When we ask the present to give us what only eternity can give, we end up driven, frustrated, discouraged, and ultimately hopeless.
It’s a case of modern evangelical schizophrenia.
It causes us so much confusion, frustration, and discouragement.
It leaves us with unrealistic expectations, naivety toward temptation, and regular disappointment.
It leads us to ask far too much from the people around us and to expect more than we should from situations and locations in our lives.
It makes a search over and over again for what we will not find and spend endless hours wondering why we haven’t found it.
It even results in some of us beginning to doubt the goodness of God.
“What is this schizophrenia?” you ask.
It is the fact that we declare that we believe in forever, yet we live as if this is all there is.
This functional contradiction between our belief system in our daily living cannot work.
Here’s why...
Two things you need to know...
First, you cannot make any sense out of the Christian life without eternity.
This is the whole argument of 1st Corinthians 15. If the one you’ve given your life to doesn’t ultimately fix all that sin has broken, so that you can live with him forever without its effects, what is your faith worth?
Second, you and I have been hardwired [designed] for eternity.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares that God has placed eternity in every person‘s heart.
That means everyone hungers for paradise.
No one is satisfied with things the way they are. So either you try your hardest to turn your life right here, right now into the paradise it will never be and therefore become driven and disappointed, or you live in this broken world with the rest and peace that comes from knowing that a guaranteed place in paradise is in your future.
You’re sad that things are as broken as they are, so you work to be an agent of change in God’s gracious and powerful hands, but you’re not anxious or driven.
You know that this world is not stuck in that it hasn’t been abandoned by God.
You know that God is working his eternal plan. He is moving things toward their final conclusion.
You can’t see it every day, but you know it’s true. In the middle of your sadness there is celebration, because you’ve read the final chapter and you know how God’s grand story is going to end.
So you get up every morning and give yourself to being and doing the things that God says are good...
[...you get up every morning and give yourself to living aligned to your God-given design for greatest impact...]
...because you know that if Grace has put eternity in your future there’s nothing that you could ever do in God’s name that is in vain.
[Amen.]
(Excerpt from devotional, New Morning Mercies, by David Tripp.)
Words in [brackets] were added by me.
Slowly, prayerfully and personally soak in this Truth from I Corinthians 15:
1 Corinthians 15:16-20 (MSG)
[16] If corpses can't be raised, then Christ wasn't, because he was indeed dead. [17] And if Christ wasn't raised, then all you're doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever. [18] It's even worse for those who died hoping in Christ and resurrection, because they're already in their graves. [19] If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot. [20] But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries.
1 Corinthians 15:51-53 (MSG)
[51] But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I'll probably never fully understand. We're not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed. [52] You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it's over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we'll all be changed. [53] In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal.
1 Corinthians 15:56-58 (MSG)
[56] It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. [57] But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God!
[58] With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don't hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort.
Dear Head2Heart Online friends,
What is one thing that has stuck out to you from this post?
What is one thing that you want to remember after you leave this reading?
I invite you to jot it in the comments below.
Your comment may very well be used of God to encourage the heart of another.
We are not designed to journey life alone.