God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Angels, Cherubim, Seraphim, Satan.
You get the idea.
But, have you ever met an eternal being…….face to face? Have you ever had a conversation with an eternal being?
You’d be surprised.
The fact is that everyone you meet is an eternal being. Our bodies will age and ultimately fail. But, our spirit is eternal. Every one of us is both a physical being and a spiritual being. Every one of us has a spiritual nature that is eternal. We put a lot of effort into taking care of our bodies…….and our body will still die. But, how much of our effort and our resources do we spend on our spirit?
Eternity is huge, in fact, endless. But our temporal, physical life is very brief……..figuratively, the blink of an eye. What, then, should be the focus of our efforts? Philosophers talk about ” the urgency of the immediate”. This is a very real thing. It is normal. The joys and problems that are right in front of us draw a great deal of our attention and effort. For most of us, the immediate gets the vast majority of our effort. For some of us, it gets the entirety. This is human nature.
But, is that distribution of effort wise? Is it right?
If our physical life is extremely short and our spiritual life is eternal……endless, shouldn’t most of our effort go into supporting our spirit? Perhaps, the amount of time and effort that we actually spend planning our day, our week, our career, our retirement is out of proportion to the amount of time and effort we should spend planning our spirit for its eternity. So far……so good.
But, there is another side to this coin.
What about the time and effort that we spend on the eternal beings who surround us? Is it possible that our neglect of the thousands of eternal spirits around us is just as big of a problem as our neglect of our own spirit?
Every one of these spirits is important to God. Every one of these spirits is loved and valued by God equally. God loves and values the drug dealers and the human traffickers just as much as he loves and values me.
Let that sink in.
It sheds an entirely new light on the issue of evangelism.
I probably won’t bake up a batch of brownies and take it and a Bible to my local gang-banger. But, maybe I can spend a little more effort in praying for them…….in loving them.
Consider this:
A minute praying for and loving a gang-banger could do as much to promote God’s kingdom as a minute praying for your pastor.
Or
You could pray for and love someone in the periphery of your world who is a real, first class, gold plated jerk.
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Jesus explaining love in the sermon on the mount, Matthew 5:44-48, ESV