Building a Kingdom Foundation of Eternal Value

We achieve ‘so much’,

When we shut ourselves off,

Or so it seems,

Until we end up in a trough.

Then finally we come,

Face to face,

With the glory of God,

And he reveals,

“Life’s not that kind of race.”

There’s an eternity to life,

That must be respected,

If we are to get it right,

With blessings to be collected.

Many build their houses in vain. We all have. Many burn themselves out on the kingdom of approval. We all have. Many stake their lives on a wafer of a chance. We all have. We all fall short.

Success in life is the daily retention of the eternal perspective, trusting God to lead from that simple premise.

To build our house – the foundation of our lives – on vanity and approval and on luck is to build with sand or paper. But when we build on the rock solid dependability of God we can be sustained through the worst of disasters, because we know grief doesn’t prevent our advancement in the Kingdom. Indeed, grief may well facilitate the ordination of grief in our experience.

God’s kingdom, ushered in through the glorification of the Messiah, is a kingdom of no sense to the world. It is other-worldly. And to build within this Kingdom, and to advance, is to build as if we are allowing the destruction of what has been built. It bears re-reading: things of the world that are destroyed – empires of the sun – are necessary in bringing forth the Kingdom to come.

If this Kingdom we build on is a coming kingdom, and it is, because God has engineered it, then we are propagators of Divine work. What is valued in this world must pass away, so that which is truly valued may come and find God glorified through us for them.

There is an eternity to life that must be respected.

When we respect this eternal aspect of life – that ‘life’ and ‘eternal’ must fit in the same phrase – then we give up our petty flagrant desires, our own straining efforts, our need of approval, our striving for a fortune of any other bounds but God’s.

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Nothing we build makes any sense or has any purpose unless we build a Kingdom foundation of eternal value. Why we do what we do counts much more than what we do. The heart makes the difference. A heart oriented toward the Kingdom will ensure things of eternal value have primacy.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.