Made to Last Forever

This life is not all there is. Life on earth is just the dress rehearsal before the real production. You will spend far more time on the other side of death—in eternity—than you will here. Earth is the staging area, the preschool, the tryout for your life in eternity. It is the practice workout before the actual game; the warm-up lap before the race begins. This life is preparation for the next.

At most, you will spend a hundred years on earth, but you will spend forever in eternity. Your time on earth is, as Sir Thomas Browne said, "but a small parenthesis in eternity." You were made to last forever.

When you fully comprehend that there is more to life than just here and now, and you realize that life is just preparation for eternity, you will begin to live differently. You will start living in light of eternity, and that will color how you handle every relationship, task, and circumstance. Suddenly many activities, goals and even problems that seemed so important will appear trivial, petty, and unworthy of your attention. The closer you live to God, the smaller everything else appears.

When you live in light of eternity, your values change. You use your time and money more wisely. You place a higher premium on relationships and character instead of fame or wealth or achievements or even fun. Your priorities are reordered. Keeping up with trends, fashions, and popular values doesn't matter so much anymore. Paul said, "What things were gain to me, I counted loss for Christ" (Philippians 3:7).

C.S. Lewis captured the concept of eternity on the last page of the Chronicles of Narnia, his seven-book children's fiction series: "For us, this is the end of all the stories…. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world … had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever and in which every chapter is better than the one before." [C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 184.]

God has a purpose for your life on earth, but it doesn't end here. His plan involves far more than the few decades you will spend on this planet. It's more than "the opportunity of a lifetime"; God offers you an opportunity beyond your lifetime.

Measured against eternity, our time on earth is just the blink of an eye, but the consequences of it will last forever. Years ago a popular slogan encouraged people to live each day "as the first day of the rest of your life." Actually, it would be wiser to live each day as if it were the last day of your life. Matthew Henry said, "It ought to be the business of every day to prepare for our final day." -From the book Purpose -Driven Life by Rick Warren

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