Is Life Worth Living?

In recent times I have been shocked and saddened by the increasing numbers of suicides in our society, and particularly concerned that many of these are among our young people. It is a tragic and sad commentary on life that our young people are growing up in our midst with the impression that life is not worth living” Of course it is a lie, and is the deceptive weapon in the hands of the Devil to “steal, kill and destroy” John 10:10.

Since the Garden of Eden, the Devils job has been to rob us of the Life God intended us to have. He stole it first from Adam and Eve, then he has tried to steal it from the rest of us ever since, and tragically has succeeded in robbing many of the full and abundant life which God intended us all to have in a relationship with Him, through Jesus Christ.

No man is an Island, and we all influence and effect the lives and living of others around us. The Apostle Paul, puts it this way in Romans 14 v7.

“For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.”

Today I want to ask the Bible to answer the deep question, “What is the true meaning of life?” I shall not insult your intelligence by one word of argument as to the importance of that question. You and I are conscious that we are living. We know that the mysterious and wonderful thing which we call life is passing rapidly away. What a mystery life is and one which science has not in the least helped us to solve. It is today the same inscrutable mystery it was centuries ago. That its issues are tremendously important, we know, and we ask what is the meaning, the true meaning, including, of course, the true

purpose and object of life. If you do desire a text on which to base these arguments, then there is none better than

Romans 14:7 …where Paul says…

“… none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.”

In other words, it is impossible for us to isolate ourselves from humanity and from God. We cannot do it. Now, I want to say, first of all, in considering this question of the true meaning of life, that we cannot ignore this one fact. No life has found its true meaning until the fact is frankly recognized that the chief value of that life is due to the investment which God has made

in it.

This is why I have no time for low self-esteem – God proves how valuable I am to Him, by dying for me, and if that were not enough, I have discovered as I hope you have also, that we are

valuable to others? This too has been proved, in the measure in which others have made investments in us also.

Think of the tremendous investment that others have made in your life and mine. For us, Mothers have suffered and prayed. For us, Fathers have toiled. Teachers have patiently invested years of effort to win us from ignorance into knowledge.

All this has been done that our lives might have some kind

of value both in time and in eternity.

Yet we cannot overlook the fact that you and I are also the heirs of the ages. For you and me Moses wrote and David sang and the seers prophesied. For you and me, Homer chanted his deathless lays, and a thousand men of genius have toiled and thought and suffered, that you and I might be what we are today. We boast of our liberty; we are proud of being

British or Irish; proud of having a

Democratically elected government … yet when did you or I ever do anything much that we might be free today – free to say the things we believe; free to come and go, free to live out our lives? Others fought that we might be free from the fight …

“For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.” Romans 14:7

But how lightly you and I have been enjoying this marvellous thing called life, as if it were only our own!

My second thought is this, – that no life has found its true meaning which does not take account of two worlds. The life that now is and that which is to come. Is it a credit to any one whose hair is grey, that he begins to think of the next life?

I would like to reach those whose heads are not grey, and plead with them to think while it is time, to redeem and rescue life from unbelief and selfishness and narrowness – into faith and rightness and nobility, to think of life as belonging to two worlds now! Two worlds, this one so brief, the other unending!

What may be in store for us there? What treasure or tragedy am I laying in store for the life to come, am I building for heaven or building for hell? What I have done today, or what I will yet do today, means something for me through all eternity. I have not begun to face the problem of life here – until I have seen that.

Today, I want to say that no life has found its true meaning which is not right with God. That is one of the last things we think of. By what strange notion of reason have men come to

think that the principal business of life is to always do the right thing by our fellow man? Such a life leaves out of the problem its mightiest factor – the final, determining factor of all life – God. What about doing the right thing by God?

How can a life be right which is out of harmony with its Creator? Science tells us, modern science, and so far I agree with it wholly, that the problem with so much of life is being out of harmony with our environment. That is right. What is the environment of every human being? Answer – God!

“For in him we live, and move, and have our being:” Acts 17:28

According to science itself, then, no life can be right, no life can, in the best sense, be happy, no life can have any well-grounded hope of happiness in the future, which is in-harmonious (out of step) with God. How many things should move us to get right with God! We are in His universe, we cannot get out of it.

For good or evil, for ever and ever, you and I must live

within its utmost rim.

How many motives, how many ways He has given us to make life right with Himself! Think of gratitude. We rightly call ingratitude the basest act of men. There is something about ingratitude – there is something about the man who can receive kindnesses and favours without being moved to gratitude in return, that marks a kind of incurable baseness of human nature.

Even in the Church there is a shocking ingratitude amongst many believers. This concerns me deeply, for I must conclude that those who are ungrateful are also unprofitable servants. Their lives tell for nothing, and their God is themselves?

If God has blessed you, it was not about you, it was in order

to make you a blessing. Most of us have lived on God’s bounty all our lives and perhaps we have never said with David the Psalmist,

“What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me? Psalms 116:13

Now, the very foundation thought concerning the problem of life is the thought of its being linked with all other life. Take, for instance, the matter of influence. Suppose a man is living without Christ in the world. By as much as he is an honourable, a kindly, a worthy man, yet he is imperilling, endangering the eternal welfare of all who look up to him. If his life is a linked life, linked with other lives, what right has he to live one minute when his influence may leave a blot or stain on another life?

And the second thought, remember, is that we must take account of life as belonging to two worlds, this and the next. Can there be any more incredible folly than for us to live perilously on the

edge of eternity, as we know every one of us does live, without being able to count tomorrow as ours? Ought we not to be glad that God has made the issue between Himself and humanity so simple? What must we do to get right with God?

What must we do to come into harmony with Him, to have our life beat in time with the life of the eternal? He makes one simple, definite proposition to us, and it is all wrapped up, not in doctrine, but in a person. His one proposition is Jesus Christ.

All life turns, in the last analysis, on the right answer to that question, first asked by Pontius Pilate –

“What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?” Matthew 27:22

Pilate’s question. All the problems of life, the whole meaning of life, centres on that one thing – what is Christ to me and what am I to Him? There is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. 1 Tim 2:5 I cannot go back to the law – it only curses me, for I have broken it. I can not begin today, if it

were possible for me to do so, to live so that every act of my life shall be pleasing to a holy God. For first of all I have no power to do it, and secondly, there is my record up to now. So what can make me right with God? God could see that it was humanly impossible for man to be right with him, since it was humanly impossible for man to keep the law in his own strength. For by offending in one part, he offended in all parts. James 2:10. So God sent a Saviour, Jesus Christ the Righteous. We can only ever be right with God, when we are right, made right in Jesus. This is why it would be utter folly to stand before God in ones own good, when God has already provided a “perfection”

in the Saviour. Jesus took our Bad to give us His good.

Religion says “you must do something” Christianity says, “Jesus has done all“.

The Hymn writer puts it this way …

“I have no other argument, I need no other plea

It is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me.”

To have and enjoy life abundant and life eternal, (remember there must be these two inclusive elements to your thinking) then do the thing God has commanded – believe on Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. Trust Him. Give yourself away to Him. Put your whole case into His hands. Let Him take this life, so full of evil, and put the evil out of it. Let Him take this life so full of weakness and fill it with strength. Let Him take this life so selfish and self-centred, and let it flow out in all its breadth to humanity. Let Him make it over. Let Him purify it. Let Him solve all its problems. Let Jesus Christ fill it as only he can.

Then and only then will you be able to say you have a live worth living. There is no life apart from God and His Christ. Anything else is mere existence.

In conclusion, permit me to return to the matter of the deceptiveness of Satan, and the deceptiveness of sin.

God designed life to be worth living – He did not design life to

be an endless uphill struggle in the pursuit of happiness and wholeness. While Satan cannot “Kill” the life of God in us who believe, he can nevertheless “steal” from us the “abundance”

of that life. Every gift God gave us, is a “good gift” but if the Devil can cloud and shroud our thinking so that we cannot fully see and comprehend the greatness of Gods gifts; and if we allow this deception, then those gifts are stolen from us and we are being robbed of the benefits and blessings that should be ours.

Satan has deceived the whole world, in that many wrongly assume that their “hellish” existence is the norm and they are settling for it. They are being short changed and they never notice the robbery that is taking happiness and fulfilment from them, for as yet, they have not tasted of anything better. Children too are being robbed of their childhood, and are being fed daily on a TV diet of pornography and violence and then we wonder why they are growing up and becoming like the things we have allowed into their lives. The Homosexual community have been robbed of the real treasure that is Marriage and deceived into accepting as normal something far inferior and far less fulfilling – but the deceptiveness of Satan and Sin does not end out there in the world. It continues to thrive within the Church, Gods Church, as we have allowed it. For many even within the Church are regularly feeling that life is not worth living.

This is because they too have been robbed. Satan has stolen from them the “truth” and the “reality” of their faith in Christ Jesus. He has infiltrated the teachings and theologies of the

Pulpits to make people conscious of sin, and fearful of God. Self effort is the central Theology of our time. We have left God out of the equation. Instead, religious observance, and keeping of rules and regulations have burdened the Church and many feel estranged from God even though they have truly trusted in Jesus as their sin bearer and Saviour? There is a shelving of the “Righteousness of God in Christ Jesus” and a spinning of

the ”Righteousness of Men in Church Circles”. We have been deceived into thinking that the Cross work of Christ is insufficient for our redemption, so we must add to it something of our own self effort. Lord have mercy!

Thus focused on Self, and not on the Saviour, we have no power in the world, no protection from evil, and no peace in our hearts. Satan is back in our Churches orchestrating our demise and our destruction. The light is fading on what should be –

the Garden of the Lord. The gates are rusted, the paths are overgrown, the fountains are dried up, the flowers have no fragrance, the birds no longer sing, and we are presenting Jesus as unattractive to the world. Unless and until we get the Garden of God back into shape, the life we have will not be worth living, and we will soon become over-run and over-ruled by weeds. (Weeds that have their roots in hell itself)

Many run to our Churches week by week, but from end of the year to the other, there is no change in our lives? They still give the same offerings, still pray the same prayers, still suffer the same sicknesses and still have no real or relevant impact or influence for God in the world around them. Something is terribly wrong my dear friends, and God is about to “shake it all up” mark my words. We are supposed to be the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” – instead we are

perceived as a “fault in the earth” and a “blight on the world”? God forgive us. Its time to confront your convictions head on. DO YOU really believe that this LIFE IS WORTH THE LIVING? Then if you do, you will do something about it now – today. What you must do, God will show you, but remain as you are, you cannot!

A few weeks ago I spoke of that “Horrible place called Hell”

and reminded my listening congregation that hell is not a state of mind, nor a figment of the imagination, nor a place to which we may dismiss our enemies. Hell is a REAL PLACE.

Unless and until we do something to change it, everyone who lives in your street, are heading in its direction. We MUST STOP them. If we don’t, who will? God is counting on me, but He is also counting on You.

The only thing we can take from this world into the next – is people. How many people have you already stopped in this life, and helped them to prepare for the next. If life is worth living here – and it is, then Heaven is certainly worth preparing for

here too. You cannot make preparation for there, there?

You can only prepare for heaven while you are here.

We need to communicate this vital message to the world.

Remember what it says in 1 John 5 v12

“He who has the Son, (Jesus) has life …

He who has not the Son, (Jesus) has not life”

It’s that simple – People need Jesus.

God Bless You … Amen