LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
When I was younger, the idea of “forever” would haunt me.
At that time, I didn’t know where I would spend eternity. But even though I was just a kid, I did understand that eternity was a real thing, and that I would spend it somewhere—maybe heaven, maybe hell, or maybe just six feet underground. In a way, they all seemed scary, because of the vast amount of time I would spend there. Think about it: when you’re young, even waiting until Christmas feels like “forever,” and something like a century seems unfathomably long. But forever isn’t measured in centuries.
In church, we’d sing “Amazing Grace,” and the final verse goes like this:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.1
The thing about this verse is that it’s actually correct. Ten thousand years into eternity, you will not be a single day closer to the end of forever. You won’t be 1 percent of the way there, or 0.01 percent, or even 0.000001 percent. You will still have an eternity to go. Even after a billion years, you’ll still have eternity in front of you. It never ends.
So I knew that I would either cease to exist and be nothing forever or go to hell and be tormented forever or go to heaven, and—I don’t know—maybe sit on a cloud and play a harp forever. I didn’t have a good understanding of what any of those would be like, and the sheer thought of spending forever in any of them seemed terrifying. The word forever, when I thought about it, sounded like the ominous quote from the movie The Sandlot: “For-ev-er. For-ev-er. FOR-EV-ER.”
We often fear what we don’t know much about. Since that time, I’ve learned a lot more about God and his nature, and I’m confident where I’ll spend the rest of my life after earth. I know it won’t be a cartoonish harp-playing festival. I believe that I will be with God in his kingdom, which is perfect and without sadness, disease, sin, or death. While that’s still difficult to imagine, it doesn’t stop me from trying. I think about heaven all the time. It sounds awesome, and I’m pretty excited about going there.
Though forever is now exciting, rather than scary, it is still forever. Regardless of how much longer I live in this life, whether it’s one more day or seventy more years, it barely even registers as a speck compared to eternity. Sometimes when I talk to people about heaven they say, “I’m looking forward to it, but there are things I want to accomplish here first”—things like getting married or raising a family or visiting Paris or becoming successful and leaving a legacy. I can understand why they feel that way, but to be honest, that’s stupid.
What is most important to you in this life is always changing. Think back to Christmastime when you were a little kid. Do you remember the anticipation of getting that one particular toy you desperately wanted? Remember how it meant everything to you? What was that toy for you? For me it was a scooter one year and remote-controlled car the next. Yet now, not only do we not play with those toys but also we most likely don’t even have them anymore, and might struggle to even remember what they were. You can’t remember the thing that once kept you up at night with anticipation. Even by high school, you would probably have laughed at the idea that the toy was important at all.
No, by high school, you had much more important things to strive toward. Do you remember what they were? Getting a letter jacket, wearing a homecoming mum or garter, getting the attention of your crush, and going to that all-important, life-defining prom. This stuff, you thought, was truly important, not that silly childhood toy. You had new things to think about at night.
Of course, once you make it to college, you’re no longer sporting that letter jacket. It turns out your high school accomplishments weren’t that important after all. Now, you realized what was really important: choosing a major, getting into the right fraternity or sorority, and getting a degree that will set the course of your life.
Except then you entered the real world and found out all that college stuff wasn’t so important, either. There were new more important things, like getting a job, finding a place to live, and convincing someone to spend the rest of their life with you . . . it goes on and on. Don’t you feel like what is important to you right now is what is really important in life? That’s what you’ve always thought. Think about it: we always feel “now I know what is really important.” Heaven will be the final realization of what actually matters, and it’s not any of those things. We’ll find that all those things we didn’t want to miss out on in life don’t really matter in an eternity where we lack nothing.
I can’t wait to get there! More than once, in these conversations about heaven, I’ve been asked, “But don’t you want to watch your kids grow up and walk your girls down the aisle at their weddings?” Yes. I certainly look forward to that day, but in no way can I compare that to the glory of heaven! I could either attend a wedding I paid for (not looking forward to that aspect of it) or attend the wedding feast of the bridegroom Jesus Christ, who invented marriage and owns the cattle on a thousand hills?! There’s no decision to be made. Give me Jesus. Fortunately I don’t have to decide. I woke up this morning; God trusted me with life here for another day. So my life will be lived for him.
Paul says it like this: “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). Or, as he says a couple of verses later, it is “better by far” to “depart and be with Christ” (v. 23). He knew that any day in heaven is better than any day spent on earth, and so the end of this life was actually something to look forward to. But God still had work for Paul to do on earth, and people for him to minister to (vv. 24–26), so Paul would keep working until God decided to call him home.
That’s the same position we find ourselves in today. We have work to do here on earth, but it’s all just a prologue before God calls us home.
The Most Important Thing
Though there is work for us to do, our performance in this life does not determine whether we get into heaven. That’s a really important distinction.
Full disclosure: I had an editor read through a draft of this book, and she suggested that this section might not be necessary because most readers probably grew up going to church and would already know it. However, I also grew up going to church and didn’t understand it at all until much later, when I was an adult. And I’ve talked with many people who have stories similar to mine. So I ask you, even if you think you’re a Christian and you have been all your life, not to skip or gloss over what I’m about to say. It’s literally the most important point in this book.
I was raised in a religious family. I went to a religious school and attended Catholic Mass twice a week, on Friday and Sunday. Get this! I literally won the “Religion Award” (yes, that’s a real thing) eight of the nine years at my Catholic school. Now, I’m not bragging; this did not help me to understand who God is. To me, Christianity was defined by performing certain rituals, following a list of rules, and generally being a good person.
The main problem with this “just be good” mentality was that, despite the awards, I just wasn’t that good. I was educated enough on the rules to know that I still broke them regularly. It’s not like I could help it: Jesus himself said that even thinking about doing some sins still counted as being sinful itself (Matt. 5:21–28). Not that I only thought about them; I also regularly acted on those thoughts, especially as I grew older and started to enter adulthood. Eventually, I gave up any pretense of even trying. Odds are, whatever rules you’ve ever broken, I’ve probably broken them too. Sex, pornography, alcohol, drugs, materialism, an arrest record—all the usual suspects. It’s the all-too-common story of someone who grew up in a Christian home and then wandered away from that lifestyle as a teenager and young adult.
So, essentially, I tried the religion thing, and then tried the you-only-live-once-so-live-for-your-own-pleasure-and-happiness thing. Both of them failed in that neither of them actually made me happy.
More importantly, I knew that neither of them would make God happy. I learned to think of God as this kind of sheriff in the sky who was looking to catch me in some wrong act. Have you ever thought about God that way? Like he’s just waiting for you to mess up? I didn’t want to have to deal with the choices I was making. The more I sought to enjoy life without God, the less I wanted to face him.
Why Did Jesus Have to Die?
There was one thing that I had never fully understood, though. Obviously, I had learned every single Easter about the story of Jesus: that he was the Son of God, lived on earth as a man, was killed on the cross on Good Friday, and came back to life on Easter Sunday. This is a ridiculous narrative, if you think about it. Why did Jesus have to die in the first place?
I remember asking that exact question as a kid, but I didn’t get a good answer at the time (or at least I didn’t understand it then). Follow me here: Jesus never did anything wrong. Unlike every other person who has ever lived, Jesus never sinned. He didn’t masturbate, look at porn, get drunk, get high, or pursue many of the vices I have. He wasn’t jealous, greedy, lustful, or prideful. He was perfect. This means that, out of all the people who have ever lived, Jesus least deserved to be punished in any way, let alone be given the death penalty. But that’s what happened, even after multiple trials failed to find any reason to convict him (John 18:38–19:6).
Jesus is God, and God is fully in control. He proved that he was in control through miracles such as stopping a storm, walking on water, and bringing the dead back to life. Since he had control of everything from the laws of physics to death itself, that means Jesus’s own death wasn’t an accident or some unfortunate mistake of the justice system. He had the power to stop it. Even an average lawyer would have had the power to stop it. The crucifixion wasn’t a surprise to God; it was all part of the plan. But what was the point of the plan?
Think of it this way: If what God wants from us is to just “be good,” then why would Jesus have to die a slow, tortuous, publicly humiliating death for that? Couldn’t Jesus just tell us to be good, show us what being good looked like, and then go on his way? I mean, dying doesn’t seem to help with that plan. It kind of hurts the argument: Jesus actually was good, never made a mistake, and was killed for it anyway. That wouldn’t seem to bode too well for us who try, but then fail, to live up to God’s standards. People like me. People like, well, everyone. If you think you just have to be good to get to heaven, then you believe God wasted the death of his Son.
It wasn’t until I was a twentysomething adult, sitting in church, still hurting from the decisions I’d made the night before, that I once again heard the gospel and understood why it was called “good news.”
What’s Good about Friday
See, the message Jesus brought wasn’t “be good” or “follow the rules.” In fact, he clarified that there was no possible way to be “good enough.” Jesus spent a lot of his time explaining how even those who seemed to do everything right—the rule-following Pharisees, for instance—were far from perfect. Nobody is perfect. And yet a perfect God requires perfection from his followers.
Think about school, for an example: my sad GPA would hardly get me into a good state college, much less an Ivy League university. A lot of things in life work this way; your performance warrants your acceptance. With a place like heaven, perfection is required. Since perfection is required, no one is “good enough” to get in.
That’s a problem. But God had a plan to deal with the problem.
The punishment for sin against a perfect God is not penance, prayers, good deeds, or acts of service but rather death and eternal punishment. It had been that way from the start, in Genesis 3, when animals were sacrificed to produce coverings for Adam and Eve after the first sin. It was a picture of the death produced by sin. That was especially the case with the annual Passover sacrifice—the very festival being celebrated when Jesus was killed. The sacrifices were important, because they showed that something or someone else could take on the punishment each person deserved. There had to be a payment for sin in the form of a sacrifice.
And that’s why Jesus died: he was the perfect sacrifice. Since he had done nothing wrong, he wasn’t due the punishment of death. But he took on that punishment in our place. Only an eternal, infinite God could take on an eternal punishment for everyone, so that’s what he did. Because God is love, and there’s nothing more loving you can do than willingly die to save someone else.
That’s what was good about Good Friday: Jesus died in our place. He suffered the punishment we deserved. And when he came back to life, it proved he had power over death and showed what happens to all whom he saves: we may die on earth, but we are given eternal life through Jesus.
As perhaps the most famous verses in the Bible say:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. (John 3:16–18)
So it’s not about being good enough. You can never be good enough. If you think you can be good enough, then you are trusting in yourself—not in Jesus—and that’s a sin. That’s the danger with religion, and that’s why I would say today that I am not “religious”—I’m a hopeless sinner who is saved from myself by the miracle of Easter.
We have to stop trying to be “good enough” on our own, admit that we aren’t good enough, and accept his death as payment for our sins and his resurrection as evidence that we can live forever with God. Then, the same Spirit who brought Christ back to life will come and live within us, helping us navigate life as we know it, until we are with God forever.
That’s the good news that changed my life and took me from being scared and uncertain to joyful and confident. It allows me to focus on what is truly important and stop chasing after the things that, in the end, always just bring me pain. It’s the most important thing for you to understand, and the most important question anyone can answer: What do you do with Jesus? Jesus, through his life, death, and resurrection, changes everything.
If this good news is old news to you, great; go and tell others. But if you haven’t considered it before, or if you’ve heard it but, like me, didn’t fully understand it, make sure you’re clear on it now. Study the Bible, discuss it with your community, set up a meeting with your pastor—whatever it takes until you can be clear and confident on where you will spend eternity.
Embracing Your Real Identity
When you do trust in Christ, you become a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). In other words, you are no longer defined by what you’ve done in the past. God is not judging you for your mistakes; he’s forgiven and forgotten them (Ps. 103:12).
But how are you defining yourself? Where do you find your identity?
As you now know, in college, and before I was a Christian, I was a partier. And when I and my friends in Waco really wanted to party, we’d make the hundred-mile drive to Dallas. On one such weekend, we all decided to go to a club in Deep Ellum, which was then a clubbing district of Dallas. We made the drive with one problem in mind: while everyone else was older than twenty-one, I was still underage. I had a plan, though. My roommate would give me his ID to get in and then I’d pass it back to him. We figured that nobody really looks at the ID anyway, so they wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t the guy in the photo or that the bouncer was seeing the same ID twice. I would go in first, my roommate would go in last, and our other friends would go between us and pass his ID back. I know what you’re thinking: I’m a genius. That’s what I thought too.
When I get to the bouncer, he looks at me, looks at the ID, and starts shaking his head. “It says here that you’re five-foot-nine.” But I tried to play it cool. “That’s a typo,” I replied. “I’m five-nineteen.” (If you do the math, that actually works out to six-foot-seven. Like I said, genius.)
He looks back down at the ID, still shaking his head, and reads the name out loud. “Babak Ali Hadid?” You see, my roommate was born in Iran and then moved to the United States. I, on the other hand, was not born in Iran, and I don’t really look very Iranian, because I’m not.
Obviously, I hadn’t thought the whole thing through very well, and my “genius” plan didn’t work. It was dumb, and kind of sad, for me to pretend to be someone I was not. Yet many of us subscribe to some kind of fake identity in the way we see ourselves and define who we are.
For example, imagine if I asked you a very basic question: “Who are you?” You might answer by telling me your name. That’s great, but that’s just the words your parents decided to call you when you were born. It doesn’t really say anything about who you are. It’s more of a sound that was assigned to you. Who are you, really?
If you’re in school, you might say that you’re a student. But what happens when you graduate? You’ll still be the same person, but you’ll no longer be a student. Being a student is temporary. It’s not really who you are, and it shouldn’t define you as a person. Similarly, defining yourself by your job, or saying that you’re a salesperson/nurse/janitor/insert career here, only describes what you currently do for about forty hours a week (which is less than a quarter of the 168 hours you get to live every week). It’s still not who you are.
There are other ways you might define your identity. You might define yourself by your worldly accomplishments: your income level, your MBA degree, your state championship. You might find your identity in your earthly desires: “I love shopping,” “I’m a foodie,” “I can out-drink anyone.” Some people get hung up on what they’ve done in the past: being an ex-con, getting a divorce, having an abortion. But none of those things determine who you really are.
Who you are is not your temporary role, or what you’ve done, or what you like to do. Who you really are, and the only identity that matters in the long run, is who you will be forever. That’s an enormous statement. Think about it. The only things about you that truly count are the things that will last forever.
If you’ve trusted in Christ, that doesn’t include the mistakes of your past; he’s forgiven and removed them. It doesn’t include your earthly accomplishments, because they (and the earth itself) will not last. They won’t exist in eternity. And it definitely shouldn’t be your earthly desires: if you find your identity in the things Christ died for, then you’re not really following Christ. As the apostle Paul says in Philippians 3:18–19, people who identify with and embrace their sinful appetites “live as enemies of the cross of Christ.”
In fact, much of Philippians 3 talks about where we should (or shouldn’t) find our identity. In it, Paul lays out all of the things he could find identity in. He was religious, zealous, well-educated, born into the right family in the right country, and faultless when it came to following the law. Yet he said he considered all those things “garbage” compared to his identity as a follower of Christ.
Before Paul became a Christian, he was the number-one enemy of Christians, going to great lengths to ensure they were either jailed or killed. So, if anyone could be condemned by God for things they’d done in the past, then surely he would have been. Yet he became, after that, the greatest missionary and proponent of Christianity the world has ever seen, showing us that no sin disqualifies us from being used by God.
Instead of finding his identity in his past, his accomplishments, or his earthly desires, Paul focused on who he would be eternally. “Their mind is set on earthly things,” he said. “But our citizenship is in heaven” (vv. 19–20). Paul was a Roman citizen, which was the most valuable and sought-after ID you could have at that time. But he considered himself first and foremost a citizen of heaven who only had a temporary visa here on earth.
If heaven required an ID card to get in the door, that ID wouldn’t list any of your earthly accomplishments, failures, memberships, or affiliations. It wouldn’t matter where you were born, what school you went to, how much money you made over the course of your career, whether you had a criminal record, or whether you got that date to prom. The only ID God would be checking is your identity in Christ. The only good work that can get you in is the work that Christ accomplished on the cross.
So, as you live out this relatively short life, focus on your true identity. Remind yourself of it daily. Don’t discount your worth or hold yourself back because of a past that no longer defines you or mistakes that have been fully forgiven and won’t mark you in eternity. Don’t focus on temporary, worldly accomplishments that will also be forgotten. Live as who you are: a citizen of heaven, an adopted son or daughter of the King of all creation, temporarily on an earthly assignment until your Father calls you home.
Live for the Longer
One goal of this book is to help things go well with you in this life. As a young adult, you potentially have several decades of earthly life left to go, which can seem like a really long time.
But remember, forever is a really, really, really long time.
Compared to eternity, your life here on earth is less than a speck. Less than one grain of sand compared to all the beaches in all the world. Your life is a tiny dot on an eternal timeline.
Do you know anything about your great-great-grandfather? Do you know his name? Do you know what he did for a living? Do you know where he lived? Do you know what his favorite color was, or how old he was when he was married? Most likely this man was alive about fifty years ago. He is part of your family; without him, you never would have been born. Yet you probably know very little about him. What this means is that fifty years after you’ve died, no one will be enamored by the way you lived this life—not even your own great-great-grandchild.
Sure, how you live matters to you right now, and it matters to your family and the people around you. But any earthly accomplishments won’t really seem like that big of a deal a billion years from now. What matters in eternity are the things that will last for eternity.
There’s an old saying I sometimes hear people quote: “Don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good.” The idea behind the expression is that if you’re focused on the reality of eternity, you’ll somehow waste your time here on earth. After all, this life is so short, and eternity is what really matters.
It might sound catchy and convincing, but it’s simply not true. In fact, we’re specifically told by God to be heavenly minded; in Colossians 3:2, it says to “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” And 1 John 2:15 says, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.”
The truth is, being “heavenly minded” is the one way to ensure you don’t waste your time on earth. It means that you will be focused on things that truly last. And what here on earth will truly last? People. The finest house, the grandest monument, the greatest collection of earthly treasures: these will all one day, much sooner than you think, be gone and forgotten. But every person you see, from the best-dressed billionaire to the homeless woman wearing rags, is an eternal creature. They will last forever, somewhere. If you do something that helps somebody, that action will be remembered forever. Most importantly, if you help point someone to the truth of eternity, that person can then join you in heaven forever.
Besides, being “heavenly minded” actually provides a much bigger incentive to be “earthly good.” It’s basic economics. Many people work hard to save up money for retirement or to build homes here on earth that are bigger and nicer. They study and search and pay experts to figure out which investments will provide the best return over time, so they get the most out of their income from work. They calculate return on investment (ROI) and net present value (NPV), all while accounting for the risk that whatever money they invest they might end up losing instead.
But if you live with the knowledge that you’ll be in heaven forever, the investment calculations change. Because God makes it very clear that he will reward us in heaven for the good things we do here on earth. We’re not talking about earning salvation as a reward; eternal life itself is a free gift. But within that eternal life there are rewards. For example, in Matthew 19:21, Jesus tells a rich man that if he gives his earthly possessions to the poor, he “will have treasure in heaven.” First Corinthians 3 shows that those who share the gospel and disciple other believers will be rewarded for their work. In Matthew 10:41–42, Jesus says that even the smallest deed (giving another believer a cup of water) can earn a reward. And in Matthew 6:19–21, he tells us:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.
Before proposing to my wife, I remember shopping for an engagement ring and being blown away by how much they cost. I quickly learned that it’s not the gold band that makes them so expensive (even though the gold is plenty expensive enough). Most of the cost came from the price of the diamond. At one time, diamonds actually weren’t that popular; sales were on the decline, and if you know anything about supply and demand, a lack of demand leads to a lower price. But then De Beers, which controls much of the world’s diamond supply, came up with the advertising slogan, “A diamond is forever.” Sales took off. The campaign was so successful that nearly everyone today has heard of the phrase, and Advertising Age ranked it as the best advertising slogan of the century.2 Often we ascribe value to something based on how enduring it is, and since diamonds supposedly last forever, we automatically assume they must be the most valuable material.
It’s a good slogan, but technically diamonds do not last forever. Sure, as the hardest natural substance on earth, they’ll last longer than most anything else you could buy. But no material thing on earth truly lasts forever. On earth, things wear out, break down, get old, lose value, or get stolen. Eventually, everything on earth will turn to dust or otherwise be destroyed. In heaven, though, everything does last forever. And that makes a huge difference when you’re trying to decide what to invest in. Something that lasts forever and provides you with benefits for all eternity is far more valuable than something that will last only a few years or only a lifetime. In fact, an eternal treasure is infinitely more valuable than a temporary earthly treasure. The ROI is infinity. It is literally the best investment you could ever make. Our problem is that we struggle to believe this.
If we believe that our good works and generosity here on earth provide an infinite return on investment, we should be motivated to invest even more. Instead of being “no earthly good,” believers in Christ should do the most good. It’s what Christians have been known for throughout most of history: selflessly loving and serving others, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense from an earthly perspective. We build homes for others instead of building bigger ones for ourselves because we know we have an eternal home being built for us. We take care of the sick and dying, even though it puts us at risk of catching the disease ourselves, because we know we’ll have eternal life no matter what. (See also the black plague, when Christians were often the only ones who would help people with the disease, and they did so joyfully, knowing that they only risked expediting their journey to paradise.) We give selflessly because we’re not seeking to build up our own glory here on earth.
Diamonds do not last forever. Treasures stored in heaven do. If you buy a stock on the stock market, it might increase in value, but it might not—and, regardless, it will be worthless to you in eighty years (because you’re dead). Or you can buy stock that appreciates in value and yields dividends in eternity. Invest in that stock!
Don’t Wait
When I became a pastor, one of my first responsibilities was to help with a funeral. A very wealthy man had died and had left his wealth to his two sons. Since his sons were in their twenties, and I was the young adult pastor, I was asked to go with our senior pastor to visit the family.
We drove into the wealthy part of Dallas, with big houses on huge plots of land. We turned onto a cobblestone drive and followed it to a big wooden gate by a guard house. The gate opened slowly and revealed a whole estate behind it: a meticulously manicured lawn; landscaped gardens bursting with pink, red, and purple flowers; and an enormous white house. We parked and went inside the house. Everything was huge. The hallways were big. The furniture was big. The paintings were big. I had never seen anything like it! We sat down with the two grieving sons and asked them about their father so that we could prepare for doing his funeral.
Although the house was near perfect in its presentation, I noticed that there were little yellow sticky notes all over the walls. They didn’t seem to belong in such a well-kept place. “What are those notes?” I asked. “In his last days,” the sons explained, “Dad wanted to be surrounded with the Word of God. So he had us write Bible verses out and put them all over the house.” Their father had not always been a Christian, but when he had been faced with his mortality through a life-threatening disease, he had become one.
Curious, I asked them to tell me more about what their dad had done in his last days. “Well, he would share the gospel with anyone and everyone,” they said. “He’d call in the doctors and nurses to tell them about Jesus. He’d have us bring in people for him to share with.” Death can be a motivator in that way. You begin to see your priorities differently.
“What else did he do?” I asked. I wanted to hear more how this man, who was so successful by the world’s standards, had prioritized his last days on earth. “He tried to give away all of his money. He wanted to know about charities in need. He wanted to resource the church with his wealth. He was frustrated when he couldn’t. It was locked up in trusts, and moving it required attorneys, brokers, and meetings.” Their father had gone to great lengths to secure his money and save it up for the future—a future he later found out would be cut off much earlier than he had planned. Now that money belonged to his two sons. It was their money—or at least it was theirs to steward, like it had been their dad’s to steward.
I asked if there was anything else they’d like to share about their dad. The two sons looked at each other and said in unison, “He said: ‘Don’t wait.’” They explained that, as death crept up on their father, he would cry out, “Don’t wait! Don’t wait, like I did! Go and tell them about Jesus! Live for Jesus!”
Today, I pass that advice on to you. Don’t wait. Don’t live most of your life focused on temporary things, thinking you’ll have time later on to think about eternity. Focus on what really matters now. Surround yourself with the truth of God. Share the love of Christ often. Give generously to those in need, and share the resources God has temporarily entrusted to you.
This life is short. The average life expectancy in the United States today is about seventy-eight years, so you can take your current age and do the math. That’s the average; we never know how soon our lives may end. But we can be sure of where we’ll be eternally, and live now in the light of that fact. Don’t wait.