Deadly Serious Fun

"Most members of my family were short livers; a few were long livers, and at least one or two who drank to excess had almost no liver at all." 

Like most people I have no idea how long I will live, but I do know that I am almost six-and-a-half decades closer to going to meet the Lord than I was the day I was born.  While death stinks, my redemption by the sacrificial love of Christ is going to lead me to yet unimagined sweetness and glory.  I know that I am just passing through this short life before I enter the eternal presence of Father God.  I am more than just a little eager to be embraced by Christ who bore my sins that I might live because He loved me before I ever was.

Yet, at times I feel a profound sadness run though me when I recover my eschatological perspective after having savored some frivolous pleasantry or other.  That is not so say that I am continually glum, far from it.  There is too much to seriously enjoy in this life. God the Provider showers us daily with an abundance of things to enjoy and savor, but this pleasure has a quality of seriousness in its origins and in our participation.  God makes for some serious fun.

For example, God gave us five senses with which to enjoy as well as to know and comprehend our environment.  More than simply knowing whether the temperature is warm or cold, we can enjoy and relish a cool breeze on a hot day or to cherish the scent of soil and molded leaves while on a promenade in the woods.  We can react to the horn of an oncoming car as much as we can delight in a symphony.  With the same skin we are motivated to escape the heat of a flame as well as to take delight in the soft touch of another person.  God created our senses to guard our lives as well as for us to know pleasure.

Frivolous pleasures are ones that involve little objective thought or lack the goal of glorifying God.  It is difficult to praise God for a silly or off-color joke.  It is correspondingly challenging to reflect God’s holiness while wasting time pointlessly surfing the Internet.  Can one seriously consider His greatness while absentmindedly chatting?

 So it is often after such inconsequential or trivial moments when I regain a more balanced perspective and consider the daily calamity of the tens of thousands of people who die each day having never walked with Jesus Christ.  There is a diabolical conveyor belt dropping untold numbers of family, friends, neighbors, people on the street, and myriad unknowns around the world into a hellish hole never to be heard from again.  They are gone forever. 

As a follower of Jesus Christ I have a full-time job.  More than the job which I believe puts food on my table or keeps a roof over my head, I have a very real job, a deadly serious job.  My “job one” is to share Christ with those who don’t walk with Him.  I can push papers, make decisions, write reports, and attend meetings, or craft plans, direct others, and aggrandize the organization, but nothing that I can ever do in that context has the unambiguous potential of helping to save someone’s eternity.

Reflective of 1 Corinthians 13, if I give away all that I have, if I deliver up my body to be burned, if I give someone a meal, a warm coat, or guarantee them their voting rights, but I have not endeavored to introduce them to Jesus Christ I am nothing and neither have I really done anything lasting, that is of eternal consequence for them.  I may have fritted away their time and mine pretending to do something of significance while I afforded them the horror of spending eternity separated from God.  This equation does not balance.

One must face the fact that our lives and the lives of everyone we know, love, or meet have a deadly serious quality. We can spend our lives building sand castles that wash away with the next tide.  We can try to ignore the fact that most of us will be largely forgotten within a generation or two of our passing.  We can spend our working lives or our retirement vacationing, travelling, having all sorts of fun, collecting seashells, or whatever trivialities we care to pursue.  Some of what we do will be of absolutely no consequence and will be as trivial and inconsequential as surfing the Internet or chuckling at a silly joke. In moderation, that’s okay.

However, there will come a time in each life when the scales are balanced.  At that time one can offer God all of the postcards, seashells, letters to the editor, signed petitions, Facebook posts, vacation photos, or quarters dropped into snowy Salvation Army buckets in feint hopes that the conversation will not turn to lost moments, missed opportunities, and unspoken conversations with those who passed through our lives only to fall onto the diabolical conveyor belt to perdition.

Yes, God gave us various sources of pleasure, He gave us myriad opportunities for fun, He gave us an entire world which to enjoy.  He also gave each of us an eternally serious job to do.  To pursue the former with not even a fleeting thought for the latter is to miss the entire point of creation and ultimately and eternally the very reason for each of our lives.

“Don’t waste your life.”  John Piper

“We are blessed so that we can bless others.”  Daniel, who gave the message at International Bible Fellowship in Ouagadougou on Sunday.