June 21, 2019 (Friday)
Years ago I visited a lady in a nursing home who was having her 90th birthday. I wished her a happy birthday and she replied, “I knew I was going to get old, but I didn’t know it would come so soon!” Now that I am old, I can identify with what she said very well. How did this happen? How did I get so old, so soon?
The lesson for me is, “Life is short.” If you live 100 years, you’ve lived 36,525 days. Now isn’t that something! I can measure my life in days. How many days has the sun been shining, or the stars glowing? You cannot use that measurement. It would be an unmanageable task to compute a number that big. But I can tell you how many days I have lived (32,043), because our lives on earth are so brief.
David said, “The days of our lives are seventy years, or even eighty if we have strength; yet their span is but toil and trouble. Our years are soon gone, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).
Hey, have you read what James wrote in the Bible about your length of days? In case you have not read it lately, I’ll tell you what he says: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into this city and spend a year there, do business and make profit’. Yet you do not know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? It is just a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James 4:13-14).
Paul taught us many things about the life to come after this one. He reminded us that Jesus Christ shall return to us and raise the dead. He startled us when he said, “if in this life only, we have hope in Christ, of all men we are most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).
“But our citizenship is in Heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 3:20).
“Heaven is where Jesus is. We do not need to speculate on what heaven will be like. It is enough to know that we will be forever with Him.” (William Barclay).
Mother Teresa may have offered us the most practical thoughts about heaven. She said, “We all long for heaven where God is, but we have it in our power to be in heaven with him right now-to be happy with him at this very moment. But being happy with him now means:loving as he loves,
helping as he helps,
giving as he gives,
serving as he serves,
rescuing as he rescues,
being with him for all the twenty-four hours,
touching him in his distressing disguise”