What is Your Life?

“For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away.” (James 4:14)

As a young pastor about twenty-three years old, I sat under some big shade trees with an elderly gentleman of our church and helped him celebrate his ninetieth birthday. As he talked about things he had seen in his lifetime he spoke of days in the little log cabin with its dirt floor where he played as a child in the mid to late 1870s. A tear drifted down his weathered cheek as he looked off into the distance and said, “I don’t know where it’s all gone. It just seems like yesterday.”

Sometimes in the early mornings the fog is described as, “thick enough to cut with a knife.” But when the sun comes up the fog is soon gone. When we are young life seems as though it will last forever, but we soon learn that it does not.

When he was a child my older brother had a plaque that read, “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” Time is fleeting, the moments are passing. Someone said his grandfather’s clock does not say, “tick, tock, tick, tock.” Instead it says, “quick, quick, quick, quick.”

Your life is as vapor as it fades. Use it by giving it to Christ or lose it now and forever.