When I was a kid my mom told me stories about my uncle who, she said, did all sorts of wild and crazy things before he accepted Christ. It was not her intent, and my uncle would be horrified to learn this, but I took these  stories to mean that I should do whatever I wanted when I was young, and when I got older, I could follow Jesus.

Ecclesiastes 12 highlights the folly of my thinking. Rather than wait until we are old to follow Jesus, the Teacher tells us that the “days of your youth” is when we should “remember your Creator” (v. 1). He closes with a poem that illustrates the end of life with a series of images drawn from nature and daily life. Before the “days of trouble come,” before the years in which we find no pleasure, before our bodies begin to break down, that is when we should seek the Lord.

The Teacher doesn’t mean that we should not remember our Creator at life’s end; of course we should! The plea, rather, is to remember the Lord— that is, to live in right relationship with Him—during all those days when we are tempted to think we have no need of God because life is so good. We find it easy to turn to the Lord in times of crisis, and that is good and right. But we must seek Him in the good times as well, for true life is found only in a relationship with God. Indeed, even the good gifts God gives us can only be fully enjoyed in the context of a relationship with Him. What’s more, none of us know when death will come; therefore, we must not, we cannot, wait until the end to turn our hearts toward the Lord.

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