The Search for Signficance II

You yourselves are all the endorsement we need. Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it – not with ink, but with God’s living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives – and we publish it…you, written by Christ himself for God, are our letter of recommendation   (2 Corinthians 3:3-4 The Message paraphrase).

Hear what he’s saying?  Some people spend a lifetime sweating and straining to be successful, famous, to be somebody but they never learn where true significance lies.  Paul is telling us we find significance as we touch the lives of people.  We write on their lives, leaving an indelible mark. 

Paul wasn’t a celebrity, but he knew about celebrity.  He knew about credentials and symbols and status.  He’d had it—or he was well on his way to getting it–before he chucked it all for Jesus:

Phil 3: 5-7 …circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law,  blameless.  But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ (English Standard Version) 

Naturally, the items on Paul’s list were things the Jewish culture he grew up in valued.  You may not be Jewish, but you’ve got a list of status symbols too.  Yet Paul was granted the grace to see what was most important–people!  The people God loves, the people Christ died for, the people, dead in sins and trespasses, laying like cold stone, waiting for somebody to write warm life into their lives by the power of the Spirit of the living God!  

 In simple terms, that means those children we brought into this world are worth every bit of time and effort it takes to raise them properly.   What’s more, other people’s kids are worth our time as well.   Then there are the aged.  I’m amazed at how much the generations are alike.  I’ve been around enough of them to know an 80-year-old suffers from some of the same fears and anxieties people decades younger have.  He has the same questions about God, Heaven, and Hell a teen-ager does.  He has some of the same desires.  But we only know that if we spend time with him.  

In the end, the world won’t know or care whether we lived or died.  But people will.   Go, then.  Go among them, touch them, speak to them, listen to them.   Let the Spirit of God guide your hand as you make the only mark that lasts.