Forever (Friday Devotional)

 

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven…I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it; God has done this so that all should stand in awe before him 

- Ecclesiastes 3:1, 14

For weeks, my wife Lindsey had been giving the side eye to my favorite pair of blue jeans. Their fadedness had gone from fashionable to embarrassing. There were telltale bulges in the pockets where my phone and wallet always rested. Most notably, there was a rip in one of the back pockets.

Nevertheless, when she told me it was time to retire those jeans, I resisted. They were my most comfortable pair, and they fit me better than any others I had. They were also my most expensive pair (though admittedly not by much…my budget veers closer to Old Navy than to Gucci.) I wasn’t ready to part with them yet.

Then on Halloween, my kids and their cousins were playing wiffleball in the front yard and I joined in. After smacking a sharp line drive into the neighbor’s yard, I hustled around the bases and slid across our makeshift home plate, only to feel something give on my backside. I stood up and patted the back of my jeans—sure enough, that little rip had tripled in size.

And with that, my favorite pair of jeans was finally relegated to “yardwork clothes,” no longer suitable for wearing out in public. At long last, their time had come.

In the Book of Ecclesiastes, the writer reminds us of something we all know deep down, even if we don’t always like to think about it—nothing in this life lasts forever. Everything we are blessed to receive and cursed to endure is seasonal, here today and gone tomorrow. Your health and your wealth, your gains and your pains, none of it—for better and for worse—goes with you when you die.

But where the experiences of this life are all transient, God is eternal. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And the work he does stands forever.

That ought to affect your priorities. Life is full of immediate concerns, but you must remember that there is a difference between what’s immediate and what’s important. Spiritual issues can feel secondary sometimes, but they are what endures when the affairs of this world are a distant memory. Prayer is not something to be put off, and worship is not something you do only when it’s convenient for your schedule—these are the things that truly matter.

Nothing in this life lasts forever, not even your best pair of jeans. So invest in what lasts forever—not the things of earth, but the glories of heaven.