The world and its desires will pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:17, NIV)
When I was a kid, hanging around the pool at our family’s club, the snack bar provided every popular candy bar in the business. While my favorites usually included chocolate, the bar that often won the day was a Big Hunk. Two reasons: First, while Big Hunk was the biggest bar on the shelf, it cost only five cents. And second, with its primary makeup being taffy, it lasted through many more minutes of sugary breakdown than any other bar.
Maybe it was the Big Hunk that taught me one of the great principles in life: The longer goodness lasts, the better it is! But if the Big Hunk at the same time lied to me, it did so in saying, “You can get your goodness from the stuff of earth.”
When we work our way through Scripture, one of the themes we see again and again is the juxtaposition of good and evil, of righteous living and of wickedness. Surely these are opposed to one another, but that battle is more often within than without. Will I honor the call of God or instead listen to the cajoling of sin?
The difference in how I answer this question is not only about the opportunity of the moment but the outcome of my life. In other words, I want to get this one right!
No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that the next worldly desire is the one that will satisfy, it doesn’t turn out that way.You don’t have to be too old to recognize the truth in the first half of John’s juxtaposition. Maybe you were one of those who got his first job with a very particular goal in mind: a classic cherry, the kind with four mag wheels and a lot of horses under the hood. You toiled and you saved and you bought it. But many things can happen to a beauty like that. You can crash it. You can sell it out of need—maybe a college education. You can grow dissatisfied with its dated look and sudden penchant for breaking down. You can drive it till it won’t drive anymore and you have to start all over in saving for a new one. “The world and its desires pass away.”
This doesn’t happen just once in life. It happens again and again. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that the next worldly desire is the one that will satisfy, it doesn’t turn out that way. But if we never come to grips with this, we will go to the grave having fulfilled the complete bumper sticker: “He who dies with the most toys wins… nothing.”
But there is a way to life. It is the will of God. It may not be so appealing tonight, when the lights and the music call to us, when the wine “sparkles in the cup and it goes down smoothly” (Proverbs 23:31). But it is a fixed point in the spiritual universe, a chance to build our firm foundation.
The biggest choice in this life is the one that asks us whether we really want the next life. If we do, our desire will not be for this world; it will be for the Lord and all he asks of us.
—
Jeff Hopper
April 21, 2020
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.