"As a physician who has been deeply privileged to share the most profound moments of people's lives, including their final moments, let me tell you a secret. People facing death don't think about what degrees they have earned, what positions they have held or how much wealth they have accumulated. At the end, what really matters (and is a good measure of a past life) is who you loved and who loved you. The circle of love is everything." Bernadine Healy, M.D.
Doctor Healy's observation, if not profound, is at least enlightening. It enlightens us to the fact that God's truth can be observed in life experiences. I have for sometime felt that those who were facing imminent death would shed their ties to this world, their perception of what is important changes drastically. One would be hard pressed to convince someone who can feel their life force waning from their body that they need to put money in an IRA. On the other hand, those of us who are fifty and expect a future on earth, feel an ominous foreboding if we fail to 'sock a little away' for retirement.
John teaches us in his first epistle that who we love and who loves us is vitally important. "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son (to be) the propitiation for our sins." (1 John 4:8-10).
God is love and has manifested that love by sending His Son into the world to save mankind. Who loves us? God, that's who!
Knowing that God loves us is not enough, we must love! "We love, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen. And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also." (1 John 4:19-21). Who do we love? God and the brethren, that's who!
John also deals with love in the negative. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vain glory of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever" (1 John 2:15-17).
How sad it is to come to the final moments of one's life only to realize they have loved the wrong things. And to realize that because they have loved the wrong things, God does not love them.
God has given you and me a most precious gift. The gift is a life to be lived. What we do with that gift has eternal consequences. As the doctor observed, when we have used up God's gift, nothing will matter except who we have loved and who has loved us. Do you love God? Does God love you?
~In Gospel Power, Anderson, Alabama, 6/8/97.