You were created to live forever.

   Death isn't part of the life we are supposed to be living; we are made for a greater purpose.  Death isn't the end; it's merely a transition from this life to the next.  The implication of this is that everything we do in this life will affect our eternal life.

   Ecclesiastes 3:11 says; 'He also has planted eternity in man's heart and mind.'  The Amplified Bible defines this as 'a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun, but only God, can satisfy."  From the moment you were born, you had a God-given sense of eternal purpose built into the very fabric of your being.

   Men have spent lifetimes searching for something to satisfy that divine craving.  C.S Lewis spent most of his life an atheist before finding Christ.  In the last page of the last book of his Chronicles of Narnia, he captured the essence of eternity in this statement: 'For us this is the end of all the stories'. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world ' had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they are beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever and in which every chapter is better then the one before.'  This is the life we were meant to live; the purpose we were made to fulfill is embodied in our eternity with God.  Our minds can't conceive what that will be like, but think about this: no matter what dreams, aspirations and hopes you have for your future, God has greater dreams, better aspirations, and higher hopes.

   A brief prequel, the blink of an eye, a tiny dot on a never ending line; all these words describe our life in comparison to eternity.  Small quantities are all too often assumed to be insignificant.  On the contrary, the length of our lives requires us to live as if every day as if it were our last.  It would be one thing if everything we did while on earth had no meaning, but every action reverberates through eternity.  That looks cool enough in print, but it's actually true.  The Bible says that whatever we bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  Plus, the biggest responsibility any of us have is outlined in the Great Commission: 'Go ye into all the world, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.'  That's a lot of ground to cover in a short time.

   Conversely, some of things we spend so much time on don't really matter in the light of eternity.  On an eternal scale, does the outcome of next week's football game deserve the attention we give it?  Does that new car deserve all the time we spend dreaming about it?  It's a fine line: we must continually look toward the future, but at the same time live every moment of the present to the fullest.

   Life isn't a prize to fight for, a game to win, or a commodity to buy; but a tool that only the creator can use properly.  We can use it to do other things, and we might get pretty good at it, but our full potential won't be realized until we give our life to God.  Once God has our life, he will use it to a greater purpose than we can imagine.  If we let Him.