This Lasts and Lasts and Lasts

1 Peter 1:23-25

We enjoy the breathtaking Texas bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes and other wildflowers every spring for a little while.  But then, after a few short weeks, they are gone.  Sometimes, it feels as though we’ve barely gotten to say hello to them.

Farmers plant their fields at least once each year.  The rains come, the crops grow, and there’s usually a sizeable harvest after some time passes.  But after the harvest, do those crops live forever?

Even trees that have trunks up to forty feet wide and can live to be over three thousand years old don’t last forever.  In California’s Calaveras Big Tree State Park, several sequoia trees have stood tall and proud for at least one thousand years.  In 1890, one of them was hollowed out so horses and people could travel through it.  That sequoia was affectionately known as “the drive-thru tree.”  But earlier this year in January, when heavy rains inundated the area, the drive-thru tree toppled over and became “the drive-around tree” instead.

The bottom line is this: you cannot find imperishable seed on earth.  Not even in the sequoia forests.  That’s what makes what we have in Christ so special.  For in Christ, we have been connected to something different, something heavenly, something that will never topple over, something that cannot die.  God says,  ²³ For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. ²⁴ For, “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, ²⁵ but the word of the Lord endures forever.” And this is the word that was preached to you.

God has personally wiped your sins away in Christ.  Today.  Every day.  God forgives you without stopping.  That’s what the Christian faith is all about, and that’s an announcement that will never die!  It doesn’t matter what season it is.  No storm will ever bring it crashing down.  Christ’s imperishable word is not just something that’s alive for awhile…it’s enduring seed that lasts and lasts and lasts.

Prayer:  Lord, support us all day long, until the shadows lengthen, the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, and our work is done.  Point us away from what is perishable to what is imperishable.  Remind us that as we watch the things of this earth rise and fall, come and go, live and die…that your word remains independent and unaffected.  For even as heaven and earth pass away, your promises never will.  Amen.