Important Questions

I have a text tonight which is a question, and it's a question that we cannot answer collectively. It's a question you have to answer individually. You will never face a more challenging question than this text.

What is your life? And it replies, gives a reply here in the text, it is even a vapour that appears for a little time. Now notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say what is life, because if it did nobody has an answer.

It doesn't say what is our life, otherwise we could fool all our thinking. It says what is your life? There are three main questions that come up in life. Children ask this question, where did I come from? And somewhere, sometime, you better give them the right answer, because if you don't, somebody will give them the wrong answer.

And then maybe at your age right now, you're asking another question, why am I here? And then when you get further up the road, which I happen to be, you say, where do I go from here? So there are three basic questions about life. Where did it come from? Why am I here? And where do I go from here? And you hear people say, well life isn't just, life isn't fair. One man said life is a feast, another wise man said life is a fast.

One man said life is a paradise, another man said life is a prison. You see, the question here is very pointed, and maybe it's very personal, it's even impersonal, maybe it's very painful. Maybe you could answer the question, what is your life? You say it's a failure.

What is your life? A success. What is your life? It's a disappointment. But actually it's showing to us, by the very context, that life is like a vapor, it's like the steam that comes off the kettle and you try and get a handful of it and it's gone.

And in every case in the Word of God where life is referred to, that is this physical life, it's likened to something that's very swift. It's likened, for instance, to a weaver's shuttle. It's likened to a tent that men wrap up and move on in the night.

Isaiah likens our life to the grass of a field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven. Now if this book is about anything at all, it's about life. I can remember in World War I, before World War I, so I'm not too young, there were a group of supermen around at that time.

George Bernard Shaw ganged up with a bunch of fellows that were called the Fabian Socialists. George Bernard Shaw gang was there, H.G. Weld was one of the leading spokesmen, Aldous Huxley was there, and all the top-notch guys, you know. And they suddenly came to a realization that they had solved the problem of inequality, injustice, a way to empty prisons, a way to make this world a utopia.

After all, Christianity's had 2,000 years, they said, it hasn't done too well. So we don't need the church, we don't need the Bible, they said we can have a new race of men by intellectual and biological processes. They didn't talk about repentance and sin, none alone, that's too theological.

They talked about the adequacy of materialism, the inevitability of progress, and the sufficiency of man. And they began to tick off things they didn't need. And they marched on bravely with a little card, you know, saying utopia isn't far off, we will do all this, and the situation isn't better.

And yet tonight, with all our progressive education, we have more sin, we have more darkness, we have more slums, we have more disease, we have more broken homes, more broken lives. The world is a madhouse. You know we learn from history.

The one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. If we did, we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in tonight. You'd think these politicians would give up.

What in God's name are they doing? Far from wasting money, wasting, dangling a carrot on the end of a stick, when all the time they know there's no, there's no hope. H.G. Wells had written his outline of history, and he wrote his final book, and this was the title of it, The Man That Was Dreaming Great Dreams of a New World Order. And he had the answer, along with all his brother, brothers were so super intellectual.

And his last book was called Mind at the End of its Tether. And he wrote the whole human race off, and said there is no hope, no hope for the human race, because he says man has a blank inside of him. Man has a blank inside of him.

In any state of thought, shall you find a man saying youth is a mistake, manhood is folly, and old age is a regret? Sure it is if you miss the one place to get life. And even in the days of his flesh, Jesus complained, he will not come to me that ye may have life. Now do you remember his great statement, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

I am the way, without that there's no going. I am the truth, without that there's no knowing. I am the life, without him there's no growing.

But the whole thing is about life. Now if I'm going to live, I'm going to eat. If I'm going to live, I'm going to eat this word because Jesus said what? I am the bread of life.

Man cannot live by bread alone, the only earthly bread, but he can live by the bread which is Christ. He says I am the water of life, that's essential to life, you can't live without water. He says I am the light of life.

And he says I've not merely come isn't it John 10 and 10 in which he says I've come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.