IF YOU WANT TO GO from A to B there are various means you can enlist to help you. You can use a map or GPS, or follow signposts. If you just trust to your sense of direction you could waste a lot of time going round in circles.
What aid do you use to guide you on the journey of life? Do you just wander from day to day without a destination in mind? Perhaps you have a destination—perhaps you have ambitions, and maybe a clear idea of how to achieve them. But sooner or later, we come to realise that all the good things in this life are short-lived. The career we’ve striven for has not delivered the fulfilment we imagined; pursuing the good times leaves us feeling hollow; we lose family and friends; our own health fails. We just don’t know what tomorrow will bring, let alone next week or next year. As the American statesman Benjamin Franklin memorably observed, ”In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”
Although we know that death is inevitable, we tend to blank it out of our minds most of the time. It only becomes a reality when we lose a loved one or we ourselves become very ill. Then we start to ask ourselves “Is this the end, or is there life after death?”
Wouldn’t it be good if there was a reliable guide to life? A guide that told us what life is about, where we should be going, and how to get there. Well of course there is—it is the Bible.
“But the Bible is a very big book,” you say, “where do I start?” Here is a suggestion:
- the origin of our mortality is explained in Genesis 3
- the prospect of eternal life is detailed in 1 Corinthians 15
- Romans 6 describes how we get on to the right route—by belief, repentance and baptism.
So why not start by reading these three chapters? They show that we have a choice: we can try to find our own way in life, or we can follow the Lord Jesus Christ. The one way leads to death, and the other to eternal life. Which way will you go?
Marion Buckler