Here is an interesting question. What is the central core of our lives? Think of the many details that make up your life and there are many. We have work, concerns, hobbies, families, relationships that sustain us, things we can celebrate and things that we know need God’s intervention. Areas of anxiety that dog us and numerous blessings that we can look back on, or are experiencing today.

With all the complexities of life, what is the central core? What is it that makes life…life? That makes life meaningful and integrates all of life into a story that makes sense?  Moses had something to say about that in his final instructions to the Israelites just prior to his death.

In those instructions he pleads with the people to choose to serve God rather than themselves or rival gods. After all, we all have a choice as to whether we will make God central to our lives or leave him on the periphery of our lives. The choice we always have is to choose our way or His way. 

Here is how Moses put it in Deuteronomy 30:19-20.  “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” 

Blessing comes, Moses says, as we choose life which is, in fact, choosing God and loving him, listening to his voice, and holding fast to Him. That is where God’s blessing comes and then Moses drops one phrase that it is easy to miss but is at the core of this discussion. That phrase and truth is this: “For the Lord is your life.”

Think about that for a moment. The Lord is your life. He is what makes life whole and meaningful and blessed. Life without Him at the center, says Moses, is not real life. Real life is having Him at the center of who we are and how we live. He is our life.

In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon made this profound statement. It is found in Ecclesiastes 3:11 and is the central truth of the book: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” This is why we are restless until we find God. He has implanted in us a sense of eternity. A sense that there is more to life than the treadmill that makes life life. And that eternity He has planted in us is this: the Lord is your life. With Him at the center life makes sense and is blessed by the creator. Without him at the center we miss out on the life that God created us for. Remember today this truth. The Lord is your life. 

Father, help me remember in the busyness of life that You are the very definition of life. You came to give us life and life abundant. Help me to keep you at the center and, in the process, to experience the life that is real life. Amen.