Articles
Harry’s Plan
A thirty-year-old man sat at a table near me in a restaurant. Let’s call him Harry. He was dominating a conversation, oblivious that he was loud enough to be heard and difficult to ignore. “I just don’t get my friends,” Harry said. “They won’t go on vacations with me. They won’t buy expensive stuff. All they do is save up their money because they want to retire when they are forty-five.” He scoffed and shook his head. “These are the best years of our lives. What a waste!”
Harry seemed quite sure of himself, boasting of his wisdom. Wise in his own eyes, I’m sure. I couldn’t help but wonder what he would be saying in fifteen years when his friends were having carefree vacations and no longer working while he was slogging away at a job where his lack of ambition had kept him from advancing and his lack of savings had kept him enslaved to the daily grind. Harry may live to be a hundred and come to realize that years 30-45 not only kept him from enjoying years 46-100 but also filled those years with stress and poverty.
Harry and his friends remind me of the difference between living for the flesh versus living for the spirit. The flesh lives for the pleasures of a moment and disregards the future. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (I Cor. 15:32). The spirit, on the other hand, disregards the moment and lives for the joys of the future. This is what Moses did. He chose “to endure ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward”(Heb. 11:25-26).
Don’t confuse Harry’s friends as the wise ones though. With what little we know of them, they may have blundered into their own foolish mistake. The future is uncertain and the best laid plans can be undone at any moment. Those friends might deprive themselves of pleasurable experiences for fourteen years only to die from some disease just before they reached their goal of retirement. Their sacrifices would have been in vain. “You do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (Jam. 4:14). That doesn’t mean you should spend all of your money on fun today, but it does mean that you should take advantage of the present time, realizing that it may be all you have. For this reason, if there is something you should be doing for God, do not put it off, thinking you can do it later (Jam. 4:17).
Harry’s friends may be making an even bigger mistake—thinking too small. What if they sacrifice now and later get to enjoy years of blissful retirement only to die and realize that they neglected to prepare for eternity? Moses “looked to the reward” and that reward is not found in this life but the next. On the surface, it appears Harry’s friends are putting their hope and trust on wealth. This too, is foolishness. “Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches but on God” (I Tim. 6:17). To live for the future but only be focused on our later years in life is to miss the eternity that comes afterwards. Spending all of your efforts and affections on a temporary, uncertain life rather than taking “hold of that which is life indeed” (I Tim. 6:19) is a horrible mistake.
Harry’s friends don’t know if they will live to see retirement or if they will save up enough. That’s not the way it is for those who seek the heavenly reward. Spiritually-minded Christians store up for themselves “treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal” (Mt. 6:19-21). They put their hope on the promises of God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2).
Harry had his plan. Harry’s friends had theirs. What is yours?
