I am shamelessly borrowing from an excellent sermon preached on the first Sunday of this year by my pastor, Josh Waltz. (I’ve done this borrowing before and will certainly do so again.) He started out by referencing Stephen Covey’s classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: “Begin with the end in mind.” Covey asks his readers to ponder what they’d want to have said about them at their own funerals, listing four groups who might give eulogies: family members, friends, co-workers, and fellow volunteers in some organization. Each group would have a different perspective. But the point of the sermon wasn’t to do a rehash of a self-help book. Rather it was an examination of a passage in the Christian New Testament: Philippians 3:7-11. In these verses the Apostle Paul (last referenced in the Dec. 31st post) explains how he evaluates, or “counts,” his life. What’s his overriding passion? His relationship to Christ, which motivates and inspires him and gives his life meaning. In order to put that purpose first, he has to count lesser ones as “refuse,” “rubbish,” or even (in the King James Version of the Bible) “dung.” Well! That’s pretty clear!
Paul would have had no problem answering the Stephen Covey question above. He would have said, “I want to be remembered as a follower of Christ, one who pointed others to Him and who never wavered in my own faith.” He had a specific target, and he spent his whole life from his conversion onward aiming at that one worthwhile goal.
Josh then gave the illustration of a question he used to ask his youth group: What’s the definition of a sharpshooter? The correct meaning of the term is someone who has practiced and practiced, spending hours on the shooting range, until he can hit the target every time. But there’s another way to at least look like a sharpshooter: shoot first and then draw the target around where you shot. All those bullseyes sure seem impressive, but the shots themselves have had no real purpose. It’s all too easy to spend your life like the second kind of sharpshooter, shooting first and making up meanings later. “Sure, I meant to do that.”
So here we are, 11 days into the new year. Most of us are still thinking about resolutions for these coming 12 months, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But what if there’s an eternal component to human life? What then? Or, to quote Josh once again, “How can you be sure you’ll be happy in 500 years?”