This is the Life

(The text of my address from the 2021 Erskine College and Seminary Commencement)

President Gustafson, thank you for that kind introduction. To the members of the board, your esteemed faculty, and of course the class of 2021, let me say what an honor it is to address you during this rite of passage from these hallowed halls of learning. Very soon, you graduates will be thrust out into the wild world of almost limitless possibility as you pursue your life’s vocation, whatever that might be.

Without detaining you unnecessarily today, I want to give you some pastoral counsel for the next chapter of your lives based on things that God has taught me in the 49 years that I have been on this planet. Now I recognize that 49 must seem very old to you. It doesn’t seem that old to me actually, for it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was standing in your shoes graduating from college, medical school, and so forth. It’s funny how life does that. When I was 22, fifty seemed ancient, but now that I am almost 50, 70 seems quite young.

I often hear people remark about pastors, that until they get to 45, they have no experience. But once you get to 45, you are no longer hip. It’s time to put your skinny jeans away. So there is a brief window of opportunity where you are both hip and experienced all at the same time, but nonetheless, I would like to take a few moments to reflect with you about what life is and what life is all about.

So what is life? Why are we alive? Or to put it another way, one has to answer the question of identity: Who am I or what am I? These are important questions, indeed.

So let’s begin. About 200 years ago, when ships had tall sails, and sailors had taller tales, her Majesty’s navy was in dock in the commonwealth of Australia. The sailors had been dismissed for a night’s revelry in the town. At the end of the evening, two sailors staggered out of a public house, rather the worse for wear. Leaving the pub, they realized that they had no idea how to find their way back to their ship at the docks. As fortune would have it, they spied a confident looking man striding purposefully in their direction. And they thought to themselves, let’s ask him. He looks as though he knows a thing or two. Now, at this point I should say, that what they didn’t know or they failed to recognize in their half-drunken stupor, was that this man was actually the admiral of the fleet. One of the sailors asked him, “Sir, do you happen to know how to get back to the fleet?” To which the admiral with some incredulity replied, “Do you happen to know who I am?” At which point, one sailor looked at the other and said, “Well, this isn’t going very well. We don’t know where we are, and he doesn’t know who he is!”

All that to say that identity matters. Who are you this morning? To listen to many people in our culture today, you are a biological accident. You are part of the great accident we call life, which began as a fluke, ends up as fertilizer, and is lived out as a farce, or as Bertrand Russel once asserted:

"(What is man?) Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built. "

These are the contentions of the atheist and the humanist. What are you? A random collocation of atoms living among the debris of a universe in ruins? You need to face the facts and build your life on the firm foundation of unyielding despair. So from such a perspective, not to be too blunt about it, life is like a broken pencil - it has no point!

Now with that said, Russel would also remind you not to panic because even though life is pointless, it also offers the possibility of tremendous pleasure in the meantime. What is life all about? Life is about finding pleasure in the moment and the pursuit of happiness. How do you pursue happiness? Well to do that, you must have liberty. And to have liberty, you must have options, good options, and to have good options, you need to have an education, and thus here you are!

Now that is certainly one increasingly common way of looking at life, but before you settle in and assume that we have things all figured out, please remember that the identity question really matters because if you get the answer wrong, there are consequences, and as one of my elders likes to say: ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.

Take, for example, my house at the present moment. We are about to buy a new washing machine because the old one is breaking. Now what is a washing machine for? Well, it's for washing things, particular things, namely clothes. I mean you could wash dishes in it, I suppose, but with predictable results. You might even try to wash your pets or your children in it, but you’d probably be arrested!

Now, let’s say, what if I were out in the yard doing a DIY project that involved some cement, and I went to Home Depot to scope out renting a cement mixer, which is quite an expensive proposition. Then as I was looking at the cement mixer and watching it go round and round, I suddenly thought to myself, hold on a second! I just bought a washing machine and it does everything that this cement mixer does. It even produces water by itself and goes round and round etc. I could mix cement in the washing machine. Now, the funny thing is that I think that plan might work for a while until it didn’t. Why? Because that is not what washing machines are made for. And then where would I be? I’d be left with a broken washing machine, a void warranty, and an outraged wife.

So you see, identity does matter. If you get the identity question wrong, you will get the life question wrong. Furthermore, it might be worth considering that for most of the last 2000 years, mankind has not believed that we are random collocations of atoms but rather that we are purposeful creations of the living God, that we are made in God’s image, not just made by Him, but made like Him and for Him. Now here is an idea with consequences: the God question leads to the identity question which exclusively forms the life question. And so do you see that if you get the God question wrong, you will by necessity get every other question in life wrong as well? And if you do that, you will face the unhappy prospect of reaching the end of your life only to realize that you have succeeded in all of the things that don’t really matter. And what’s more, you would have spent your brief earthly life focusing on the first 70 years, and not the next 20,000 and the 20 million years coming after that, and the 20 billion years coming after that and then the 20 trillion years coming after that!

Getting the life question right is of eternal significance. So I ask you this morning, what are you? A soup of chemicals wrapped up in skin? Or are you a personal spiritual existence wrapped up in a suit of flesh, designed by God to live forever? And forever you shall live.

So who are you this morning, and what is life all about?
To answer that question, I want to turn with you to a passage in Luke’s gospel.
Luke 12:13–21 (ESV)
The Lord Jesus has been speaking to his disciples about the very real prospect of their being arrested and dragged before a court to testify concerning their fundamental convictions as Christians. Now, one man in the crowd has been doing a lot of thinking about courthouses, about dragging his brother to court because his older brother has the power of attorney over their father’s estate. Evidently, the older brother is not willing to release the younger brother’s share of the estate, and the younger brother is getting more than a little resentful about that. So Luke recounts:

13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
14 But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?”
15 And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
16 And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully,
17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’
18 And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.
19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” ’
20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’
21 So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Here’s a man who's on the verge of making the ultimate mistake, of getting to the end of his life only to find out that he’s spent his precious life on all the things that don’t really matter. How does that happen? It happens by process of deception—mostly, I have to say, self-deception, in which we start to project our own desires into reality, where we start to believe lies about life, who we are, and about what life is all about. I have to say that these are extremely common lies, the kinds of falsehoods that most people believe. I wonder if some of you might be believing them right now.

The first mistake that many people make when it comes to living life is that they believe that life is about getting more.

Life Is about Getting More - Building Prosperity

Jesus warns against greed or covetousness. What does He mean by that? Covetousness is an insatiable desire for more, disconnected from need. “It’s the rebel yell of the midnight hour that cries more, more, more!” It’s the bumper sticker lifestyle that,“He who dies with the most toys wins!” It’s Rockefeller’s famous confession when asked how much money is enough, “Oh,’ he said, “just a little bit more!” It’s the man who, when planning his own funeral, says to the undertaker, “I want my coffin to say this about me:” Boy, there’s a man who knew how to live!”
Jesus says that this is a mistake because even when you have an abundance, life does not consist in that abundance. And we all know that, don’t we? It’s the law of diminishing return. You start out in the journey of getting more, and it feels good at the start, but before very long as you head down the road, getting more and more and more, it doesn't take very long until the more you get seems to satisfy you less and less because things are only worth what they cost you. And so when you are a poor student, a hamburger might be really precious because you might be living on Ramen noodles all week, but so when you get to splurge and go to Five Guys Burgers and Fries, it’s like going to Ruth’s Chris Steak House! But for Bill Gates, Ruth’s Chris Steak House is the equivalent of eating at a homeless shelter. It costs him nothing, and therefore nothing is exactly what it’s worth for him.

I learned that early in life when I was a relatively poor medical student. Once a month, I allowed myself one guilty pleasure - buying a music CD. I listened to classical music, jazz, and blues. Each month, I would go down to the local Virgin Megastore, spend hours pouring over the new releases, and I would select my next album. I would then spend the whole month devouring it. I took great delight in it. Now, for roughly the same amount of money each month, I have Spotify which enables me to listen to any CD I want, but now I seem to listen to music much less often. I am spoiled in terms of choice and the wealth of possibility costs me nothing. And all of life’s pleasures are like that. The more money you manage to amass, the less things actually cost you, until you get to that awful moment when nothing costs you anything any more, and everything becomes worthless. Finally, you get to the loneliest moment in all the world when you at last get everything the world says that you must have to be happy, and yet you find out that happiness still eludes you. You have everything and nothing all at the same time, which is why movie stars and pop music idols self-destruct, turn to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. They have followed the empty promises of affluenza all the way to the end of the rainbow only to find out that there is nothing there but the clanging sound of their own emptiness.

Christ tells the story of a farmer to illustrate this truth. This man has a bumper harvest, suddenly reaping a harvest of greater returns than he could ever have possibly imagined. At first, it brings him great joy. He has bought into the lie that life is about getting more; it’s about building prosperity.

Then Jesus moves on to the second lie:

Life consists in building a secure tomorrow.

Life exists in security; it’s about securing your prosperity. The man in Christ’s parable says, What shall I do? “I’ll build bigger barns, and there I will store all my stuff!” Now there’s a little bit of truth here. We all have treasure in this world: things we love, people we love, and we want to secure them. We want to make sure that they are safe from evil and wicked men, from natural disasters, from financial disasters. We seek to diversify our portfolios so that we can have some confidence that things will be okay tomorrow.

However when you build your life on security, you need to realize that life is fundamentally insecure, that there will come a day when it will not matter how much money you have. It won’t matter whether you are Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. There will come a day when a doctor will turn to your family and say, “I am sorry, there is nothing more that I can do. We must let nature take its course.” And then you will have to take that most personal of all journeys. You will have to head off into eternity.

So I don’t mind your building security; that’s part of wisdom. The Bible isn’t against security any more than it's against possessions. God doesn’t mind your having stuff. He just doesn't want stuff to have you. And in a similar fashion, God doesn’t mean that you and I should adopt a laissez faire attitude to the treasure of life. No, there is no virtue to be found in playing footloose and fancy free with treasure.

However, we must not live our lives ignorant of the final insecurity of life which is that when all has been said and done, the death rate is the same the world over: one death for every person.
This brings me to the third lie which most men believe that:

Life is about enjoying the simple Pleasures…

“Take Your ease, eat, drink and be merry….” This is the philosophy of the man in Christ’s story. Once he has prosperity and security nailed down, he can take a moment to smell the roses. Such merriment, of course, is one of God’s great gifts. But like the decorations on a Christmas tree, if we are not very careful, we can use these simple pleasures to mask the fact that the tree is rootless and, therefore, lifeless. Such was undoubtedly the case with the man in our story...

Life is about to go on for a very long time.

That’s a lie which most seem to operate under such that they find it much easier to believe in the inevitability of other people’s deaths rather than their own. And, of course, I know I might die tomorrow, but I also am quite convinced that it probably won’t be today. But one day, friends, it will be today for me and it will be today for you. That day will be our last, our dying day.

I remember one time when I was a junior doctor doing rounds in a ward with Dr. Nelson, who was one of the great physicians of internal medicine at the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald. In the course of our rounds, we came to an older lady who was about to be discharged after a fairly mild case of pneumonia. Just before she was, she asked him, ‘Doctor, I am worried about my heart. I fear my heart is very weak. Would you please listen to my heart?” And so, Dr. Nelson made a great show in front of the grand round, pulled out his stethoscope, and ever so eruditely proceeded to listen to this dear lady’s heart. Then he stood up and said, ‘Why ma’am, your heart will do you to your dying day!’ She took great comfort from that, and of course, he was right. The problem was that she died the next morning before they had a chance to discharge her!

And it was just like that for the rich man in Luke’s gospel, who thought to himself, “I have many goods laid up for many years.” But he couldn’t have been more wrong, for that very night God said to him, “You fool, this night your soul is required of you, then whose will those things be that you have provided?”

It reminds me of that moment after Rockefeller’s death when his family was gathering in the drawing room at the mansion for the reading of his will. One of his friends was there in the corridor leading up to the drawing room, and as the attorney walked by he asked, “How much did the old man leave?”

“Why sir,” the lawyer replied, “he left it all.”

Which brings me to the lie that is most commonly believed among the sons and daughters of man, that life is not only about getting more, about building a secure portfolio, and about it going on for a very long time, but that life is about me!

Life Is about Me!

But Jesus says, “Oh no, actually life is about God!” So he who lays up treasure for himself is not rich towards God. What does that mean? It means that life is about the great business of knowing God:
Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 9: 23–24, ESV)

Do you know God? Does God know you? Most of you are probably thinking, “Well, of course, I know God. I am an American, for crying out loud. God bless America is in my spiritual DNA! However, it is one thing to know about God, but it is entirely another to actually know Him.

What does it look like to know God? It means a number of things.
Living life must be based upon true truth. When I ask people to describe God, most say, “When I like to think of God, I like to think of . . . . ” And then what they begin to describe is a rather bigger and better version of themselves. But of course, a more pressing question is how does God think of Himself? How could you know?
The answer, of course, is that God has revealed Himself to you. He has revealed Himself to you in nature. The heavens declare His glory. The stars, the sun, the moon, the hummingbirds, the buzzing bees, the busy busy ants all glow with creative genius. At first meeting, they all remind us that we have a Creator and that we should worship Him! But the book of nature is all pictures and no sound, so it can only take us so far. When it comes to a written instruction booklet, we need to know more, and that something more is found in the Psalms, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:7–8, ESV).

Only Scripture brings us true truth, that which is true in all places at all times and for all people. The created universe can show us God’s glory, but only the Scripture can reveal to us His mind and can fix us from the inside out, “restoring the soul,” causing the soul to turn around (to repent)! Only Scripture can take a natural born fool like you and me, one born with the awful propensity to live life devoid of the fear of God, to live life without being gripped and controlled by a sense of God. And only the Scriptures can teach us true wisdom, to make God the Reference Point of our lives, all our thoughts, all our words, all our deeds, of all of life itself.

If your relationship with God is not built upon the truth of His word, then it is built upon the fondest lies within your own head. But just because you like to think certain thoughts about God, doesn’t make them true. And when it comes to worshipping a God whom you cannot see, touch, taste, or feel, nothing matters more than truth!

Being rich towards God revolves around the gospel and a just mercy. The problem from God’s standpoint is that you and I have sinned against Him. Most people believe that sin isn’t too much of a problem. Are you one of them? Such thoughts can exist only in the presence of a profound ignorance of God. As the Puritan John Owen once remarked, “He that never had a great thought of sin never once had a great thought of God. Because it is against God that sin ultimately has to do.” But one day, when you see God as He is, when you feel the blazing weight of His glory, you will see things very differently.

And yet how many people in our day think that they can know God without any repentance on their part and without any costly forgiveness on God’s part? To be sure, many people will pay lip service to sin and say with Henrich Heine (and these were his last words), “Of course God will forgive me. It’s his job!” But actually God’s job is judgment. His real job is to make sure that justice is done in the universe. He just can’t ignore what you and I have done. Think about it for a moment. How many of us would enjoy watching a crime show if the bad guys were never caught, the murderers never punished, and the rapist never received his comeuppance? No, we need justice because there is a divine need for justice, and when it comes to settling accounts, God’s job is to ensure that sin is seen for what it really is. He can’t just forgive it as if it doesn’t really matter, which is why, of course, God sent His Son into this world. There is no other Name under heaven given amongst men by which we can or must be saved. Jesus’ very Name tells us that He is the Savior. “You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” In other words, without Him, the best we can be is lost. And with Him, the worst you can be is saved!

You can’t know life if you don’t know Jesus as Savior and Lord. Jesus himself said, “This is eternal life that they might know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent!”

Therefore, I am calling you today to entrust your life and all your hopes and plans to Jesus. Be that person who gets the God question right, that person who is rich towards God, who understands that life is not about me, myself and mine.Rather, being rich toward God is about living life in the right order: it’s about God first, others second and me last of all. By the strange logic of the gospel, we gain our lives not by indulging our lives but by laying them down. Listen to Mark as he quotes Jesus:

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:34–38, ESV)

And so, he who is rich towards God finds life by forsaking life. He fills himself by emptying himself. He saves his life by losing it. He lives by dying. He pours himself out as a drink offering serving his wife, his children, his neighbors, and even his enemies. In short, we find our life by laying it down.

And so, when we reach the end of our life and we come to die, we discover that the great lesson of the Christian life is that death is not death at all. For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. Why is it gain? Because death brings me more of Christ. When a believer comes to die, he actually becomes more alive than he has ever been before.

When he was dying, the Puritan Richard Baxter was asked how he was faring. With his final breath, Baxter opened his eyes for one last time and said, “Almost well, nearly home!”

This is the essence of the Christian life. Do you have it? Oh, Jesus died to give it. Whoever you are this morning, Jesus says, let this day be the first day of the rest of your life. For I have come that you might have life and have it in abundance!