what if you had one month left to live?

i recently led a group of people in a bible study on living your life to the fullest..here is my outline. hope you enjoy!

What if you went into a regular check-up and the doctors told you that they found something that was out of place? What if that something was a cancer? What if they told you, you only had a month to live? What would you do? What would you need to let go of? Who would you need to talk to? How would the way you lived your life change?

James4:14 says you are not even guaranteed tomorrow and yet we waste so much of our time putting stuff off until tomorrow

I want you to think of a gravestone. They are three things that are on each and every gravestone. Those things are the year you were born, the year you died, and in between those two number is a dash. We cant control the year we were born nor can we control the year that we die but what we can control is the dash. So i wanna know, what are you doing with your dash and how are you going to spend it? How are you spending your life? Will people remember you when that second date comes? I know a big thing for me that has kept me from living my dash the way i know God wants me to is that I havnt let go of my past. I haven’t forgiven.

So many people, myself included, live in the past, we can’t let go of something that happened to us. Maybe someone close to them died, maybe their parents split up, maybe they went bankrupt, maybe they were abused, the list could go on. In order to live today, to live the dash to the fullest, we need to let go of our past and our mistakes and forgive.
Living a life full of unforgivness is a miserable way to live. Maybe it’s someone close to you that you can’t even be in the same room with anymore. Maybe it’s someone you haven’t seen in years. And maybe the person is you.

I don’t know what kind of stuff all of you are carrying around, but guys-the bags get heavy and carrying these things around with us make life exhausting and God didn’t create us to be this way. I know it is hard to let go, everyone has wounds – some big and some small, but if you keep holding on to them they eventually become a part of you. God created us to be free. God created us to live life to the fullest. To live in the dash- to live today, not in our past. We need to let go and forgive just as we have been forgiven by him.

We need to forgive and let go today because like James says, there is no guarantee that we will live tomorrow.

Back to the gravestone thing, it reminds me a lot like a race. We can’t control when the old man shoots the gun, and we can’t control when all the coaches are yelling at you to stop at the finish line but what we can control is the twenty minutes or so between the start and end of the race. And let’s say that you had a great start and are running and feel as if no one or nothing can ever put a stop to you. But what if suddenly you look down and see that your shoe is untied and when you look down that causes you to trip. Or what if at the beginning of the race you get spiked in the knee and start bleeding. Or what if your own spike gets stuck in a huge mud puddle and you fall and get covered in mud. Well it doesn’t matter how many times that you fall in a cross country meet, the officials are not going to disqualify you and that is just like life. No matter how many times you mess-up God will still forgive you. We can’t live off of our mistakes or the things that have happened to us in the past, we need to live today.

We need to live our dash to the fullest for we do not know when the second date is coming. It could be tomorrow, next year, or several decades down the road. But we need to be ready. We need to let go of our past. We need to forgive. We need to live the dash to the fullest. We need to live today.