Have you ever skipped a rock across water? Each touch on the water’s surface makes a set of ripples moving out from the point of contact. Momentarily the water is disturbed. A few moments later you cannot tell anything happened. The effect is over, gone, and forgotten.
Have you ever thought about the significance of our lives?
You can make a difference where you are standing on the lives of those around you. Depending on what you do, you can impact them in very important and sometimes eternal ways. Or can you?
We know it is not ever what we do. Ultimately, it is God working through us that brings folks to a saving knowledge of Him. We are just vessels for service.
We know we are important to God. God loves us. He sent Jesus to die for us. Aside from that, how important are we? What difference do we really make in the scheme of things?
Each day you may worry about one thing or another. Will that worry still be a worry in a month? Will you still worry about it in a year? Most worries are brief indeed. What about what you build? Will that house that is so important to you still be here in two hundred years? What can you create that will last forever?
Our lives are like that rock skipping on water. We make a few ripples in time, but nothing really consequential comes from our existence – individually or collectively as the human race.
LORD, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! or the son of man, that thou makest account of him! Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away.
Psalms 144:3-4
Did you catch that? Our “days are as a shadow that passeth away.” We are important to God because He loves us, but that is the only reason we have any significance. Certainly nothing we do is significant.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!
Psalms 8:3-9
What are we that God would be mindful of us? Next to God we are so incapable. Yet, he loved us enough to give us dominion over the works He made. He made a wonderful world and placed us in it to look after it. We are given the privilege of stewardship.
LIFE APPLICATION
Today’s challenge is to realize that as important as things may seem to us, they are really not that important in the scheme of things. What we are capable of is so inconsequential. Our life is like a shadow. Ever so brief, we are here now and gone tomorrow. Who are we that God should pay us any attention? Praise God for His love and care.
“O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!”