Your life echoes into eternity.
There’s a statement right there that, if true, bears some significant weight. It would follow that how you live in the present has significant implications for the future. So the question is, what do we allow to inform how we live?
With its cultural ingenuity and ambitious endeavor to be relevant, our world bedazzlingly strives to answer that question.
However, on the one hand, if we’re not careful, our lives can be troubled by debilitating regret as we consider our life–as it is–echoing into eternity. We all know life doesn’t give us redos, undos, or denials. While we can learn from the past, we also know that we can’t change it, and that’s hard if life hasn’t met expectations. The inadequate outcome is indecision shackled by regret.
On the other hand, sauntering aimlessly through life, reacting to circumstances as they invade our moments, brings us to the same persistence in the wrong direction. So while there’s a mysterious appeal to the free-spirit ethos that Hollywood carefully pursues, it fails miserably when worked out to its conclusion. This is yet another poor outcome of indecision shackled by apathy.
One scenario binds with regret and the other with apathy. If our lives truly echo into eternity, then indecision–whether by regret or apathy–is insufficient for anyone desiring a positive conclusion to their life.
What’s the Way Forward?
Each new day gifts us with potentialities to shape our present and guide our future. You and I are a free people with the autonomy to invest wisely…today. The question, as previously stated, is, “What informs how you invest your life?”
The answer must at least include a daily decision to yield oneself to God’s Word and prayer with a heart that seeks His face. That is to say, one aspect of embracing the daily gift of potential is to build it upon reading God’s Word to know His heart, character, love, refinement, and care.
Why?
God’s Word is the plumb line, anchor, and rock upon which to build our lives. And so, your devotional time with God becomes the eye in the storms of life. Time with the Lord is the calm amidst confusion and order within chaos. Being with the Lord daily shapes and guides you throughout your life and seasons so that you know how to live–wisely. As God’s Word seeps into your life, you respond with Bible, and when you don’t, you confess and seek reconciliation.
And, in the end, the one who builds his life upon God’s Word will hear, “‘Well done, good and faithful servant!” (Matthew 25:23)
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock.”
Matthew 7:24-25
A Suggested Guide?
Do you have a resource that guides you daily through God’s Word? Would you like one? I’m developing one as we speak that I will gladly send you if you desire.
How Would A Daily Guide Help?
A guide aids in the cultivation of seeking the Lord. It’s not a checklist (although it’s a daily habit). It’s not a standard of righteousness (although it brings you daily to the One who is righteous). But, essentially, a daily devotional guide is like preparing beds in a garden from which seeds of Truth from God’s Word may sprout, grow, blossom, and reproduce into a wise life.
May your daily time in God’s Word and prayer cultivate in you a mind that desires things that are above (Col. 3:2), a heart that seeks the face of God (Ps. 27:8), and a life that walks in the steps of Christ (1 Pet. 2:21).
— April 12, 2023