Choosing Intentionality Can Save Your Life
When you choose to have an intentional life, tied to the true purpose of your life and God’s intention, it can change your life. It’s important to remain interested in specific things. And when things that seemed important begin to feel less than significant, it’s time to invest in new, important things:
- Start learning new things.
- Open new doors to a particular part of your life.
- Refuse to simply do just enough to get by.
A lot of what is at work when you are tempted to slow down comes from the second law of thermal dynamics, which is the law of entropy.
Entropy means that systems tend to move from order to disorder.
If you’ve ever built a sandcastle on the beach, it looks great at first – everything is nice and orderly. But the waves come and the wind blows, and suddenly, it’s just a little pile of sand. That’s the law of entropy.
Or maybe you turn the furnace on in the house to bring the heat up a little bit, and then the temperature starts to drop shortly after it comes up to the mark you’ve set on the thermostat.
Entropy works in all systems in life. Anything left to itself will move toward disorder.
Isaiah 40:7-8 says, “The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (ESV).
Even Scripture concludes we’re in a constant state of decay. You can see it in the relics of ancient history. When Donna and I were in Israel, we went to the sites where Jesus walked. Today, in many of those places, only a pile of rubble or stones is left. And in what still stands, you can see the decay that happened from order to then disorder.
Your spiritual life can follow this same path. You can go from spiritual order, where you’re spending time with God and growing spiritually, and often move naturally, to disorder and then to destruction.
Entropy began in the Garden of Eden. “You start out as dirt, you’ll end up as dirt” (Genesis 3:19 MSG). It’s the word picture of entropy that occurs in all our lives. We feel it physically, and we can see it occurring in the world around us.
According to the second law of dynamics, the only way to put things back in order is to add energy.
- If you want to put that sandcastle back together, you use physical energy to rebuild it.
- If you want to have a healthy body, you go for a walk, eat well and exercise.
- If you want to put your finances back in order, it takes planning – sitting down, putting things on paper and making decisions – doing something, eliminating something, selling something or working harder.
- If you don’t constantly invest in your marriage, it will fall into disorder, decay and destruction. That’s why many times marriages fail. Other factors can also be involved, but clearly, left to their own devices, things tend to fall into this disorder.
One of the reasons we see people fade is because there’s just not enough energy to do everything.
For those of us who follow Christ, we can only put things back into order if we add the energy of the Holy Spirit into our lives.
We need to make sure that the power of the Holy Spirit is alive in us. I believe when we accept Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to reside in our lives. Scripture says in Ephesians 5:18, we are to be filled with the Spirit – allowing the Spirit of God to fill every part of our life.
If you allow the power of the Holy Spirit to fill your life, you may save your life, your marriage, your family or your spirit. You can save yourself a lot of misery in life, as opposed to allowing the physical law of entropy to take place. It’s something we have to continually fight.
Check out the next blog, Four Things You Can Do to Combat Entropy we discussed entropy which means systems tend to move from order to disorder.
