Just A Moment

2 Cor 4:16-18

Have you ever thought about the length of your life? Some of you are close to the beginning and can’t even imagine an ending. Some of you are close to the ending and wake up every day wondering if this will be the last one. I’m at an age right in the middle of all that. I am beginning to realize I won’t live forever. When I play sports my mind says go for it and my body just laughs at me. I am beginning to see that my life has probably less to go than what I have already lived. It’s a strange feeling.

But what is our life in comparison to eternity? Let’s look at this plate as roughly 80 years of our life. But compare it to all the time that has gone by. (send a kid with yarn in one direction and out the door.) But time behind us is only part of eternity. There is just as long a distance ahead of our lives. ( send a kid with yarn in the opposite direction and out the other door)

Do you get the point? In the scheme of eternity, our physical lives are like this dot in the long, long, line of eternity. So what’s that mean to us? How does that change our lives and how we view it?

PRAYER

I. Just A moment

A. Recognizing time

1. Have you ever seen a toddler wearing a watch and concerned about time? Nope? Me either.

2. There is something in little children that makes them not even think about time.

3. If there is snow on the ground in the afternoon, they probably can’t remember that there wasn’t snow on the ground in the morning.

4. They don’t worry about being on time to anything. Time doesn’t mean a thing to them.

5. Then, one day it happens. Somehow they become aware of time and say something like, “In a minute”

6. A minute? When did that happen?

7. The realization of time has come into their existence.

B. Adam and Eve

1. Did Adam and Eve consider time?

2. My guess is that they were just like a little baby. Until they had to leave the garden, time was irrelevant. They were eternal until that sin destroyed their utopia.

3. Remember, they lived with God who isn’t constrained at all by time.

4. He always refers to himself as “I AM” not “I was”

5. Isa 43:13 says, “from eternity I am He.”

6. God is eternity

7. He’s all about the line, while we tend to be all about the dot.

II. All in Perspective

A. Paul

1. In our text Paul say that our troubles are light and momentary.

2. Paul said this? The guy who in a few chapters later lays out how he had suffered for the cause of Christ?

3. The man who said he was whipped with 39 lashes 4 different times by the Jews, the man who was imprisoned, flogged, beaten with rods, shipwrecked, always on the run, and endangered by bandits?

4. How could a life like that be light and momentary?

5. How could the suffering we have all gone through be light and momentary?

B. Troubles in eternal perspective

1. Mr. Lucado tells about a woman who had been in a very unhappy marriage for 17 years. Her husband had done wrong, she had done wrong. He drank too much, she was too impatient with him. She went to counseling and the counselor said life is short - get out. Mr. Lucado told her that God says life is short – stay in.

2. He makes this comment in his book, “ The brevity of life grants power to abide, not an excuse to bail. Fleeting days don’t justify fleeing problems. Fleeting days strengthen us to endure problems.

3. Now that is a really tough pill to swallow isn’t it?

4. Illustration: pan scale, on one side put small rocks and talk about various struggles, bad boss, health problems, hurtful parents, children who forgot you, bum deals. Watch the one side quickly drop down and stay there.

5. What if he is right? What if we measured our struggles in this life against the measureless peace of God?

6. Look again at our text in verse 17: “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”

7. Now put large weight on other side and watch scales quickly tip the other way.

8. The troubles don’t go away, they are just put in perspective by the weight of God’s eternal glory.

C. God’s eternal glory changes everything.

1. When we understand and accept his eternal glory everything changes.

a) Burdens are lifted

b) The pain of life doesn’t weigh us down anymore.

2. We can be persecuted for a moment.

3. We can be sick for a moment.

4. We can struggle for a moment.

5. We can be lonely for a moment.

6. Again we see that it’s not about us and it certainly isn’t about now.

7. Look at our life as the dot in the line, a moment in time.

8. We need to remember verse 18 – “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”