Enjoying Your Future Today
Here is some irony for you: When you can find satisfaction with God alone, and you don’t need anything else to make you happy, you can have a “piece of heaven” on earth. This soul condition is the heavenly jewel of contentment in your terrestrial life.
You can experience the “future life of rest and contentment” today. This kind of experience does not mean God will protect you from all present evil trouble. Christ was able to sleep in the midst of a storm and you can too (Mark 4:38).
But you must not fall into the trap of thinking you’re not in a war here on earth. Rest and contentment come from God-centered confidence that He is ultimately in control, even if you lose your earthly life.
Our problem is that we love our earthly lives too much while making claims for some of life’s pleasures and perks as though that is all that matters. If that is how you think, you will be an unstable and disillusioned Christian. You cannot serve two masters.
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. – Matthew 6:24
Do you want peace on earth? You can have it, but God may have to kill you first (John 12:24). Only when you die to your selfish ambition, secret desires, pet preferences and expected outcomes will you be able to enjoy peace on earth.
If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? – Luke 9:23-25
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. – Luke 14:26-27
The preacher should have blared from his pulpit, “You follow hard after God and it may cost you the dearest things you have, even your own life, but there is an inexpressible grace for this entrance into the depths of the knowledge of the sufferings of Christ. Even in your greatest losses, you will never be disappointed with the Lord because He is all you need.”
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. – Philippians 3:8-11
This article originally appeared here.
