by Kevin Burton
James called your life and mine “a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14b NKJV).
Even those with a complete lack of discernment and self-awareness, if they would pause long enough to just do the math of life, I think would still come to this conclusion.
To conclude otherwise is pure hubris and self-delusion.
Today’s headline (Hold Lightly To Earthly Things) is plucked from a recent message by Alistair Begg, speaker on the Truth For Life radio ministry.
Begg began his message with a passage from Job (which I will expand a little):
“Man who is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower and fades away; He flees like a shadow and does not continue” (Job 14: 1-2 NKJV).
The Bible is full of such admonitions. Life doesn’t last forever. A day of reckoning is coming.
“It may be of great service to us, before we fall asleep, to remember this mournful fact, for it may lead us to hold lightly to earthly things,” Begg writes. “There is nothing very pleasant in the recollection that we are not above the arrows of adversity, but it may humble us and prevent us from boasting like the psalmist that our mountain stands firm, that we shall never be moved.”
“It may prevent us from making our roots too deep in this soil from which we are so soon to be transplanted into the heavenly garden.”
I am old now by just about anybody’s measure. But not so old that I can’t remember the headrush of youth, when I had, so I thought, forever and a day.
From that vantage point it may be difficult to see life’s ultimate reality. But if one pays attention, as the days and years pass, that reality will emerge, gently or harshly, but certainly.
“Let us keep in mind the frail tenure upon which we hold our temporal mercies,” Begg writes. “If we remember that all the trees of earth are marked for the woodman’s axe, we will not be so ready to build our nests in them.”
“We should love, but we should love with the love that expects death, and that reckons upon separations. Our dear relations are simply loaned to us, and the hour when we must return them to the lender’s hand may be sooner than we think.”
The truth of this point I am all too painfully aware of. I can remember a day when I heard on the radio, a message from Our Daily Bread Ministries about grief. I said to myself, “I don’t need that.” Within two weeks, my best boyhood friend was dead.
“This is also true of our worldly goods. Do not riches take to themselves wings and fly away? Our health is equally precarious. Frail flowers of the field, we must not reckon upon blooming forever. There is a time appointed for weakness and sickness, when we will have to glorify God by suffering and not by earnest activity.”
So here is where I want to divide the question. My worldly goods are less and less precious to me. In fact I feel a growing desire to thrust many of them away.
But the people, starting with my mother, living with great difficulty what we believe to be her final days/weeks/months, I can’t bear to part with.
But this is a reality all of us face.
“There is no single point in which we can hope to escape from the sharp arrows of affliction; out of our few days there is not one secure from sorrow,” Begg writes. “Man’s life is a cask full of bitter wine; he who looks for joy in it would be better looking for honey in a salty ocean.”
To have God walking with me through these painful times, and promising salvation and Heaven through faith in Jesus Christ His Son, this is the only thing that makes it all bearable.
“Beloved reader, do not set your affections upon things of earth, but seek those things that are above, for here the moth devours, and the thief steals, but there, all joys are perpetual and eternal,” Begg writes.
“The path of trouble is the way home. Lord, make this thought a pillow for many a weary head!”
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