Recently, I was listening to one of David Platt’s sermons and he said something that caused me to sit up straight: “So many things we focus on will not matter in 10 years, let alone 10 billion years from now. We are blinded by the temporal and the trivial.”

Given that I am currently quite preoccupied by the fact that we are dealing with a bank that is moving slower than a snail, I had to admit that this issue certainly will not matter in 10 billion years.

What is the only thing that will matter 10 billion years from now?

Jesus.

It always comes back to Jesus. The One Who was, Who is, Who is to come.

The Creator and Sustainer of this world. The Great I AM. The Messiah. The Savior.

Only one life; twill soon be past

Only what is done for Christ will last.

I was reminded of this afresh on Saturday night.

Our family attended a play at the high school that evening. Several of our kids’ friends were in the show and it was a very enjoyable evening.

After the curtain fell, everyone spilled out into the lobby to congratulate the cast on a job well done. I had stepped away after taking my turn through the line and was waiting by the doors for my husband to finish when a friend approached me.

The look on her face was very serious.

“We got devastating news,” she said softly.

Her husband was diagnosed with cancer last summer. After a grueling treatment, the cancer was still ravaging his body. In a last ditch effort to save his life, another round of treatment was begun in February. Hopes were high that this would work.

It was not to be.

“The treatment isn’t working. The main focus now is just to make him comfortable.”

I glanced over at her husband, who was standing against a wall with one of their neighbors. He looked so frail, so sad. He had just witnessed his son steal the show with his amazing comedic timing on the stage. He will not live to see another play or to see his son graduate next year. I noticed that his gaze was riveted on his boy across the room, as if trying to memorize his face.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered as I drew her into a hug. She felt thin, small. There were lines on her face that were not there when I first met her three years ago.

In the midst of a room filled with the energy of youth and hearty laughter, reality crashed into my heart with the force of a bullet shattering glass and my eyes filled with tears.

This life is not a dress rehearsal.

How we live out our eighty or so years on this planet will directly affect where we will spend eternity.

The instant we die, we will immediately come face to face with the risen Christ. We will either see Him as our Savior or our Judge. The choice is ours.

Sin against a holy God has to go somewhere. Either we pay for the full penalty of our sin and experience the horrors of a Christ-less eternity or we run to the cross in desperation with all our strength and throw ourselves on the breathtaking grace and mercy of the perfect God-Man who died in our place so that we might live.

Nothing else will matter on that day: not our health, our bank account, our home, our possessions, our job, our marital status, our college degrees, our titles. Nothing.

Where is your focus? Is it on the eternal: God, His Word and people?

Or is your one precious life slipping quietly away as you obsess about the mundane and trivial and temporal?

Wake up!!!

And please pray for this man who does not (yet) know Jesus. He has less than two months left on this earth.

“This world has been condemned to ultimate dissolution. The human spirit persists beyond the grave and there indeed is a world to come. The church is constantly being tempted to accept this world as her home … we would do well to contemplate the long tomorrow.” —A.W. Tozer