The Secret Of Life

Before we get started this morning, I’d like to share with you an email a friend sent me this week.

Satan called a worldwide convention. In his opening address to his evil angels he said; We can’t keep the Christians from going to church. We can’t keep them from reading their bibles and knowing the truth. And we can’t keep them from conservative values, but we can do something else; We can keep them from forming an intimate, abiding relationship experience with Christ. If they gain that connection with Jesus, our power over them will be broken. So, let them go to church, let them have their conservative lifestyles, but.....steal their time, so they can’t gain that experience with Jesus Christ. This is what I want you to do angels:

Distract them from gaining hold of their Savior and maintaining that vital connection throughout their day!

“How shall we do that?” shouted the angels.

“Keep them busy in the non-essentials of life and invent unnumbered schemes to occupy their minds,” he answered. “Tempt them to spend, spend, spend, then borrow, borrow, borrow. Persuade the wives to go to work for long hours and the husbands to work 6-7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day, so they can afford their lifestyles. Keep them from spending time with their children. As their family fragments, soon their home will offer no escape from the pressures of work.”

“Over-stimulate their minds so that they cannot hear that still small Voice. Entice them to play the radio or cassette player whenever they drive. To keep the TV, VCR, CD’s and their PCs going constantly it their homes. And see to it that every store and restaurant in the world plays non-religious music constantly. This will help to jam their minds and break that union with “their Jesus.”

“Fill their coffee tables with magazines and newspapers. Pound their minds with the news 24hrs a day. Invade their time on the road with billboards advertising cigarettes, alcohol,---and while you’re at it--slip in a little sexual immorality every now and then.

Flood their mailboxes with junk-mail, sweepstakes, mail order catalogues, and every kind of newsletter and promotional offering free products, services, and false hopes.

Even in their recreation, let them be excessive. Have them return from their weekends exhausted, disquieted, and totally unprepared for the coming week.

Don’t dare let them just go out in nature to reflect on God’s wonders. Send them to amusement parks, sporting events, concerts, and movies instead.

And, when they meet for spiritual fellowship, involve them in gossip and small talk so that they leave with troubled consciences and unsettled emotion. Let them be involved in soul winning all right... But crowd their lives with so many “good causes” that they have no time to seek power from Christ. Soon they will be working in their own straight, sacrificing their health and family for the “good of the cause.”

It was quite a convention in the end. And the evil angels went out eagerly to ful-fill their assignments causing Christians everywhere to get busy, busy, busy......( Unknown Author)

Of course we all know that this is just a little fictional story that someone made up to give us a chuckle and perhaps to make us think a little, but does it really hold some indisputable truth? I for one believe it does. You see, at the time that the Lord first gave me the topic of this message, I had been pretty busy--at work and at home, it almost seemed as though the Lord was somehow “preparing” me to receive this particular sermon. I realized how easy it is for life to get so chaotic that we suddenly don’t have time in our hectic schedules to pause and just listen to that “still small Voice.”

I want you to think back on this week as we are now at the end of it, and kind of take a mental inventory of how you budgeted out you time and attention. Be honest with yourselves now, and just see if someone has been keeping you from devoting time to where it really needed to be spent. Perhaps someone learned well at the Dark Angel Convention! You know it’s amazing how we can be so easily diverted from what really matters in life. I mean, sometimes we feel like a pinball--being bounced all over the place with no sense of direction or purpose. Instead of enjoying our lives, we sometimes seem to be awful busy just trying to survive it.-- Is that how God intended for us to live

You ever heard someone claim know the secret of life? This has been perhaps the most sought-after mystery since time began.

Well, consider yourselves fortunate... because this morning we are going to come to the conclusion of that timeless question; “What is the secret of life?--what’s it really all about? Pray with me will you?