A Verse That Will Put Your Life In Perspective

People ask me all the time which verse in the Bible is my favorite. I always point to James 4:14:

“How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog — it’s here a little while, then it’s gone.”

Now, that’s a verse that’ll put your life in perspective.

So often, I become enthralled by all the pressures and responsibilities of life that I completely lose sight of what’s really important- walking hand in hand with God. You see, when I sit back and think about my time here on earth and compare it to the eternity that I’m going to spend in heaven, it forces me to realign my priorities.

It also forces me to grapple with a hard reality: there’s one game we won’t win.

I’m a naturally competitive person.  When our team lost a game at Kansas State — or even Lamar High — it ate me up.  I wanted to win.  And if we lost, I comforted myself by thinking, “We’ll win next time.”  Nick Lannon explains that this desire to win extends all the way into the eternal, when he wrote:

As humans, our most desperate wish is to win. We try to win everything, up to and including the ultimate contest: us against our own deaths. The profundity of the cross is that it looks death in the face and confronts it directly. The cross is the end of the human contest. We lose.

That’s the thing.  As the Bible verse says, we are just a vapor.  All of us.   Lannon puts this powerfully when he wrote, “even Jim Valvano died.”

For those of you who don’t follow sports, Valvano was the coach who led the 1983 North Carolina State Wolfpack to the most unlikely of championships.  Under his leadership, his team pulled off “nine consecutive must-win games, many of which came down to the final seconds. The team’s run (the final basket in the championship game was recognized by Sports Illustrated and ESPN as the “greatest moment in the history of college basketball)…”

When Valvano was diagnosed with cancer, no one really thought it would take him.  Valvano’s players, spouse, and friends — people like Mike Krzyzewski, Dick Vitale and Sonny Vaccaro — all said the same thing when they heard the news.

He’ll “beat it.”  After all, Valvano’s a winner, right?  (Note that we use the language of competition and victory when we talk about death.)

Valvano shocked everyone by dying from cancer.  This Bible verse tells us that none of us win in one of the most important contests — cancer or not.  I won’t win against death.  You won’t either. Lannon writes:

God, in Christ, brings victory out of defeat. God, in Christ, brings life out of death. We all die, but in Christ, we have the hope — no, the promise — of new and eternal life.

That is a good perspective to have today.  Why do I allow myself to get so caught up with things that should really be trivial in the grand scheme of things? God’s love reaches far beyond my understanding.  My soul will exist long after my time on Earth is done.

Memorize James 4:14 and think of it every day.  It helps loosen your grip on this world — and its temporary problems — and hold on to the only person who has really won that competition with death.

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