Nothing will be in vain
But let all who take refuge in you rejoice;
Let them ever sing for joy. Psalm 5:11
Read Philippians 2:12—18
When my life is over and done I cannot expect anyone left walking around on the surface of the ground (I’ll be underneath it in some form) to delay much from what they are doing. I really won’t interrupt them any more. They’ll all be pouring their lives into something. They’ll all have their day, too. Some of them will have achieved far greater notoriety than I. But they’ll have their day, just the same. And, ultimately, be forgotten, just the same. So if it’s a name for myself, a perpetual name I want… that thought is pretty glum. I don’t get the slightest sense that the apostle is the slightest glum. I think he’s sharing his great secret of joy with me. He’s sharing with me the one thing that’s worth pouring out my life for, losing myself. Forgetting myself. I’m to give myself for the life of the word of God among his people, for their health and benefit and their encouragement, because they are going to be God’s children forever.
Father God, you have called your children to be yours. You have called me to be yours. You have called me to be yours amid a people like every people, a generation like every generation, who will live and die and be lost to human memory. But you have made me not to be alone and not to be ever forgotten, but to live in connection, to live in communion, to love and to cherish your forever children by sharing their joy and their struggle, their glory and their little shames one day at a time, one prayer at a time, one confession, one shared joke, one shared song of praise at a time until the Day.