Desiring Forever

Question 1: do you want to live forever? If “no”, then you can skip this quiet time because it has nothing to do with you. If you answered “yes”, regardless of your reasons why, you have to understand that there is a cost to living forever. If you don’t want to pay the cost, then, you’ll be deceived. Not everything that the world offers—physical gratification, greed, and extravagant lifestyles—comes from the Father. It comes from the world, and the world and its evil desires are passing away. But the person who does what God wants lives forever. (1 John 2:16, 17 GWT) So the cost that has to be paid for eternity was already paid by Jesus Christ on the cross. It is by your faith that you died with him on that cross, along with that death you died, so too did the sin within you, that is the stuff and things in your life, past, present and future, that defile you. Likewise, because in that faith you died, you will be raised again by God from that death into eternal life (life forever). Now here comes the tricky part, because you believe all of that and known that since you were in your mom’s womb; your life now is being primed by God for that eternity. We have to be careful to weigh our decisions and actions based upon that priming. Here’s what I mean: if God wants us to encounter and experience life which comes from Him, then shouldn’t we make sure that our choices and decisions are the ones that He lined up for us? I know I just opened a can of worms for you folks who like to think that everything was fated in some weird predestination thing, but let’s be honest and clear– God does indeed give us options and we make our own decisions from those options. To say any less is to deny your own humanity. So this brings us back to our question: do you desire forever? Better question: Do we love the forever of God more than this world or the things in the world? If “yes”, then it’s simple, you have to live like you do– that is to do what God wants. What God wants is for us to love Him and the forever He is offering more than ourselves and whatever we can imagine for ourselves, ever. Moreover, this is lived out or loved out by how we value other people– are out desires for other people for their eternity or is it simply out of a love for the temporal here and now? Let’s pray about that today.