No Regrets!
At 6 AM two weeks ago I received a phone call that I didn’t want to receive. It was the son of a good friend who told me that his dad was not responding to efforts to wake him. When I got to the house minutes later, I was greeted by his wife who said, “He didn’t make it.” I embraced her in silent unbelief. This could not be true; he was only 41 years old and in apparent good health. Time went on, and we had visitation and the funeral in the next few days. In a two week span, I attended a total of three of those. Was God trying to tell me (us) something? Always! What was it? Maybe it was to live life so we will have no regrets. It has been my experience that in death, especially a sudden death, there is always some who wished they had had more time, or had done things differently in the time they had. Regret – it is an awful word at the time of a death. God doesn’t want us to have regrets at the end of our life (or the lives of our loved ones). He constantly tells us to watch, to anticipate the end, so we will be ready, our accounts all even. We tend to think we have lots of time to get things right, then time stops, and we have regrets. I remember the first thing out of my mouth when I received a call that my mother had passed on – “I had so much I wanted to tell her!”
How can we live our
life so that we will have no regrets? I think Paul sums it up when, at the end
of his life, he said, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.” Wouldn’t we all want to truthfully say that at the end
of our lives? In order to do that, we must first vow to do the things now that
are most important, not to ourselves only, but to God. Paul said, “I have kept
the faith.” That is the key. What he means is he obeyed God. He kept the
faith, the commandments of his God. Everyday of his life, he made decisions on
the sole basis of whether or not it would honor and please his Lord. We need to
watch (“kept” literally means “keep an eye on”) that every decision we make is
one God wants us to make. That takes earnest prayer to stay in tuned with His
wishes, and knowledge of His Word, with which He communicates to us. That sound
easy, but it is far from easy, because we have opposition. Paul said he “fought
the fight.” This word is the word from which we get our English word
“agonize”. We are in a fight, an intense struggle with our enemies. The Bible
mentions three – the world (the me-first, humanistic religion of society), the
flesh (our own sinful desires), and the devil (Satan himself). This is a daily
struggle. Paul struggled, too (Romans 7). Nobody said it was going to be
easy! But it will be well worth it when we have “finished the course.” We need
to finish well. Our life is often referred to as a race, where all our efforts
are focused on the finish line. The only trouble is, we don’t know where the
finish line is! It can pop up at any moment. Are you ready? Don’t worry about
past regrets – Paul said he forgot the past and spent his efforts on striving
for the goal (Phil. 3). Confess any past sins to God, and He will wipe your
slate clean (1
Pastor John Erwin
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