BROADCASTS.com

Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1118 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Life is Like the Morning Fog - Ask Gramps


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1118 of our Trek and time for our Philosophy Friday series.  Each Friday we will ponder some of the basic truths and mysteries of life, and how they can impact us in creating our living legacy.  As we continue on this trek called life, sometimes we have questions about life, so our Friday trek is a time where we can ‘Ask Gramps.’   Gramps will answer questions that you would like to ask your dad or granddad, but for whatever reason, this is not possible.  No matter how old we are, I know that all of us would like the opportunity to ask dad or gramps questions about life in many areas.

We may mix it up a bit on our Friday episodes, but will strive to keep them down to earth and enjoyable.   If you have any questions that you would like to ask Gramps, please email them to guthrie@wisdom-trek.com

So the question for this week is:

“Hey, Gramps, as a Christ follower, how should we handle it when a loved one or friend has died?
Life is Like the Morning Fog
Regardless of age, whether it is a child, a teenager, or an adult, it always seems too soon to say goodbye.  When God permits one of his children to die it is because their purpose in God’s kingdom has been fulfilled.  None of us know when that day will be.  Within the past week, I have had two dear friends who attend our church die.  One from cancer, which was somewhat expected, but the other one was a very unexpected and massive heart attack.  Regardless of if there is time to prepare, or not, we all need to be prepared, and we are told in the book of James 4:13-15:  Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.” 

While our salvation is not based on our works, since we are to be an imager of God in the building of His earthly kingdom, we should always be serving others and impacting the lives of others for His glory.   Both of these dear friends who died this week, showed us an example of how to serve God by serving others.  Both were humble, and ready to help anyone who needed it.  You might ask, if they were serving others, why did God permit them to die?   As humans, with our finite minds, we cannot fully comprehend or understand why, but we do know that it is God’s purpose because it is He who gives life, and it is He who takes us home when our earthly purpose is completed.   What we do to impact others is what we carry onto eternity.  We have the capability of impacting many generations to come, by our service here on earth.  We are told in James 2:14-18 What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing,  and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?

 So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.