No time spent serving Him will be wasted. Don’t waste your energy. While there is time, redeem it. Make the most of it. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.

Breaking news: We are all going to die. But prior to death, we lose our strength and energy. Old age comes with waning strength. Memory starts to slip; instability and immobility become a norm of life.
Young, healthy people don’t think about the later years as difficult days (Eccl 12:1). They focus on the here and now. But we have all seen the debilitating effects of old age and disease, and so we have to reckon with the reality that as life rolls on, it tends to get harder.
As we consider the imminent reality of death, Solomon charges us in Ecclesiastes 12 to remember our Creator in the days of our youth (v. 1). That is, we should remember who He is, what He has done, and who we are in relation to Him. We should maximize our effort while we still have life. While we have strength, we should serve God now.
Serve God Before Life Gets Harder, vv. 1-2
Most of us as children were unable to comprehend the pain of tragic events. Our innocence and naiveté tended to make tragedies a distant reality. But as we move toward middle age, we start to understand what these tragedies mean. We build deep relationships with people only to experience betrayal. We develop an abiding love for another person only to lose that person to death. And while those losses hurt, we still have much to do. We fill up our time with activity and work, and anticipate living for another forty years. Consequently, the noise of tragedy, while still painful, is somewhat muted by our busyness.
But eventually we get old, and our body breaks down, and our friends and family die. We start to go to more and more funerals of people younger than us—a rare occurrence when we were younger. In our youth, we went to funerals of older people and we understood that all older will eventually die. Now we are older ourselves. Our stamina has faded away. We have little ability to constructively contribute. Fewer and fewer people depend on us. And we know that it is only a matter of time until our own lives come to an end.
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How easily we can overlook our own ability to bring the Word of God to bear in our daily interactions. What if we thought more deeply about our beliefs, responsibilities, and everyday choices as we dwell together before a watching world? We are resident foreigners with an eternal citizenship in heaven (1 Peter 2:11). Remembering this divine reality changes the way we interact on earth. Imagine how mighty a witness we would be as countless thousands of Christians deploy into the culture every single day with one visual in mind: We are a city on a hill.

Let’s not be surprised. The world is a dark place, and attacks on Christianity by our culture are in abundant supply. A quick scroll through your social media feed or a fifteen-minute segment of the evening news will prove that. While some might say, “It’s worse than ever!” we must admit that somewhere in the world it’s always been like this. Jesus put it this way when preparing His own disciples for His departure: “In this world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33).
As Christians, it’s more than likely that our faith in Christ will bring us attacks, slander, workplace discrimination, and the loss of friends and opportunities. In the midst of such treatment, there is a temptation to fight fire with fire. But what if we saw times like these as a great opportunity to be a witness? What if our most powerful witness was found in using weapons of warfare that look nothing like the culture’s? As Christians, we are the light of the world. We are a city on a hill (Matt. 5:14). But how can light be light when it looks like the darkness?
The Apostle Paul was no stranger to trouble and dealing with difficult people, yet he continued to encourage the church to preserve its witness in the midst of a wicked culture. “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Col. 4:5–7). These words were penned by the same Paul who was slandered by false teachers and had his integrity questioned in Corinth (2 Cor. 10–11). Yet, Paul continued to make every effort to guard his witness by proclaiming the truth and walking with integrity. His heart was wide open to the church (6:11), he exemplified his own words to “owe no one anything” but to love others (Rom. 13:8), and he poured his life out as a drink offering (2 Tim. 4:6). He was a wonderful example of truth and integrity. How can we maintain our witness in today’s culture? By reflecting the character of Him to whom we bear witness.
The enemy’s strategy has not changed. Darkness will stop at nothing in tempting you to behave like the world in times like these.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Every single person, Christian or not, longs to be reunited with loved ones who have died, but the Christian longs to be with Christ. I can’t wait to see my father, my mother, and my friends in heaven, but beyond that, the ultimate hope of my soul is to see the resurrected Christ in His Father’s house, and He promised that this will happen.

What is heaven like? Is there anyone who hasn’t raised that question at one time or another? We could first ask, “Is there really such a thing as heaven?” Christianity has been loudly criticized for being a so-called pie-in-the-sky religion. Karl Marx popularized the idea that religion is the opiate of the people. His thesis was that religion had been invented and used by the ruling classes to exploit and oppress the poor people of the world. Religion, Marx claimed, would keep them from revolting by promising them great rewards if they would obey their masters, accept low wages, and so on—but their rewards would be deferred into eternity. In the meantime, these ruthless exploiters of the poor would amass fortunes for themselves here on earth. Marx took the cynical view that religion, with its hope of heaven, has been used as a club to keep unthinking people in line. Versions of this view have become so prevalent that now people are considered unsophisticated if they think at all about a future life, unless they’re at a funeral home or at a graveside. One cannot take Christianity seriously without seeing the central importance of the concept of heaven. There really is a “pie in the sky” idea that is integral to the Bible. I’m afraid we’ve lost our appetite for, or our taste sensitivity toward, those delights that God has stored up for His people in the future.
Christians are sometimes asked to name their favorite chapter in the New Testament. The top two results are 1 Corinthians 13, the great love chapter, and John 14. John 14 is where we’ll begin our brief study of heaven.
In this chapter, Jesus is speaking to His disciples in His last great discourse with them in the upper room on the night of the Last Supper. This is the night on which He was betrayed, the night before His execution. He tells them: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:1–2). Jesus begins with an admonition to His disciples not to allow their hearts to be distressed or disturbed. This is a call to trust and to faith. These words are so comforting to us that we can sometimes gloss over the cogency of the argument contained in this brief exercise in reason.
Jesus says, “Let not your hearts be troubled,” and then He urges them, “Believe in God; believe also in me.” Belief in God and belief in Christ are inextricably tied together, for this reason: according to the testimony of the New Testament, it is God who certifies and verifies the identity of Jesus. By endowing Christ with miraculous power and by raising Him from the dead, God proves and certifies that Christ is His beloved Son. Three times the New Testament records that God spoke audibly from heaven, and on all three occasions the announcement that came audibly from heaven was substantially the same thing: “This is my beloved Son.” In one case, the voice says “with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Another time it says, “Listen to him” (Matt. 17:5). In John 14, Jesus is saying that God the Father sent Him into the world, and God the Father bears witness to His identity in the world.
It’s in this context that Jesus makes His statements about heaven. Before He makes His announcement about heaven, He speaks of faith in God and faith in Himself. Why does He begin by saying, “Believe in God”? In a real sense, one’s relation to God is the controlling idea for one’s whole understanding of life, of the world, of death, and of heaven.
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