Monday, December 29, 2014

Death and The Life Well Lived

This article is from a most excellent blog:

LEARNING IN THE GRIP OF GRACE.


Steve Jobs, Death and The Life Well Lived


I recently watched a Steve Jobs speech that he gave at Stanford university (check it out here.) In it he quite candidly talks about death. Here is a quote from it:
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Jobs is saying that the path to the life well lived is remembering you are mortal which is exactly what the Bible says in Psalm 90:2 where the psalmist says “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
It got me thinking, if I had only one week or month to live what would I do?
Here are ten things that I would do if I only had a week or a month to live:
  1. Kiss, hug, play and pray with my kids and tell them about Jesus.
  2. Kiss, hug, serve and pray with my wife.
  3. Have the hard but good conversations I have been avoiding
  4. Pray for my family, church and those I loved
  5. Praise God for the gospel
  6. Put time into the leaders and future leaders of Resolved
  7. Preach the gospel with all my heart and strength and without fear
  8. Be fully intellectually, emotionally, physically and spiritually engaged in everything I did
  9. I would ignore Facebook, Twitter and my phone
  10. I would tell people how God has used them to encourage me in my faith
But then that got me thinking what if I did those things all day every day? What if I lived life like that? That would be a life lived for the glory of God. That would be an unwasted life.
So maybe the key to living life to the full is not trying escape death but embrace the fact that you and I are going to die and living in the light of that!
If you had only one month to live what ten things would you do? What if you lived out this list every day? What would your life be like then?
You may also like:

Will There Be Work in Heaven?

How To No Longer Fear Death

The Distinguishing Mark of a Leader

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