The Waters of Prosperity

Let me talk first to the person who identifies most with pleasant waters. Let me address you whose life is one of ease and comfort. Let me have a word with you who seem to be just coasting along, everything’s going alright; you don’t really have much to worry about- no serious storms, no intense suffering. Money’s not really an issue. You have a good job that pays well. Or maybe you’re retired and now you’re just relaxing off the hard work you already put in all those years. You deserve it after all right? You know- the children are doing fine, perhaps they’re grown up and have started their own families. You and your spouse (or your significant other) aren’t facing any real relationship issues. You’ve got a nice place- maybe you’ve been there for some time and everything’s pretty settled in and comfortable. You have your car, or your truck, or your bike, or your boat, or your 4-wheeler, or snowmobile, or lawnmower, or surfboard, or skateboard, or whatever. You have a pretty set, typical schedule that’s generally not too disturbed. You have your different entertainment when you want it. You have your favorite places to eat, your hobbies you like to do, your places you like to go. You have your friends (maybe less or more), but you have enough to make you happy when you want to go out or something. You have no real health issues, no real pressing needs, no real pressing wants maybe even. All in all, everything’s pretty easy for you. You look at your life and it isn’t too bad. You got this, you got that; I mean, more or less, you’re happy, you’re comfortable. And maybe you’d even say you’ve actually got it pretty darn good. Maybe you’re just loving how good you have it right now.

If this is you, then I urge you to recall my earlier warning. Remember your danger! Satan loves to devour the complacent! And who tend to be most complacent? It’s the prosperous, the comfortable! -moseying along in their health and wealth and success and prestige, not a care in the world! Sure, they murmur- but about their grass not being green enough, or their sky being too clouded, or their fast food not fast enough, or their steak too soft, or their traffic too traficky! Oh how they make such fat and easy prey for that dragon of old! They are so filled with this world that they are weighed down by it, unable to even move towards heaven- like a full-grown cow that simply has its head down all day eating grass and only moves to the next patch of grass and barely ever lifts its head up to survey the field about them. It’s so content with grass that it doesn’t care about anything else! And then it is slaughtered! Don’t be like that! You aren’t a cow! But when you’re so comfortable with your life in this world, you forget about your life in the next. And when you forget, you stop caring. And when you stop caring about your life in the next, Satan laughs at the ease by which you perish. He simply has to pull the latch, and because you’re so weighed down by the world you’ve been feeding on, your own weight causes you to fall into Hell. And it is so easy for him to do precisely because you’ve lost sight of what really matters! You’re face is stuck in the grasses of this world, the comforts of this world, the soothing waters of this world. You think you were made for this world when you weren’t.

Have you forgotten who you are? –a finite, frail, temporary creature? Who created you? What are you doing here anyway? Why are you on this planet? Why is there breath in your lungs? Who started your heart beat and keeps it beating when you’re unconscious, asleep and dreaming like a little baby at night? You are here for a reason. Not because of some mysterious irrational impersonal insensible forces somehow over a billion years turning you from a cosmic prebiotic soup into a conscious, thinking, reasoning, and loving person. No! You were designed and made an immortal being. You have an eternal soul that will either live on forever in heaven or in hell no matter what you think or feel about it. And this life- this journey through this sea- is but a step across a puddle in comparison to eternity! A puddle! Don’t lose yourself in this puddle.

Have you forgotten where it is you are going? Oh Christian, you’re going to a sea like glass mingled with fire that is shining with the harps of all the saints. You’re going to a sea of tribes and nations and peoples all saved by grace praising the Lamb that was slain for them. You’re going to a sea of archangels, and angels, and seraphim, and cherubim, and all the heavenly host in all their glorious array working alongside you for the joy of their Master! Oh yes, you’re going to a sea of joy indescribable and pleasures you cannot even dream of!- a sea of ever-increasing happiness and new delights day after day forever. And best of all, you are going to a sea of infinite love flowing from the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords ever, directly, and personally towards you. Wave after wave of the glory of Christ will wash over you- each one transforming you to be able to take in the next one’s delights; and that for-e-ver. Just imagine it! Can you describe the euphoria of heaven? Oh, what comforts and pleasures of this life are worth comparing to those of heaven? Forget them! They are temporary. They are fleeting. They are here to day and gone tomorrow. They will rust, rot, and die even as you will. They will not sustain you or give you the satisfaction you are looking for. Do not depend on them. They won’t deliver! Do not hold them tightly. They will turn to dust in the end! They are not worth living for. Do not trade the seas of heaven for the stagnant ponds of this world.

But your danger is greater indeed than simply wasting your life in this world, forgetting that of the next. That mistake is serious enough- for you won’t live for what you were made to live for, and you will have settled for pitiful pleasures; but the choice of making that mistake is one that you will regret forever. Know this: if you live for this world, you will not live in the next. If you waste your life in this world, you will lose your life in heaven. You won’t make it. The gates will be closed to you. You will have lazily drifted along in the easy waters of this world too long, and you will find that the nice river of life you were just enjoying has turned into a deadly waterfall; and there is nothing to save you from your plummet into the Lake of Fire at the bottom of it. As surely as you loved your life in this world, you will hate your life for eternity. Forever and ever and ever you will regret your life of comfort and ease. You will say, “Oh that I would have suffered the worst hells of that life if it would have saved me from this Hell.” For even the worst suffering of a temporary life won’t even compare to the lightest sufferings of an eternal one. Your torment, your suffering, your misery, your agony will be forever. “When you look forward, you shall see a long forever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any rest at all.” Surely you will be the object of a merciless consuming fire for thousands and thousands and thousands of years; and once you have burned for all that time, when so many ages have already been spent by you screaming, you will know that it is all but a moment, a speck, a dot, to what remains.

Consider this seriously! Dwell on this! It is not like you can sit around awhile enjoying all this world has to offer you and then on your death bed will yourself to heaven! Just as you can’t pull down your sails and sit in the middle of the ocean and then think you can somehow make it to shore! No you must do the opposite! You must sail to your destination! You must take up the anchor, and open your sails, and move! You must embark upon your voyage to the heavenly shore just as you must set sail upon your journey toward an earthly one. If you are still and stop, you will sink. If you dawdle and delay, you will drown. Think! Wouldn’t you rather live as if there was a heaven and a hell than if there wasn’t? Wouldn’t you rather risk this life for eternity rather than eternity for this life? If living as if there is a heaven and hell meant you must go through the worst of storms but you would still arrive at eternal bliss; and living as if there weren’t a heaven and hell meant you could live quite comfortably but you would arrive in eternal torment and misery; what would you choose? Don’t trade the hope of eternity for this fleeting vapor! Quickly hoist the sails and be off! Away quickly! The sun of your life is setting already! Your time is short! And you have wasted enough of it as it is! You cannot face the waterfall of death. You do not have strength to fight against its pull. The sea beast Satan himself is after you. His jaws seek only to bring you down to the Pit. Go now while he thinks you are still docked in Vanity Fair. Release your tie to this world, pull up the anchor, and open your sails, praying that the Lord may fill them with His grace and steer you towards His blessed eternal shore. You must go! Go at once!

BUT!

-one last word before I bid you farewell. And woe is me if I do not tell you this! If indeed this is your case, and you are enjoying the waters of this world far too much, and you find yourself lost in the comfort and pleasure they offer, truly your time is short indeed, and you must set sail quickly or you will never make it. However, you must know one last thing before you set off. And this is the most important thing: You will never make it across these waters on your own. Never. You will surely die if you try to sail to the heavenly shore on your own strength. You are not strong enough. You are not good enough; you’re not smart enough, you’re not funny enough, not charming enough, not successful enough, not good-looking enough, nor can you try hard enough; you are not perfect enough to make it across this sea alive. For these waters are cursed from old, and from ancient times they have held the plague of death in them.

(Quote is from Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, READ IT).