Build on eternal; squeeze in the temporary

~ From Derek Miller

We make many, many decisions in our lives.  These decisions range from the routine easy decisions to complex and difficult decisions with long-term impacts.  In the typical day, we have to make thousands of decisions.  We make decisions on whether to shower or eat first, what to eat for breakfast, what clothes to wear, what time to wake our children and/or spouses for their day, what route to use to get to work, and on and on.  Many of these go without much forethought and are made in a fraction of a second.  Many of these decisions, however, even when they are perceived to be small, can have many life altering impacts.

In the Guideposts story written by Kevn Felts, he tells the story of how he was struck to give a $100 to a family that he did not even know.  As it turned out, he provided the seed money to print the initial 15 copies of a story that would become the bestseller, The Shack.  Do you see that?  A simple act of giving to others, allowed author Paul Young to print out 15 copies of his story to distribute to his family members.  God used that gift to help millions who have read The Shack which has sold over 14.5 million copies.  Kevin relays that he never knew who he gave the money to until he was called upon to be the camera man for a documentary about Paul Young and realized he was the beneficiary of the $100.  A gift that has been multiplied many times over when placed in God's hands.

In Matthew 6:19-21, we are called upon to store up treasures in heaven and not here on earth.  Jesus lays out the different economic lessons that God has for us.  Many times we get hung up on the marketing blitz of modern times and we lose out on seeing that many "treasures" we seek have a short life span and we find that we have to scratch that itch for the next latest and greatest thing.

In Luke 12:16-21, Jesus relays the parable of the foolish farmer who has a bumper crop.  Rather than being generous with his bounty, he decides that he is going to build bigger barns and take it easy for a while.  The story shows that while Jesus continues to show that we tend to focus on the temporary, God is more interested in the eternal.  One thing to notice here is that Jesus doesn't say that the man in the story is evil or wicked.  He simply calls him a fool.  Why does Jesus use this harsh word?  The man did not deliberately set out to neglect his wife or ignore his children.  He did not establish the goal of becoming greedy and self-preoccupied as possible.  He didn't purpose in his heart to defy God or close off all compassion for the poor.  He just had other things to do.  He was simply too busy.  His priority list of what mattered most would be:

1. Harvest large crops
2. Build bigger barns
3. Achieve financial security
4. Eat
5. Drink
6. Be merry

What he did not bank on was that all of these things were temporary.

When we do a little mental accounting, we realize that as we look around and think about our lives, there are many things that are temporary.  This list includes our possessions, our resumes, our bodies, money, pleasures, other people's opinions of us, security, titles and positions, youth, power, physical attractiveness, and health.  On the Forever side of the ledger, we find God, our investments in the lives of others, our soul and deeds of love are eternal and are those treasures in heaven that Jesus talked about in the earlier verses.

What these verses are saying is that we need to be rich toward God.  You may ask, what does that look like:

• Being rich toward God means growing a soul that is increasingly healthy and good.
• Being rich toward God means loving and enjoying the people around you.
• Being rich toward God means learning about your gifts and passions and doing good work to help improve the world.
• Being rich toward God means becoming generous with our stuff.
• Being rich toward God means making that which is temporary become the servant of that which is eternal.
• Being rich toward God means savoring every roll of the dice and every trip around the board in this game of life.

What stops you from being rich toward God?

A couple of things get in our way.  One is that we are in a long lasting desire to keep score.  The old "keeping up with the Joneses" routine.  It is easy to use stuff to keep score and it is very difficult to quantify the effect of loving and serving both God and others.  We love to compare and contrast ourselves to those around us and decide whether we are better than, equal to, or worse than someone else.  Second and very related to the first, is that we like to live in the here and now and we lose track of the coming accountability that we are going to have to give later on.  With all of this, it is important to recognize that wise people build their lives around what is eternal and squeeze in what is temporary rather than the other way around.

Kyle Orth has learned that very thing.  Growing up in Tallahassee, Florida, he was one of the best athletes that I ever saw.  Whether we played football, basketball, baseball, track or any other athletic endeavor, everyone always wanted to be on Kyle's team.  It seemed that his teams never lost.  In a relay race, he was the anchor leg to make sure that any deficit after the third lap could be made up with his speed.  I was on a recreation league team with Kyle and we won the league championship in come from behind fashion due in large measure to Kyle's play.  As the years went along, my family moved away and when we moved back to Tallahassee, his family had moved.  The last time that I saw Kyle was when he came to a bank I worked at in 1982.  We had lost touch with each other.

Recently, through a series of God centered events, our lives have reconnected when I noticed pictures of work he was doing last summer in South Africa.  After getting to see his sister on Facebook and getting his contact information, I corresponded with Kyle and he related his story of how he has gotten so heavily involved in kingdom work.  He related to me that while influenced by events that happened to build his foundation in childhood, his recent involvement in these missional trips has been triggered by a calling to do things with an eternal effect rather than a temporary one.  It started about a decade ago with a daily quiet time and then built into his following the footprints of Jesus into the world.  He answered the call of who will go with, "Here am I, send me."

Kyle is epitomizing that wise people build their lives around what is eternal and squeeze in what is temporary rather than the other way around.  I always enjoyed being on Kyle's teams because I knew that we were going to win.  Jesus' words show that we need to recognize that it is being on His team that really makes all the difference.  When we do that and we change our focus from ourselves and our needs to those of others around us that is when we become eternal winners!