I went to a funeral recently for a Christian lady who was over one hundred years old. When I was a little kid she lived a couple houses away from us. She was a fine Christian woman and had devoted her life to serving other people. The funeral wasn’t really a time of sorrow. If there were tears, they were mostly tears of joy. When someone has lived one hundred years serving the Lord, it is a celebration. As her children reminisced about their mother, one thought kept going through my mind – that we each have but one lifetime to live. That’s it. But the clock is ticking. Each of us has less than a lifetime left.

I was given a Bible when I graduated from High School by my Grandmother and Aunt. In the front of the Bible they wrote the little quote you are probably familiar with: "Only one life, ‘twill soon be past, only what’s done for Christ will last." It made an impression on me that stuck. It’s true. We can do all kinds of things, but the only thing that really matters is what we do that has eternal value, which has to do with Jesus Christ, our relationship to Him, and our relationship to other people.

I Timothy 6:13 says that, "All men derive life from God, who quickeneth all things." Acts 17:28 says: "In Him we live and move and have our being." The life experienced by men who are dead in their sins, and alienated from the life of God, is not that eternal life that God offers men through Jesus Christ His Son.

God created man in His own image – a spirit being with the capacity for knowing his Creator and sharing His life. That is a basic Christian fact. You’ve heard the 

Genesis story many times. God created Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden. He gave them one commandment. They could eat of all the trees in the Garden except for one – "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:17)

God was setting up a test for Adam and Eve. They didn’t know anything about death, because they had never experienced death of any kind. They had to take God’s word for it. As long as they took Him at His word, they were expressing faith in God. And as long as they were living by faith, they were on safe ground. But the day came when they no longer lived by faith, and decided to try the fruit on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The old serpent told them, "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:4-5) So they ate of it – and they died. They immediately died spiritually, even though they didn’t die physically for many years. God had warned Adam that the penalty for transgression was death. They were cut off from the eternal life of the Creator. God punished Adam and Eve, but He did not curse them like He did the serpent. Although He put them out of the Garden, He immediately promised the coming of a Redeemer. In spite of the fact that they had sinned, they would be given another chance. God would provide a Redeemer who would crush the head of the serpent.

God instituted the ordinance of animal sacrifice. We don’t always appreciate it, but animal sacrifice from a biblical standpoint, was simply a representation of the one sacrifice for all sins, ultimately provided by the offering of Jesus Christ described in Hebrews 10. The animal sacrifices were a symbolic representation of that sacrifice that was to come. The offering of animal sacrifices did not make one perfect, but God was pleased with the faith of the worshipers as expressed in this act, and imputed to them that righteousness that was to be imparted to all believers through the offering as yet to be accomplished, through the offering of Christ. As the people were obedient in making their sacrifices, they were exercising faith in God. They were living before Christ, but the righteousness they were to experience still comes as a result of the death of Christ even though it occurred later. Reconciliation of men to God required a perfect sacrifice.

As Christ was on the cross He said, "It is finished." When He said that, God had made reconciliation possible for all mankind. Objectively, the whole world was saved, but in the way God set it up, each individual must say "yes" and accept God’s gift and appropriate it for himself for it to be effectual. In other words, there is not universal salvation as some people teach. Only those are saved who actually come to Christ, and accept His sacrifice. Why is it that anyone living, no matter what their sins, can come to know Jesus Christ as Savior, and yet many don’t? In fact most people don’t. People get caught 

up in things that are not eternal, the little gadgets and toys that please them, instead of real life in Jesus Christ. My brother is dead. One of the last times I visited him he was proudly telling me about a couple of his possessions. He was making these two little things into a great achievement. He took me out to the garage to show me his Cadillac. He didn’t live in a fancy home but he did have a nice big garage with a Cadillac in it. Beside the Cadillac he had a new Harley Davidson motorcycle. To hear him talk – he had now arrived. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to have a Harley Davidson motorcycle, too! But that’s not the point. The point is that this was a big deal to him. They were just toys which would soon rust away. There is only one thing worth making a big deal of – one’s life in Jesus Christ, bringing honor to Him, and serving our brothers and sisters.

There is a story you are probably familiar with about how we can get side-tracked. A body of a man was discovered out in the Sierras in California back during the Gold Rush days. He had a pouch of gold in his hand, which turned out to be fools gold. There was a handwritten note in his pocket that said, "I died rich." And all he had was that little bag of fools gold, worth nothing. I think that happens to a lot of people. They spend their lives gathering material things or spending hours doing things that really have no eternal value. They think they are laying up treasures. Jesus says; "I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." John 10:10b

As I said earlier, there have been a few times in my life when I would have "checked-out" of life if I hadn’t had a hope that goes far beyond the grave. But I have that hope! I don’t want to do anything to promote misfortune or gloom, but when you have this hope in your heart, when it’s a living reality in your being, nothing can ever happen to you that is serious enough to destroy that hope or that joy within. People get confused talking about happiness. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the joy that God puts in our hearts that has absolutely no relationship to circumstances. This joy is part of our being because Christ lives within. It will cost you everything you have to be a Christian. But it’s a bargain, because we don’t have much.