Psa 23:6
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
David did not differentiate between life on earth and life in heaven. For him, it was all the same. The venue changes but the life continues on…forever. Because he understood that we are eternal creatures, he not only anticipated heaven, but experienced heaven while on earth.
This verse is a marriage of the venues: “days of my life” refers to life on earth while “dwelling in the house of the Lord forever” speaks of eternity. “Goodness and mercy” are the heavenly blessings that David plans to experience both on earth and in heaven. David grabbed a bit of life in heaven and applied it to life here and now.
And here is the good part: because of this eternal perspective, he refused to let the daily bugaboos of life beat him down. David reasoned that because he was going to live in the house of the Lord forever, he could and should experience the goodness and mercy of eternity today.
This is not naive or Pollyanna thinking. We are sinners in a sinful world. Evil abounds in all corners of this world. But, fortunately, we are not citizens of this world, but of heaven. We will spend 70 or so years as aliens on this planet compared to billions of years in the house of the Lord. Forever, as David fully knew, is a long time.
If you, like me, are a Christian, then you can be very confident about the future. Yes, we get stressed about the everyday living and many of us don’t take the time to think about heaven. Our enemy wants us to be stressed about the issues of today but our Lord would challenge us to look beyond today toward eternity. As my son Josh once told me, “Chill out Dad. It’s all going to burn anyway.”
When your 401(k) nosedives and your boss is a jerk and your job is on the fritz and your children don’t honor you and your spouse doesn’t understand you, look up. You are going to live in the house of the Lord forever. Surely goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life.
Your future is good.
Thanks for the reminder that while the stresses of daily life can get quite out of hand, that it’s all just a prelude to an eternity with Him. We need to take it in stride and just remember that it’ll all just burn away.