TICKING DOWN . . .

The concept of living backward is meant to counter this grave mind-set that we have time on our hands. Time is truly priceless—once it’s gone, you can never get it back. Because time is an invaluable commodity, I want to challenge you to reorient your thinking. I hope you’ll embrace a paradigm shift and begin to view your time on earth not as simply marching forward but as elapsing. Yes, do enjoy and celebrate each and every year with which God blesses you. But I want you to truly grasp that with each passing year you haven’t just gained another birthday or more time to live—you’ve also lost more of the precious, irretrievable time that you have been allotted to create significance in your life. To varying degrees, each of us has already lost or squandered countless opportunities to endow our lives with true significance, because contrary to the world’s system, not everything “great” that we do in this life will leave a mark on eternity. Indeed, many of these things absolutely won’t.

As much as we may want to minimize this fact, each of our lives is much like a fully wound clock that is steadily ticking down. Ticking down to that eventful and inescapable moment in the future—God’s final assessment of our lives. Since Scripture teaches that this evaluation will have sweeping ramifications for all eternity, it’s of the utmost importance to heed this counsel and engage life with an eternal mindset. Yet we generally don’t stop to consider our lives—much less how fleeting they are—within the context of our earthly time clock winding down, only to be recalibrated for time without end.

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