August 24: Thoughts on James 4:13-14

"Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."
~ James 4:13-14

Our lives aren't endless. Because we are young, it is likely that we will wake up tomorrow morning and the sun will rise on another day of our lives, but it's not guaranteed.

There's only a small percent chance that you will die tomorrow. However, there is a 100% chance that you will die. It's what we all have in common. Everybody dies.

A lot of people, particularly young adults, think they can live their lives however they want to because they're young, and that they'll give their lives to Christ when they're older. This isn't such a good idea, for a couple of reasons.

First, it's not a good idea because you don't know for sure that you'll make it to be an old person. Death is relatively rare among young adults, but it does happen. The death rate per year of people between the ages of 20 and 24 is 101 deaths per 100,000 people. That's about a .1% chance of dying in any given year, which doesn't sound like much. And it isn't - unless you happen to be one of those 18,000 Americans between 20 and 24 who pass away every year. For them, it's everything.

Ask yourself - and I'm not trying to be morbid, but it's an important question - if you went to sleep tonight and didn't wake up in the morning, where would you spend eternity (and why)? If you got to the pearly gates and the Lord asked you why you deserved to be let into Heaven, what would you tell Him?

Certainly, I don't think there's anything I've done that makes me worthy of entering into His glory, so my only answer would be that I've been washed in the Blood of Jesus, and the God's Word says that's enough (a whole bunch of Scriptures). God's not a liar, and His Word won't return void (Isaiah 55:11), so I know that He'll have to let me in. But what would you say? Do you truly have a personal relationship with Jesus? Have you accepted His sacrifice for your sins?

The second reason it's a bad idea to wait until later in your life to turn to God is that it's not always possible for you to do so. The longer that you're apart from God, the harder your heart becomes against Him. Let's take, for instance, Ephesians 4:17-19: "So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more."

The longer you are in sin, the longer you're away from God, the more you forget about and the less you desire the things of God, until eventually your heart becomes hard and foolish and you begin saying things to yourself like, "God doesn't really exist" or "there's a God, but He can't care about me after all I've done" or "yeah, God is real, but I'd rather spend my life having a good time than serving Him" or "maybe Hell is a real place, but the future isn't important; right now is what matters."

That's utter foolishness. Think about it. You are going to be dead a lot longer than you are going to be alive. We live but for a season, 120 years at the absolute maximum. But after we die, what is there? Eternity. And eternity, by its very definition, is eternal - it lasts forever. So isn't concerning ourselves with what we're going to be doing forever and ever and ever a little more sensible than trying to have a very short good time while we're here on earth? Isn't it worth considering eternal things, considering God?

We're a mist that appears for a little while on the earth and then vanishes. A million years from now, it won't matter where you went to school, what your grades were like, who you dated, what fraternity you joined - but it will matter whether you loved and served the Lord of all creation and who you shared the Gospel with.

As young adults, we have this sort of overwhelming tendency to think about what makes us happy right now, but maybe we should stop for a moment and just ponder the eternal meanings of our everyday lives. Are we giving our all to God and sharing Him with others, or, in being busy busy busy, are we barely managing to acknowledge Him at all?