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Not to be overly dramatic, but sometimes we have to look reality straight in the eyes: Life can end at any moment.

If you’ve ever known someone who’s died young, you know how true that is. And even for those who live to a ripe old age, life is still so short. James 4:14 compares our life to a mist or a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Also, Jesus tells us in John 9:4, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.” This means that, not only is a lost person’s opportunity to receive the gospel terribly short, but our opportunity to share it with them is terribly short as well. So there’s a distinct urgency that characterizes our gospel mission.

Ask yourself, how should that affect the way we approach the our mission of spreading the gospel—the energy we expend, the resources we allocate, the focus we maintain?

Perhaps you remember a few years ago when those 33 miners were trapped half a mile underground in that mining shaft in Chile. It was a national crisis. The Chilean president visited, and reporters were providing 24-hour news coverage of the rescue effort.

And since it was such a crisis, the government spared no expense in rescuing those miners. They immediately assigned 130 people to the rescue efforts, they brought in consultants from NASA, they used all kinds of different drills and other pieces of equipment. It was a heroic effort. And it took them 69 days, but they managed to rescue those miners.

The point? That’s how you act during a crisis. You don’t worry about some of the secondary things you would otherwise worry about, and you don’t work at the pace you would otherwise work at. You understand that you’re in a race against time, and that mentality affects just about every aspect of the way you approach the situation.

When we think of the fact that we only have a limited time to spread the gospel, it changes things. It changes things a lot. When we really grasp the urgency of the situation, we don’t spend time doing some of the things we would otherwise do, and we don’t spend our money on things we would otherwise spend it on. Instead, we use every available resource we have in order to launch a truly heroic effort to take the gospel to those who are in dire need.

If you are a Christian, how engaged are you in our gospel mission?