ONLY A VAPOR!

ONLY A VAPOR!

Blogger’s note: If you have been following these morning devotionals since December of 2010, and if you have a very good memory, you will remember this one. If you are a newcomer then you may find this almost macabre. As I reviewed it for publication today, I actually thought it might be read at my memorial. Anyway, here it is again – or for the first time.

James 4:14

14 Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

It seems like only yesterday I was a shirtless barefoot boy, playing with an old alarm clock in the black dirt in front of a rented house in Cincinnati. One could smell the meat packing house not too far away and the noise of the city was a curious mixture of honking horns, and the rumble of machinery. I would play all day and then turn the bathwater into muck. Momma would dry my kid-blond hair with a towel and then off to bed.

A moment later, I was a teen in a football uniform and then a cap and gown. Suddenly I’m a young man working in the parts cage at the Coca-Cola company with an uneasy restlessness that later defined itself as a call from God upon my life.

Like a blur, I’m kneeling in the tabernacle at the Ohio youth camp after hearing Dr. David Cavin. Now I’m standing in line registering for classes at Baptist Bible College. I’m now standing near the back of the Bible Baptist Church and I spy a lovely young lady playing the piano. She is the love of my life.

Nearly forty five years of ministry swirls about in a cyclone of places and faces. What remains are ambition, disappointment, and satisfaction in a strange blend. Now it is sunset and the colors are magnificent.

I’d like to quote another old preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who said:

  We crossed and recrossed a river several times by the ferry-boat with no purpose in the world but mere amusement and curiosity, to watch the simple machinery by which the same current is made to drift the boat in opposite directions from side to side. To other passengers it was a business, to us a sport.

   Our hearers use our ministry in much the same manner when they come to it out of the idlest curiosity and listen to us as a means of spending a pleasant hour. That which should ferry them across to a better state of soul, they use as a mere pleasure-boat to sail up and down in, making no progress after years of hearing. It may be sport to them, but it is death to us, because we know it will before long be death to them.

n  Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Quotable Spurgeon, (Wheaton: Harold Shaw Publishers, Inc, 1990)

Dear Lord, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. AMEN