Pursuing Eternal Matters
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven."
After my annual two-month hiatus, I’m back! Can’t wait to converse with you this year. Thank you for allowing me to take up residence in your email inbox every week.
A fifty-something-year-old woman approached my book table at a craft fair in December. She honed in on Finishing Well: Living with the End in Mind (A Devotional). She picked it up and read the back cover description. She set it down and looked at a few other titles, then picked up Finishing Well again.
After contemplating the purchase for a few seconds, she set the book back down and said something about coming back. And she did. This time with her daughter who was maybe eighteen.
“What do you think about this book for Grandma?” she asked her daughter.
Her daughter picked it up and read the back cover description. Maybe fifteen seconds passed before she spoke up. Before I tell you what she said, here’s what she would have read:
To finish the Christian life well, the believer must live with the end in mind. The world offers us many distractions, but none of them offer lasting satisfaction, nor do they allow us to make a lasting difference. The reality that life is short should orient the way we live right now.
In this fifty-day devotional, readers will explore what the Bible says about the importance of persevering to the end, suffering well, standing firm, leaving a faith legacy, earning heavenly rewards, striving for unity in the faith, mutually encouraging one another, not growing weary, dying well, and much more.
“She already does all these things,” the woman’s daughter said to her. She set the book down and they walked away.
It thrilled me to know that her grandmother was on track to finish well. And I hope that means her grandmother passed such information on to her daughter and granddaughter. With all that said, I’m really hoping they didn’t miss the point.
Finishing well isn’t about waiting until the end to change the way we live. The fifty-five-year-old who begins to think less about this world and more about the next one is more likely to finish well. But the eighteen-year-old even more so because she will reorient her life based on kingdom principles at an even younger age, which will keep her from getting weighed down in things that don’t matter.
Have you seen the reel that’s going around the various social media platforms that points out that in one hundred years from now, the things you are so stressed about won’t matter? In fact, people won’t even remember you. Your car will be a pile of rust in a landfill. Someone else will live in your home. Your other possessions will be given away, sold, or decaying somewhere. Given that all of this is undeniably true, why do we work so hard for things that have no eternal significance?
Jesus said it this way: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19-20 ESV).
Of course, we need temporal things, but we probably don’t need as many as we think we do.
Here are some tidbits you might find interesting this week:
I’ve never been someone who chooses a word for the coming year. I won’t start now, but if you made me, I’d pick less. Less tracking. Less hustle. Less of anything someone tells me I need to do to be successful. I just want to experience.
After Christmas, I had a reaction to a medication, so I was down for a few days. I stumbled across a television show called Sullivan’s Crossing that is set in Canada. The scenery is breathtaking.
“Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?” - Corrie ten Boom
I always love these 100 Things That Made My Year posts Austin Kleon does every year.
When Lee isn’t writing essays, devotional books, or Christian fiction, he is a freelance editor, as well as a freelance journalist who has written hundreds of articles for various newspapers and magazines. He’s also a fan of NASCAR, baseball, tennis, books, movies and coffee shops.
Welcome back, Lee!
I pray to live my life - and finish well and hear, "Well done, my faithful servant"!
Such an important point, Lee. Although many people aren't intentional about finishing well even in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, we should all be intentional about living well to finish well whatever age we are.