More to Life

It was 1973. Maybe 74. I was 23 years-old and had been a Christian only a year or so. But the Holy Spirit had changed my life-trajectory. A sinner loving sin, now a child of God learning to love righteousness and the Bible.

 

I’d been dating a young woman – a non-Christian – for a while and eventually asked her to marry me. At the time I was unaware of God's admonition in 2 Corinthians 6 to avoid such entanglements with non-believers. Anyway, she said, yes, and so I asked her father for permission to wed his daughter. It’s the kind of thing my mother trained me to do as I was growing into adulthood in her home. She was old-fashioned in a way I wish the whole world was old-fashioned.

 

I will never forget what Sharon’s father said to me after I told him my plans for employment centered on the pastorate or missionary work. He told me, “There’s more to life than the teachings of God.”

 

Exact words.

 

They burned into my heart because I wanted to marry his daughter, but I knew we would have nothing but trouble because the word of God was my food and my drink. It had become the air that I breathed. When I soon learned Sharon’s philosophy of life was like her dad’s, I broke our engagement.

 

“There is more to life than the teachings of God.”

 

Christian, do you believe that? Do you believe there is more to life than God's teaching in Scripture?

 

Listen, we all know not everyone has the time or the energy to voraciously study God’s word as a pastor or a Bible teacher must study God's word. Nor do I believe God expects everyone to know His word as well as pastors or teachers or missionaries. Between raising a family, punching time clocks, fighting traffic, and everything else that fills a 24-hour day in our lives, we often do our best to read the Scriptures from cover to cover once a year.

 

But does life’s busyness and our employment and family responsibilities diminish God's call on our lives to know His word as best as we can know it, month after month? Of course not.

 

Yet, if we hunger to know more about history or art or music or language than we do the word of God, then maybe we DO believe there is more to life than the teachings of God.

 

If we hunger to know more about leadership or the intricacies of our employment than we do about the word of God, then maybe we DO believe there is more to life than the teachings of God.

 

If we hunger to know more about medicine, or astronomy, or physics, or engineering, or any of the hard sciences than we do the word of God, then maybe we DO believe there is more to life than the teachings of God.

 

If we hunger to know more about politics, or the statistics of your favorite sports team than we do about the word of God, then maybe we DO believe there is more to life than the teachings of God.

 

When Saint Paul wrote to young Timothy “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15), those inspired words of God also apply to you and me in 2022 – even for those of us who are not pastors or teachers or missionaries.

 

God's instruction to be ‘diligent’ about His word applies equally to those who work in offices and hospitals and fast-food restaurants and department stores. It applies to moms raising a family and teens rushing to classes and college students cramming for the next test. And it applied to me in 1973, and to Sharon’s father, and to Sharon herself.

 

No, there is NOT more to life than the teachings of God.

 

Listen! When we are lying on our hospice bed, I promise we will not at all care about science or politics or sports or anything else other than our impending destiny. If we are not giving a proper place in our very busy lives to study God's word, then we WILL be sorry when we are lying there on that hospice bed.

 

Christian, the time is far spent for us to treat the holy, infallible, inerrant, transcultural, transcendent word of God as if it is of only little worth, as if it is something to open only on occasion. If we can read a 400-page novel in a few weeks, if we can spend hours in front of the television or computer, then what excuse will we give to God when He asks what we did with the gift He gave us?

 

And make no mistake – the word of God is a gift from the very throne of God into our hands. It is a gift of infinite – infinite value.

 

Now – what will we do with His gift?