So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Psalm 90:12
When I was growing up, my neighbor, a very godly man, was on his way to work out with his children when he was killed by a drunk driver. He pulled up to a stop sign right near a curve in the cross road, and because the other driver was drunk, he never rounded the bend. He plowed straight into my neighbor, who was killed instantly. There were a lot of anomalies leading up to the time of his death, but perhaps the one that stuck out the most is the conversation he had had with his children just a couple nights previous. In their family devotions he had begun to talk about what he would like to have on his tombstone when he died. Maybe he had a premonition about his death, but I imagine he was making a statement that he hoped would ring true to his life when he was finally laid in the ground. How could he have known that just a couple days later, at only age fifty-one, the statement he wished for would be inscribed on the hard rock above his head: “Here lies a servant of God”?
What about you? If you were to die right now, what do you think will be inscribed on your tombstone? You know, you really don’t get to pick what you want to have chiseled into your stone. You can tell those you love what you would like to have said about you, but if it is nowhere close to the truth, it will probably never be written. Will those that know you write “Here lies a man who sought after money and things”? or will your tombstone say “Here lies a selfish, miserable man that lived only to please himself”? My neighbor’s tombstone was etched with the words he had wanted to have written about him because he lived his life in a way that proved he was a servant of God.
Think about what you would like to have engraved on your tombstone. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant”; “Here lies a man with a heart to please God”; or “Here lies a man that lived to bring others to Christ” would be some great things to have written about you when you are gone. After you die, it will be too late to decide what you want to have written on your stone. It will be too late to change the way that your life has been lived. The time is now to make your life count toward the things of eternity and toward making a life that will be remembered in the way that you would like for it to be remembered.
Read also: Psalm 90:1-12
Quote of the day: “Live in such a way that if someone spoke badly of you, no one would believe it.”
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