As a pastor, I have the opportunity to help people with their marriages, their finances, their children, their anxieties, doubts, fears and character flaws. One of things I have noticed over the past 20 years of pastoral ministry is that people hunger to understand their lives and why things happen the way they do. Questions I often get asked are,“What does this mean?” or “Why has this happened to me?”
It is a universal human desire to want things to make sense and to want our lives to have meaning. Deep down we know that our lives should count and count for something important. This desire is hardwired into us because it is something we need to live a flourishing life.
Dallas Willard comments, “Meaning is not a luxury for us. It is a kind of spiritual oxygen, we might say, that enables our souls to live.” In short, we need our lives to have meaning and the events of our lives to make sense in some way. And so, we hunt for meaning.
Meaning comes from the future.
The events of our lives only make sense to us in light of future events. Willard explains it this way, “The meaning of present events in human life is largely a matter of what comes later. Thus, anything that ‘has no future’ is meaningless in the human order.” He compares our lives to the opening words of an unfinished sentence, paragraph or chapter of a book. The only way we can fully know the meaning of the words is to know what comes later, to keep reading.
Our lives are like that. We come to understand our lives from understanding our future. That begs the question, “What does our future look like?” We have been kept in the dark on the details, but God has given us some concrete ideas and images to show us a basic understanding of what is to come.
What Jesus said about your future.
In Luke 19 and Matthew 25, Jesus told two similar parables to help us find meaning in our lives. Both stories are about a master who entrusted a certain amount of money to his servants. In each story, the servants who invested the master’s money well and received a return for him were told that they would be given “even more responsibilities.” In Luke 19, Jesus even specifies being “governor over ten cities.”
What is the lesson here? It’s actually quite simple. Jesus is teaching that how we manage what has been entrusted to us in this life will determine our role in His future heavenly kingdom. If we are faithful over a little here in earth, we will be entrusted with even more in heaven. By making this connection, Jesus is giving us a picture of our future which in turn gives meaning to the “first words of the sentence” of our lives.
One day, if you are a believer in Christ, you will live in a glorious kingdom with Christ and everyone else who has made Him Savior. It will be similar to earth but very different. There will be no pain or suffering. There will be no sin or evil. Righteousness and peace will reign. And you will have a role in this kingdom. You will play a part.
What role that will be is up to you. How you live now, how you manage what has been entrusted to you now will determine your part in God’s future kingdom. This gives everything we do today incredible significance, for we are managing time, talent, people, money, children, our health, our sexuality and our homes. It’s all adding up to something, and your future impact is up to you.
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