This morning I woke up to another birthday.

Another year completed during which the Lord has abundantly blessed me with daily provision, new life and health.

Another opportunity to count my numerous blessings and to pause and reflect. To be grateful for the ability to know and grow more in my relationship with my Creator, to be grateful to have met my Saviour at a young age and to have received His very costly grace!, to reflect on the blessing of having a Godly, loving, caring, hard-working wife and two healthy, talented, obedient children. To be thankful or family members, church-family, friends, work, health, peace in my country.

Abundant blessings… too many to count.

Also the realisation that whatever happens in this life is of temporary nature. That it is oh-so-easy to get sucked into and to remain focused on the earthly, material, here-and-now… so very easy to focus on gathering riches and possessions and non-important “stuff”… instead of treasures in Heaven… treasures of eternal value!

My son recently sent me the following message by Dr. Steve Lawson on the 70 life resolutions of puritan Jonathan Edwards and how he viewed his time… (Please make some time to listen to it! – find the link below…)

He lived with a conscious awareness and goal to ask himself:

“What will most glorify God”

He attempted to do this in EVERYTHING that he did (1 Cor 10:31). The core idea that really struck me was how he purposefully developed and worked on having an eternal perspective in everything he did (starting from a very young age). He did this, knowing that in his own power this would not be possible and therefor with a heavy dependence on God’s grace (John 15:5 – “…apart from me you can do nothing” )

To help Jonathan Edwards remember this eternal perspective, he incorporated 3 perspectives/subjects to reflect on, into his daily habits:

1. The shortness of life
2. The certainty & suddenness of death
3. The length of eternity

He prayed that God would “stamp eternity onto his eyeballs”

Wow! As a person who lost my father recently, I have become keenly aware of the brevity of life. As I reflect on my next year of life, this video and these words above, about having an eternal perspective, truly made me rethink my own life within the context of eternity. My prayer is that it will also make you pause and reflect…

Let me ask you this question:

If you were to die today, where will you spend eternity?

If you are not sure, or are hoping for a best-case scenario, based on your own “good” works, I would implore you to go to the book of life, the Bible, and read scriptures like the following:

• for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23)
• The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim 1:15)
• For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)
• Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
• For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
• if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9)
• No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.(John 6:44)
• I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)
• And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. (Matt 25:46)

References:

• Image: https://www.tntchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Eternity-timeline.png
• All scripture from the English Standard Version (ESV) Bible translation (2001)