How often do we put all our hopes and dreams in the things that we see?
We want to be successful. We want to find meaning in today. We want to experience love and happiness. We want to have friendships and feel belonging.
None of these things are bad in and of themselves. Yes, we want to feel successful and find meaning in what we do. Yes, we want to find companionship and experience all the feels that come along with being intimately connected with others.
But in our searching for these things, we often fall into the trap of idolizing them. Seeing this temporal, right now –stuff, as so necessary, we would give just about anything for them. It is a dangerous game that we play.
In fact, it isn’t a game at all. It is a painful reminder that we stumble and fall, forgetting our purpose in finding joy in the eternal rather than trying to find it in the temporal.
King Solomon wrote:
“What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?A generation goes, and a generation comes,But the earth remains forever.”
Ecclesiastes 1:3-4
We forget so easily that we are here today and gone tomorrow. That generations come and generations go. Life is fleeting, a mist. We are but grains of sand on the seashore washed away as fast we came. Yet our earthly, temporal life is the not the end of our living. We are eternal beings, designed for so much more than this broken world.
Which is why Jesus warns us:
“For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?”
Luke 9:25
The world in all its trappings is just a temporal fix for what is really an eternal problem. Salvation eternally can’t be fixed, set right, by a duct-tape solution. It requires so much more. It requires an eternal solution. His name is Jesus.
He tells us that when we put our hope in the temporal – in the created and fallen world around us we forfeit, losing ourselves in the process. We walk into the maze of this world in hopes of the salvation we so desperately need only to find ourselves unable to reach the very thing we are reaching for. Its reflection disappears as the world darkens and we find ourselves lost in the temporal, unable to see past ourselves to the eternal.
There is no profit in putting our hope in the now, to see time destroy the world that we thought would be our salvation.
Our success, belonging, love and joy is found in the eternal. No, we can’t often see it. At least not with these physical eyes. It is hard to see time with the exception of its extraordinary movement. The eternal is seen only through the soul. Embraced by heart and engaged with the spirit.
Jesus takes our hands, the one for whose sake we give everything, and he leads us there.
To the place we deeply long for. The place of rest and grace. The place where we don’t lose, we gain. We gain an eternal perspective because we have paid the price of pain and denial and found ourselves with all we could ever want or need. All in the person of Jesus.
For his sake we give everything that we are so that it is not lose, but perfect gain in an eternal life with him. Starting now.
Are you ready to gain? To take that step into an eternal mindset that begins with walking with Jesus?
Join me in this journey of experiencing true peace and joy, not just in the now, but for an eternity with God. The God of creation, the one and only, designer of your being and all you see and feel and experience, and everything you can’t see! He put it all together.
It’s a journey that will encompass your whole life. It will shape you and everything about you. You won’t ever want for a temporal world when an eternal is built for you!
Start now. Gain the eternal.
