Your blood gets a little hotter; the clock seems to be ticking faster; even the weather becomes more ‘full’. 

The stakes always raise the level of intensity.

What if you really felt the weight of God’s purpose on you in a new way? What if you really sensed that weight of your life not just being some ‘lets-see-how-it-goes’ heavenly experiment, but that your life is a very specifically designed, right-on-time answer from God for a needy world? I think it will breathe an intensity into you.

Life is not to be rushed, but I believe it must be lived with urgency. We are not to live under some sickening pressure, but we are to live with a constant challenge. Moments must be made to count.  Our efforts must be rightly channeled.

So I run straight to the goal with purpose in every step. I fight to win. I’m not just shadow-boxing or playing around. 1 Corinthians 9:26 TLB

Everything about our lives need intensity- our faith, our love, our marriages, our work, our patience, our joy, our service, our purity, and so on.

How many times does the devil try to use discouragement and distraction to water down the level of our intensity?  How many times do we give in to those lazy vibes that just water down everything about our lives.

As we wait on God today, can we believe for a renewed intensity? Can we believe that God will bless us with a fresh spark of purposeful living. Let’s believe that we will not handle the delicateness of purpose and the hopes of another generation with drowsy, sluggish devotion. Would you believe that 2021 will be a year of great intensity for you, irrespective of what’s going on around you.

In Prayer Today:

1. Ask the Lord to give you a renewed consciousness of the stakes that are on your life. Ask the Lord to heal you of all the ways that you have thought small of what God is doing in your life
2. Pray for a quickening from within you by the Holy Spirit. We need something more than mere mind resolutions, we need a spark of God! 

Recommended Listen:

Do The Blessed– Tolulope Moody

https://soundcloud.com/sycamore-church/do-the-blessed-pastor-tolulope-moody-sycamore-church

PS: Remember tomorrow is Super-Saturday! It’s going to be a great hour of prayer together as we wrap up the first week of Surge. It holds exclusively online (Mixlr: Sycamore Church) and there are three repeat sessions- 7 am, 12 noon and 7pm WAT.