December 02, 2010
Bucket List
Some people have a ‘bucket list’ – a list of items they want to do before they kick the bucket. Many lists contain things like taking a trip, climbing a mountain or running a marathon. I feel certain many people would not put an item on their bucket list that pertains to the Kingdom of God. When we stand before God, our work “…will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work.” (1 Cor 3:13 NIV) No doubt a lot of lists will be going up in flames.
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Gail;
-----God has not set Himself about being for poverty or disregard for the affairs of this temporal life. He created the physical world and a way in which those in it should go. That way includes the necessities of life. We would certainly die without food, shelter, and clothing. And our lives would be little more than an existence of consumption and dropping waste without tools, and supplies. Yet one can have all these without sanity and be the worst because of it. Sanity is also a necessity. It entails emotions ranging from those of simple pleasure to those of stark determination. It involves logic, knowledge, and speculation. It brings all of this into a mix of wisdom for shaping character according to where God has placed the soul amongst the physical aspects of life and to what He has lit for it by the light of His Word. He is not a partial God. He is a total God. For those who love Him He is interested in prospering their ways - physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.
-----We are the partial ones. It is a belly laugh to think anyone in this temporal life will ever travel beyond our galaxy. Nor can anyone experience the entire world in his lifetime. We can not even begin to read a small sampling of all the books written. Even the information about the tiny space around each of us dribbles into our minds by sight and sound as precious seconds tick by. There are not enough seconds in a lifetime to receive the first part of a sliver of all the information there is to know, even about that tiny space. And if there were, all that time would have been spent simply receiving the information, leaving no time left for perceiving what was received for understanding so it could become knowledge. We are pitifully partial.
-----That is why God lovingly cut to the chase by giving us His Word. With it we can formulate a paradigm of what is truly important by relating Him to the tiny piece of the world into which we were born and to all the affairs of that place with which we must deal for survival, sanity, and spirituality. The more humbly we approach His Word and the affairs of life the more true and quickly that paradigm forms. And in His Word are many indications that He is interested in the whole of our prosperity - the wealth of our goods and supplies, the joy of our sanity, the breadth of our knowledge, and the eternal bliss of our spirits.
-----So He is interested in our bucket lists. He is interested in our trip taking and mountain climbing and marathon running. Our interests grow out of the places into which He has placed us. They are the ways in which we each perceive our prosperity, whether that be physical wealth or just the experiences of doing things. But His participation in prospering our bucket lists requires our abiding in His Word. And that abiding in His Word is our participation in His Kingdom. It relates our taken trips and climbed mountains and ran marathons to Him, and shapes within them service for His Kingdom.
-----Indeed, service to His Kingdom should not be on the bucket list. It should have already been formed into the paradigm which builds service for His Kingdom into the prospering of all our ways. If that paradigm has not yet been formulated, then surely the bucket itself is worthless and its list is ignorable.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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