Living With Eternity In View

Living With Eternity In View

By Rick Gillespie- Mobley 6/13/2021 Matthew 7:15-28,1 Corinthians 3:5-17

Have you ever purchased an item that looked great in the package or on the advertisement but when you got it, you said, “this is nothing but a piece of junk, it so flimsy, I want my money back. I recently ordered and purchased a flying drone with a 4k camera to take video from the sky and it could even skim across Lake Erie to take underwater pictures. It’s flight time was 32 minutes. If I paid an extra $15 which I did, it would ship in 3-5 days.

I received a drone 3 weeks later that would fly up to 8 minutes, had a terrible quality camera, and if I sent it to Lake Erie that thing would promptly sink. It was a different brand, color and style from what I ordered.

Sometimes when things like this happens to us, it makes us angry and upset, we can simply throw the thing in the trash can and go on about our business. There are other times though, when what we got can’t easily be gotten rid of and we’re stuck making payments such as that great deal on the car that we didn’t know had been underwater in a flood. We still have to make the payments.

There are still other times, when our lives are severely damaged or maimed. We see this when people think they are purchasing a good time with a high with drugs not realizing they are actually paying for an overdose of fetanoly that will kill them. What we see is not always, what we get.

Whether you know it or not, you are both a builder and a building and what you’re building is based on how long you expect it to last. Each time we eat, we’re deciding to build and on what we plan to look like in the future as well as how far out that future is going to go.

Each time we think or we act, we are using materials to build our spiritual body or our temple of the Holy Spirit as the bible describes it. We do not think of it often, but we are actually a temple, that has been created for God to reside in us. God actually wants to live inside of you and inside of me. The sin in us wants to keep God on the outside. It constantly want to serve God an eviction notice.

Our problem with sin is that we want to use our body for one purpose, but God says your body is my temple and it must be kept holy by using the right kinds of materials to build the temple.

In our New Testament reading the apostle Paul told us we build ourselves spiritually with different items that will have a different result for our lives. In Corinthians 3:12 He said some lives are may be built using gold, silver, costly stones and others with wood, hay or straw.

What we build with is going to determine how long - we think something is going to last. In this passage Paul is clearly speaking to believers, because he says they are building upon the foundation of Jesus Christ. So this is telling us that some of us in the church are not using the right tools for eternity.

If you’re dating someone and you decide to take it to the next level with an engagement ring, it is going to have a tremendous impact what the ring is made of. If it is made of gold, silver and costly stones, you may indeed take things upward to another level. But if the person knows that you have money but the ring is made out of wood, hay and straw, that relationship is definitely going to another level.

The foundation means everything when it comes to building a building that you expect to last. There are two main reasons that might cause someone to make a mistake with a foundation. The first is by honest mistake. We that we think something is something that it is not. Our intentions may have been good, but we put our hope and confidence in the wrong thing.

The second reason is we’re just lazy, or in a hurry, or think it costs too much or that it doesn’t really matter and we’re willing to take a short cut. We deceive ourselves into thinking, just because it looks okay, it’s okay and nobody will ever find out.

Jesus talks quite a bit about building on the right foundation. Jesus tells us that it is an absolute necessity to build your life on the right foundation. . Because the foundation is what holds everything up, it’s what holds everything together.