So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
I Corinthians 13:13
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
I Corinthians 13:8
Where does most of our time go? Probably to work. We spend most of our waking hours getting ready to work, driving to work, working, driving home and recovering from work. And why do we work? Hopefully some of the motivation is to use our talents to improve the world in which we live. But if we are honest, much of the motivation is financial. If they took the money away from the job, most of us wouldn’t work for little or nothing.
What do we do when we are not working? We hang out with family. That’s good. That’s one of the benefits of family. It gives us people to share life with. We socialize with friends. That’s good. Fun is an important part of life and a necessary balance against the time we spend working. We have hobbies. Those are good as well, because they give us something to do that we enjoy, that doesn’t carry the consequences that work does. We do housework. That is necessary in order to live. We need a clean house, food on the table, laundry and other things that are part of running a household.
Money is a necessary part of life. It takes money to have a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear. Most of us want extra money to do extra things like travel. We want money to spend on hobbies. We want enough money so that we will feel secure when we retire. And most of us hope to leave money to our children when we pass away.
In my nearly thirty years as a priest, I have attended over 300 funerals. The church where I serve holds 300 people. That’s almost an entire church filled with people that I used to know at some point, who have now passed on. The common denominator at each funeral was a casket, with a person dressed in it, in one set of clothes. There wasn’t the whole wardrobe. There wasn’t money stuffed into the casket. No family members were in there, just one person. I’ve seen a golf club now and then, a symbol of a hobby a person might have had, but not the golf course, or the friends they golfed with. Speaking of friends, many friends may turn out for a funeral but none of them are going along with the deceased. No houses or cars or travel experiences accompany the one who has died.
All those things we’ve spent our life amassing will no longer be ours. They will either go to someone else, or they might even be discarded. I Corinthians 13:8 reminds us that prophecies will pass away. The brilliant things we have said, the ideas we have prognosticated, these will likely be forgotten. The eloquent speeches and our knowledge of language will not do us any good when we are dead. Whatever knowledge we have collected will not go with us either. All will be gone.
The only thing that will never end is love. We will be able to take our love of God with us. That is our faith. We will take our record of serving God with us as well. It is written on our souls.
We will not be able to take other people with us. However, we will be able to take our record of serving others with us. This, too, will be written on our souls. God will examine our records of loving Him and serving others at His awesome judgment seat. He won’t really care about our golf handicap, or our executive title, or impressive office, resume or bank account. It will be our love for Him and our love for others, manifested in serving them, that He will care about.
In the Divine Services of the Church, we offer a couple of notable petitions. First, we pray for the peace from Above and the salvation of our souls. We don’t ostensibly pray for wealth or success. Instead, we pray for peace and salvation. We pray for sufficiency but not excess. The most important thing we pray for is A Christian end to our lives, peaceful without shame and suffering and for a good defense before the Awesome Judgment Seat of Christ. Because at the end of our lives, this is the only petition that will matter. It will matter how we end because that will set us in motion for where we will spend eternal life. After the joyful pursuits of life are gone, as life itself ebbs away, the only thing that will matter is that we prepared for ourselves a good defense before the awesome judgment seat of Christ. And this judgment will be based not on accomplishment or material gain, but on love; love for God and love for our neighbor. God won’t ask how much we gained for ourselves but rather how much of ourselves we gave away to others, because that’s what love and service is. Love, and our record of it (or the absence of it from our record) is the thing that will never end. And how we’ve loved God and how we’ve loved our neighbor will have a bearing on our defense at the awesome judgment seat of Christ, and that will determine where we will spend eternity.
Lord, thank You for the promise of eternal life. That there is not just a destination to look to when life is over but a purpose in life, which is to prepare for that. Help me to be a person of love, and a person who serves others. Help me to seek and to find the “peace from Above” and ultimately the salvation of my soul. Guide me as I work toward a Christian end to my life, and may I take steps each day to prepare for a good account at Your awesome judgment seat. Remember me, O Lord, in Your Kingdom, now and forever. Amen.
Everything but our record of love will one day pass away. That’s why how we record our lives from the perspective of love—for God and in service to our neighbor—is all that will matter when we stand before God and make a defense our lives to Him.
