Life is fleeting. All the things we experience are here and gone, only available for a moment, and if we don’t grasp them in that instant, we can never recover them.
They are lost to us.
Look at children, taking twenty years to mature. At three months, they laugh with a high-pitched giggle, and by the time the grandparents come to visit two weeks later, the endearing behavior is gone. They want us at their sports games at twelve. At thirteen, we are required to drop them off a block away.
How quickly does the new wear off a car? Or a vacation? We blink, the week is gone, and we are back at our desks, filling out requisition forms for new ink pens.
Talk to an elderly person. They will shake their heads and ask where all the years went so quickly.
What we haven’t grabbed is lost to us.
The carving of Mount Rushmore was started in 1927. Gutzon Borglum reached out and grabbed at eternity, and the faces of four American presidents still grace that mountain today.
Tourists visit the Egyptian pharaohs’ grab for permanence amidst an ever-changing world. Even so, the stone is battered and worn, chipped away by time and the hand of avenging men.
There are more: Angkor Wat, a stone temple complex in Cambodia; the stone Mayan pyramid ruins in Mexico; Rome, and the palaces and temples now fallen to mere stones, but still visited by millions every year.
The largest stone monument of all is the Great Wall of China, thousands of years old, the only man-made structure visible from the moon.
What does this tell us? If we want any kind of permanence, we need to chisel our moments in stone.
1 John 5:13 tells us:
“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.”
God’s words are eternal. They stand against the winds of erosion and the will of man, embedded into the stone of his truth.
Romans 8:16 assures us:
“The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
It was by the Spirit that Belshazzar had his moment of despair written in stone. Daniel interpreted, and it came to pass. When the Spirit writes our future on the stone walls of eternity, we can trust in the truth written by his hand.
1 John 3:19-23 lays our proof on the table for the world to see:
“By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.”
When we believe in Christ, we are tracing our salvation into eternity’s stone. When we keep God’s commandments, our salvation becomes more deeply etched, and when we love one another, we become a Rushmore, on display for God, as he proudly holds us up for all the world to see.
If we want our lives to really mean something, for all the moments we’ve experienced to be written down forever, let’s turn to God. He writes the story of his Chosen on the walls of eternity, and there it will remain forever, to remind those who follow of our love for him.
When we show love to our fellow man, our love for God is never forgotten.
Copyright © 2015 MyChurchNotes.net
Code: FGO.L.23.14.vp