3. The Importance of the Moment

Your body cannot be sound and whole unless you have a continual foothold on life, able to absorb whatever nutrients may come your way at any time. This is the way of all living things in the natural world. The turning points of life depend not what happens over a long period of time, but on how you deal with a single moment.
People who ignore the moment can fail to obtain something precious. They cannot become great people. They cannot inherit God’s throne and crown. To make each moment shine, you should exercise care with each word you utter, each action you take, and even each thought you think. Deal with life and solve its problems, believing that how you deal with the day-to-day challenges of life will remain to determine your connection to the world.
The only way to gain ultimate victory is to do well in each moment.
Meeting the challenge of each moment will make you a victor. The same applies if you are fighting for an historical victory or even a cosmic victory. Those who know the infinite value of one bright shining moment and live accordingly can become great people, even saints, even God’s sons and daughters. A single moment can determine whether you are on the path of life or death. (31-217, 05/31/1970)

Today, our attitude is the problem. Scripture tells us that we should first seek the coming of the Kingdom of God and pray that God’s will be done. Yet the more important issue for each one of us is how I as an individual can move forward in unity with God’s will.
Consider this current hour; how can we spend it in such a way that it becomes entirely one with God’s will? That is far more valuable than just sitting there hoping for the Kingdom of God to appear. Therefore, we should use this hour to create the conditions that will enable us as individuals, as well as our families, tribes and nations, to inherit and accomplish God’s will. This is the way we can make a place for ourselves in God’s coming Kingdom. Thus the question is this: How do you spend this one hour – if you are given an hour – to make God’s will your first priority within the context of your daily life? The way we spend each moment of our life is a very important issue.
Looking at the history of the providence of restoration, four thousand years elapsed from Adam’s family through Noah’s family, Abraham’s family, and Moses’ family down to Jesus’ family. Yet each of the failures that prolonged the providence did not happen over the span of, say, a year. In the case of Adam and Eve, their fall was not something planned out and put into action over the span of a year or a decade or several decades. Their mistakes happened in a flash. Yet the failure of that one moment had consequences that have persisted through eons of time. Considering this, we can understand that a single moment can have a great and terrible impact.
Due to the failure of that one moment, countless people who walked the path of righteousness in the course of history had to undergo untold suffering. Due to the failure of that one moment, many nations could not follow God’s will and fell into the abyss of destruction. They became part of a gigantic offering of indemnity that was required because of that one moment. When we understand this, we see that each hour we just let tick by can be fraught with terrible consequences. Even though the Kingdom of Heaven is eternal, it does not exist apart from what we do in each single moment.
Eternity does not begin when we die. It begins from the moment we understand God’s will. From that moment on, if we interrupt our relationship with God’s will for even an instant in time, it can create an abyss that interrupts our walk with eternity.
Therefore, as you walk the path of faith through the course of your life, do not procrastinate by deferring your providential responsibilities from this year to the next, and then to the year after that, or from your 20s to your 30s, or from your 30s to your 40s, or from your 40s to your 50s. You should not live like that. If you persist in your secular lifestyle, you just might end up dying without having lived for the sake of God’s will for even a single day. In that case, how can you possibly go to the Kingdom of Heaven?
It doesn’t matter that the country you live in is blessed; you will have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven if you were unable to live even one day by a victorious standard. You may face one crucial day or one crucial year in your life when, if you fail the test, the consequence will be that you cannot enter eternal life. Thus, while it is not wrong for believers to spend their days dreaming of eternity, it is far more important that they actually join in God’s work to eradicate evil and become the standard-bearers of goodness in the real world. Consider that Adam’s momentary lapse resulted in eons of anguish. Consider Cain and Abel, who were supposed to dissolve the anguish of their parents, demolish the wall between the brothers and create the starting point for family unity. It only took a moment for Cain to murder Abel, yet that brief incident destroyed the providence of restoration that Abel had been elected to lead.
Noah had toiled 120 years to build the ark. But when the time came, God issued the command, “Call the people to come into the ark, for the day of My judgment has come.” The people had only one brief moment to follow this order and receive the blessings of the eternal God. Those who did not were drowned in the deluge.
In Abraham’s case too, God’s promise that his descendants would be “as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sands on the seashore” was bestowed in just a single moment. Abraham’s sacrificial offering did not require decades but merely a day’s work. The time it took him to cut the animals for the offering and place them on the altar was not more than an hour. Yet the way he spent that single hour bore the seeds of life and death, blessing and curse, for subsequent history.
Today’s believers should not be anxious over the coming judgment in the Last Days. Rather, they should be anxious about how they can take each day that God has given them and devote it to the will of God. They should be anxious about how they can link their lives to God’s will. (37-217, 12/27/1970)