When It's All Been Said and Done

Grab your Bible and open up to Matthew 6:19 and read through verse 21. This passage is talking about temporal things compared to eternal things. In today’s current culture, we can practically buy anything. There a maxim that states simply, “People will do anything for a dollar”, which in actuality is true in today’s culture. So you can take this passage in three different ways:

1. You can go and live on the bare necessities of life, consecrating your life to the study of the Bible, and sell everything that you have, giving the money that you earned to the poor.

2. You can enjoy some of the pleasures that God has given you without making them idols of your heart. You can use the money, great or small, that God has given you to promote good things (i.e. giving to the church, giving to missionaries, etc.).

3. You can let this passage have no effect on you and continue your life unchanged by the passage.

            

           Option number one is the extreme response, which is not exactly biblically based, although devoting your life to the study of God’s Word is a good thing. The problem is that God has put you where you are with the income for several reasons. For instance, if you have no money, you cannot support missionaries, and they play an important role in the spreading of the gospel. Another thing is that God has put certain pleasures on this earth so that we may enjoy them in moderation.

            

            Option number two is the one that I want to focus on right now. Now, it’s okay to have tangible things, but seriously, some of us (make that a lot of us) need to cut back. Everyone has their “thing”, mine is movie making, so I’ll use that as an example. It isn’t wrong to have a nice camera, greenscreen, movie props, and all of that paraphernalia, but in the end, that’s not going to matter. Turn in your Bible to 1 Peter 1:7, which says, “^7 that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ…” This passage says basically that what we’ve done on earth will be tested by fire, and all of the temporal things (things of this world) will burn, and everything eternal will last.

            

           By eternal things, I mean things such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, purity, and humility (Galatians 5, 1 Corinthians 5). These are the virtues that we must be building here on earth. This short time period of a few decades is all of the time we have on earth, yet somehow we acquire more things for this time period than we build for eternity. Think about this: We are on earth for maybe seventy years, and we, as Christians, have an eternity in heaven. If you’re having trouble thinking about what eternity is, imagine opening up a word document as a five-year old child, and pressing the “1” key once, and pressing the “0” key and holding it. If you held that your entire life and you lived to be 1,000 years old, the number at the end of your life would not even come close to the amount of years that we’ll have in heaven. So let me end this article with one question, “When it’s all been said and done, what will matter?”