Life Is Short

Older people often use the phrase “Life is short”, but to a young person this seems foolish. Each new day brings a youth one more beginning added to their seemingly endless beginnings. Second Peter 3:8 says: But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. So maybe young people see life as our Lord does, before adulthood burdens them with the responsibilities which manifest the saying;”Life is short.”

Is life short? If you think only of your flesh and not your spirit as the world thinks, then life is indeed short. Picture in your mind a straight line that reaches from the floor to the ceiling. This time line represents all the time that has passed since God created the world. Now beginning at the floor adjacent to that time line, picture another line representing your life. How far would it reach, how long would it be in comparison? It would appear as only a tiny dot. Face it; your lifeline would be short.

However, Christians are not to be of the world. When saved, our old self dies and a new person begins. We are no longer to think of life as ending with our death on earth. Instead, we are to view life as beginning at salvation and continuing for eternity. We are to look at life in a different way as found in second Corinthians: 2Co 4:18: While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

Now go back to our time line example. Visualize again the line representing all of time since creation, and the line (or dot) next to it representing your life. Begin a third line that extends from the floor reaching up through the ceiling. This third line continues upward not stopping until it reaches the end of our universe. This new line represents eternity. Compare the three lines in your mind. The line that was originally your lifeline has become invisible and the one representing time since creation is now just a tiny dot. Now how short does your life seem?

The saying is true and our life on earth in the flesh may be short but life itself is eternal. We all will live without end, and God’s grace gives each of us the chance to choose where we will live that eternity. Through God’s grace, and by our faith in the atoning power of the blood that Jesus shed for us, we can choose to live that eternity with God. It is God’s amazing grace that we sing of when we sing that famous hymn and those beautiful words which declare: “When we been there ten thousand years… we have no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first begun”. Amen.

With Love;

mj