Eternity And The Heart

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eternity

August 4 (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

He has planted eternity in the human heart.  (NLT)

The tyranny of the urgent crushes the human spirit.  Consider for a moment the things that make you nervous or anxious, scared or worried.  Are they not things like paying your bills, dealing with a difficult relationship, or handling the mountain of work at your job?  The young person knows this anxiety as she prepares to enter a new level of school, and the elderly person knows it as he frets over burdening his family.  Seventeenth century thinker Blaise Pascal identified why this is so.  “Our imagination so enlarges the present by dint of continually reflecting on it, and so contracts eternity, by never reflecting on it, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing.”

Contrast that with how God designed us.  He planted eternity in our hearts.  We were made to dream of and to ponder the limitless.  Do we have to put gas in the car?  Of course we do, but activities like that are not the focus of our lives, and neither are things like wealth, honor, and the accumulation of achievements.  We live in discrete moments, minute to minute, in bodies no taller than the tops of our heads and no faster than our muscles can contract, yet our hearts are made for eternity.  How, then, do we reverse the absurdity that Pascal identified?

We dwell in the eternal when we surrender to God.  When we give Him our fears and our worries, when we give Him our plans and our dreams and focus not on any of those things but on Him and His rich, extravagant, lavish, warm, perfect love for us, in such a moment our moments expand to eternity.  Confidence and peace become ours as we walk in sure relationship with our Lord.

Oh, Jesus, You overwhelm me with Your love and friendship.  When I think about it, I can’t imagine why I ever look to anything, be it my worries or successes, other than You.  If anything tempts me to look elsewhere, please draw my gaze back to You.  Amen.

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Published by Steve Perkins

I am a baptized follower of Jesus Christ, a husband, and a father. I have taught Latin for nearly thirty years from middle school through undergraduate levels, am a speaker and author, and am the 2014 Indiana Teacher of the Year. Things that get my blood racing: '80s metal and classic rock, blues, fountain pens, Ford Mustangs, poetry, philosophy, theology, all things Latin and Greek, grammar, hiking, and reading. Online Devotions began January 4, 1999, in email format for the teens of the church my family attended at the time. The list of email subscribers quickly grew to include adults as well from across the United States and beyond. In 2007 I published a collection of the devotions in print format, and in 2010 I added the blog version. I began recording the devotions for a limited time in 2017 and made them available on iTunes. Starting in January of 2019, the Online Devotions are getting a new look here at Wordpress. They are still available by email through subscription. As I have said for the past twenty years, if one of the devotions touches you, you can be sure it was from God. If one leaves you flat, there was too much of me in it.

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