What are we doing?

Lately, I have been pounded with question in my head..."What are you doing with this life?"  I'm sure each and everyone of you has had this question go through your mind.  Am I doing what I am supposed to be doing?  Am I doing what God wants me to do? Am I doing enough?  These are all tough questions that are tough to answer.  I just recently finished reading the book of Ecclesiastes.  This book of the Bible just ruined me.  It basically told me that everything I do in this life is all vanity.  Well, not entirely. It said everything I do in this life that is APART FROM JESUS is vanity.  This is a concept that I have always known but have I really taken it seriously?

If you know me at all you know that I can obsess over a lot of things.  One area of the world that I obsess with is sports.  Growing up, sports is all I knew.  I lived and breathed Seattle Mariners baseball when I was a kid.  And to an extent I still do.  If you walk into my room you would understand what I mean.  But this obsession with sports came to a point where it was too much of me.  It consumed my being.  All my Facebook and Twitter posts were about sports.  I realized that I have spent so much money on sports! All my money gone, poof! On jerseys, tickets, banners, sweatshirts.  And for what?  Do I get to take all that with me when I go to heaven? No! And people have been telling me for years that I had a problem with this but I didn't want to believe it.  In Ecclesiastes 6:5 it says that "It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools." For a long time I was listening to the song of fools.  Sports was an idol in my life.  An idol that I could not shake.  I found my self more concerned with whether my sports teams won rather than the things of God.  That is just wrong.

In Matt Chandler's book The Explicit Gospel, he touches on this subject beautifully.  And if you haven't read this book I highly suggest that you pick it up.  I haven't even read through the whole thing and it is rocking me to the core. I'm going to give you a little excerpt from chapter 6 of his book.

"We can place our self-worth in anything, including otherwise good things. When we take a good thing and make it an ultimate thing, we ensure that that thing will drive us into the ground. 


I'll give you one example.  You can make money the ultimate goal of your life. There's nothing inherently wrong with money or possessions; otherwise God wouldn't tell us not to steal each other's stuff.  But you can spend all your time on money, putting all your energy into accumulating it.  You can buy a house that you rarely get to go into because you're working fifteen-hour days so that you can amass a fortune.  But in the end, you're going to be painted up like a clown, put in a box, and buried.  I'm not being crass; I'm just being honest. Vanity, vanity, it's all vanity!


Or how about something more spiritual?  Take religion, for another instance. Religion practiced apart from faith in Christ is called self-righteousness in the Bible, and not even the perfecters of self-righteousness themselves, the Pharisees, qualified for God's kingdom.  Faithless religion is vanity. No matter how many people it practically helps, no matter how good it makes you feel, religious effort not rooted in the Gospel is rooted in self-justifying self-worth.  This is meaningless."

Wow! That whole passage, even just typing it, ran me through the mill again.  When we make something ultimate in our lives to the point where it takes us over is vanity.  And I love how he even takes it to the religion side of it.  And I think he hits the points here dead on.  A faithless religion where you get the glory and not God is all vanity.  You are trying to justify yourself when God has already justified you.  He justified you when he died on the cross for you.  We can't earn our way to heaven.  He bought that right from us.  He bought us so we could be with Him.  Everything we do needs to be for Him and Him alone.  If it isn't then what are we even doing?  Where are we going?  What's our purpose?  Our purpose is found in the person and the work of Jesus Christ.  Everything else is just dust.  Check yourself.  God is working on my idols and vanity daily because He knows how many I have (too many to count).  Let Him be the ultimate thing in your life.