I wish we could have that quote framed and hang it in the den or office of every man in this country. That wasn't a preacher, but the man who before Michael Jordan was the most famous and recognizable athlete in the world. Ali literally won the world in his profession, but the glory didn't last.
We also have a biblical example in King Solomon, the wisest and richest man who ever lived. Solomon had it all to a degree we cannot even conceive of, and yet as his foreign wives and his sensual desires led him away from God (read 1 Kings 11:1-8 and Ecc. 2:1-11), he concluded that life was just "vanity of vanities" (Ecc. 1:2).
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That means a big zero! It's another way of saying what Jesus said in Mark 8. He left the questions open-ended, but the answers are clear. What do we gain by winning the world at the cost of our souls? Nothing. And what do we have of sufficient worth to exchange for our souls? Nothing.
Getting the answer to those questions right demands an eternal, spiritual perspective. From the other side of eternity, the answer is obvious — but by then it's too late. We can be sure any lost person in hell would give anything to redeem his soul. That's what the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 wanted to do, but it was too late. We have to make life's decisions, as the old Sunday school chorus said, "with eternity's values in view."
We Need God's Wisdom to Take the Right Road
Do you feel that you're at a key fork in the road in your life? If not, just hang on, because one is probably just ahead. How do we gain the wisdom Jesus was talking about? How do we learn, once and for all, that losing our life in terms of all-out commitment to Him is the way to save it?
This kind of wisdom comes only from God's Word. That's why I am deeply committed to sharing the Word with men. It's exciting to see how many men in our church have a deep hunger to be men of God. All of us need to immerse ourselves in the Scriptures, and we need resources to help us do that. My prayer is that this book will be a resource for you.
And since men usually respond well to a challenge, I like to give the guys in our men's Bible study something to work on from time to time. I found one interesting exercise in the book Seasons of a Man's Life, by Patrick Morley, a man whom God is using to speak to men in this generation.
Morley suggests that we take a piece of paper and write down the year of our birth, then add eighty years to it and write down the date of our death, with a dash in between the two dates. Then he challenges us to focus on that little dash, which represents a normal life span, and ask ourselves what we are doing with the short amount of time we have between those two dates. Are the things we're doing adding up to something eternally significant? Are we heading toward fulfillment, or futility?