John 16:16-33
We have many things that are recorded In our book of life. We write a page each day in the book. Some of the books of life are very short with few pages. Other books of life are long and filled with many pages. The common thing about our book of life is that we all begin with birth and we all will have an obituary dating our death. Even a long life on this earth is but a fast dash in God’s eternal time record.
We all have a date of birth. On September 9th I will record my 84th birthday. As we mark our birthdays as our starting point, what kind of family did each of us become a part of? We do not get to choose our parents. Some of us were very lucky to have good fathers and mothers. Some of us only had one good parent. Many children are born with parents that did not want us, or cared little about us. Some babies don’t even get to start life because millions of babies have been aborted. They never have a chance to use their gifts of life and have no book of birth date. One of the gifts that some of us start life with is loving and caring parents. If you are lucky to have parents that believe in Jesus Christ you will be connected to God’s church. The Christian parents will have you in God’s church so that you can have the joy of worship and can experience love, grace, mercy and forgiveness of God.
In most of our books of life we have that first day of school as part of our lives. My first day in school was at home, because my mother was a teacher and she homeschooled me. The next year I started to a public school and in 1954 graduated from a small country high school. In my journey through school most of my teachers were Christians and were leaders in the community. They loved us and cared about us. They taught us how to study, grow and learn; but they also taught us how to be a person of worth. My teachers were concerned with the whole person. I had few teachers that just taught because it was a job. The days of my life in school were not separated from the Christian faith. I know that the God that gave me life is involved with each day in my life. That includes all the days I have spent in college and universities. Each day that we rise to start a new day, the God we meet in Jesus Christ is involved with all we do in that one day. As a Christian I see the work I do each day as a part of my book of life.
When you are young, you see the days stretching out forever. Then later you experience how short the days have become as you work and live. God wants to be involved with you in the work you do. It is a big chapter in the book of life. It is about our working days. We that believe work is an honorable institution do not understand people that do not like, or want, to work. As a Christian I believe we are to use our days in the dash of life in a way that is acceptable to God. God honors all honest work. He has given each of us many different gifts. Each day God expects us to use the gifts that He has given us to the best of our abilities. Many people want to live life off the work and sweat of other people. In our pages of life God notes this about us and how we failed to use our gifts for our work. The Bible tells us that God worked six days in the of the earth. Since God has no time boundaries His day could be as long as he wanted. A day for God could have been three million years. But as God finished each day’s work, he would look over his work to see what he had accomplished with his day. “Then God looked over all he had made and saw that it was very good.” As we look at our work each day, can we say to ourselves that it was a very good day?
In our book of life most of us meet someone that we love and want to marry. Marriage is one of God’s beautiful gifts to us, if we marry for the right reason. That reason is that you want to spend the rest of your days with that person. Many people fill their book of life with pages of what went wrong with their marriage because of bad decisions and bad choices that leave them with mental and physical pain. In fact, they live in fear of marriage for they are afraid to make a real commitment to love someone because they don’t love themselves. Marriage is the care of family life. In their book of life, family life is about broken lives, broken hopes, and broken dreams because they have never bonded with someone that loves them and that they love in return. It is one of the biggest decisions that a person ever makes in the pages of life. Get it right and you find joy and happiness in the pages of life. Get it wrong and you live with sorrow and pain in your life.
The pages of our lives are shaped by what kind of faith we have in God. We have free will. We can accept God’s gift of life or we can reject God. We can be a part of God’s life or we can tell God that we want no part of him.
Rejection of God brings sorrow to our pages of life, but when we believe in the God who gave us life, we find true joy in life. In our scripture today we find that Jesus is preparing his disciples for the time when he would no longer be a physical person with them. He wants them to know and believe that even after the cross, he was still with them in each day they lived.
Jesus asked, “Do you finally believe? But the time is coming, indeed it’s now -when you will be scattered, each one going his own way, leaving me alone. Yet, I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have told you all of this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart because I have overcome the world.”
When you believe in Jesus the pages in your book of life will be filled with a love of life. The believer knows that he has overcome evil and death in the world for each of us that believes in Him lives forever more.
In your book of life between the time of birth and death, the most important page in your book will be when you accept and believe in God. When someone writes your obituary, can they say your book of life was shaped by your faith, belief and love for the God that gave you life? Have you been faithful to the God of life and used your gifts and time for His work? Life is but a dash, but if you believe and serve the only true God, your life stretches out forever.
Believe in him that gives us each day. Know the real joy of being alive. Our book of life on earth ends in death; but for those of us that believe in God, we know our book of life will say we will continue with a loving and caring God.
