40 Days of Faith
"By faith Enoch was taken away so that he did not see death,
and was not found, because God had taken him;
for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God."
Hebrews 11:5
What exactly is a godly legacy? Those words get tossed around with very little meaning attached to it any more. While it may seem calloused to say, we often tend to think more of people after they die than when they were alive. We want to see every one as a saint no matter how they lived their lives.
Enoch's testimony was not made up. He was one of only a couple of people that we read of in the Bible that never tasted death. There is very little said about Enoch, but what is said is astounding. Twice in Genesis 5 we are told that Enoch walked with God. There is no record of great accomplishments, astounding victories, or powerful exploits. We are just given the fact that each and every day Enoch faithfully walked with God. A faithful life is a consistent life. Many of us live our lives in the flash of the moment. We make commitments and decisions based on how we feel emotionally at that particular time of life. A burden or a concern enters our heart or mind, and we know we must do something. So, we make this heartfelt decision about the situation, but when the emotion dies out so does our commitment. You cannot live for God that way. Faithfulness must be the key ingredient to the successful Christian walk.
My wife has taught me to love history and look at it a different way. When we talk about people that have done something for good here on this earth, I see a gleam in her eye. She loves to consider their lives and not only what they accomplished but how they accomplished it. Like some of you have done, we have walked through old cemeteries and read the tombstones and wondered about the lives of the people. How fascinating it would be to know each of their stories! On every one of those grave markers are the same two things: a name and a date. The name tells us who the person was. The date tells us when they were born and when they died. The one thing we don't know is represented by a small dash between the two dates: how they lived. The significance of one's life has nothing to do with when were born and when we died; it has every thing to do with what we did with the time that we were given. Those are the years, days, hours, and minutes that must not be wasted but wisely used for God's glory. What will the dash of your life represent? When we think of Enoch, we do not focus on his death because he never experienced it; we focus on the life he lived walking with God. Oh, for that to be said of all of our lives would be glorious!
May you walk with God today!
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