When I was young, around age 10 or 11, I was invited to take part in an athletics competition. The prize was a free place on a trip to a meeting in Belgium. I was already an active member of the Swindon Athletics Club (Mum made us go!) and for some reason at that age I was really good at sprinting. I beat everyone I raced. Once I competed against a guy who had the fastest 60m time in Wiltshire, and I beat him!
If I remember correctly, the competition was three main events: 60m sprint, high jump and long jump. In my age group, it was neck and neck between me and another kid for the high jump and the long jump, so the deciding event was the sprint, which I won (yay!)
So all the winning competitors travelled for hours by minibus deep into the heart of Belgium. However, the night before the meeting I didn’t sleep well and the next day I was very lethargic and not at my best. My first event was the sprint, but I performed really poorly and came about last :-( After that, I didn’t bother to compete in the other events since I was not likely to place.
At that time I had a choice to make. Understandably I felt really stupid for performing so poorly and losing a race I probably should have won, but I could either be dejected and depressed for the rest of the trip, or I could let it go and choose to have a good time anyway. Sure, it was disappointing to have come so far with high hopes, only to fail. But I was fortunate enough to win the free place, travel my first time abroad, make new friends and have fun on a long road trip. The perspective I chose would affect my attitude and whether I enjoyed myself or not.
One man who knew the power of a right perspective was the Apostle Paul. If anyone knew what it meant to suffer for the gospel, he did. Frequently he was beaten with whips and with rods and was thrown in jail, sometimes for long periods. He worked to exhaustion, travelled endless miles, went without food and water and even clothing. He was shipwrecked and one time he was even stoned and left for dead. Besides that was his burden of care for all the churches he had started, since there were false apostles who tried to deceive the churches and lead them away from the truth he had worked so hard to establish among them.
You would think that would be enough to make even the strongest-willed person think twice about himself. Yet he never gave up because he had an eternal perspective. He reveals it in 2 Cor. 4:17-18:
“For our present troubles are quite small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us an immeasurably great glory that will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see right now; rather we look forward to what we have not yet seen. For the troubles we see will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever.”
Amazing! He knew that even many years of suffering for the gospel’s sake was just a moment compared to the eternal reward he would receive for doing it. So he didn’t focus on the suffering, but on the reward. That’s what kept him going. How different would our own lives be if we had an eternal perspective? How much more patient would we be? If we really understood and believed that our reward for serving the Lord will last forever, we would serve Him all the more diligently, laying aside our entanglements with this life knowing they produce no lasting good and rob us from eternal joy.
We need to heed Paul’s advice in 2 Cor. 5:7:
“That is why we live by believing and not by seeing.”
As we live out our lives here below, let’s focus on what we believe, not on what we see. Let’s focus on joys forever instead of temporary suffering. Let’s focus on matters eternal instead of indulgence in a world that is passing away.
What’s your perspective?
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