What Makes Life Significant?

How many times have you walked past a memorial to a dead person--and not noticed? What will make your life any more significant in the end?

Psalm 49:11-13
Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names. Nevertheless man being in honour abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish. This their way is their folly: yet their posterity approve their sayings.

How many times have you walked past a plaque that bore the name of some long-dead person—and not even really noticed? That person may have given a lot of money to the organization, or done something important, but who remembers? If you visit a monument erected in commemoration of someone, do you remember the person it stood for, or the monument itself?

Empty Quest for Significance 
Every person wants to be significant and to know that his life has purpose and meaning. Yet we all know that our lives will end someday. The people whose names are inscribed on those plaques or monuments are desperate for significance. Perhaps if their names live on, they reason, then the importance of their lives will not be forgotten. 

But they are forgotten. The names we memorize in our history books are the tiniest percentage of the names seen by the ages of the earth. Many more people lived and died without so much as a gravestone to commemorate them.

What guarantees do you have that your life is anything more than a momentary blip on the line of time?

Psalm 49:15
But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me.

Psalm 49 indicates that the power of the grave is its ability to swallow all things into a void of forgetfulness and insignificance. Were you rich or powerful or important in life? You will be just as dead as the poor and powerless and unknown.

The Promise
But for Christians, these realities of life and death do not change our destiny. The Creator of time Himself knows us. We are significant because He gives us significance. We are important because, though the world forgets us, He remembers us. 

Better yet, the grave ends nothing. We don’t remain in obscurity forever. We will be raised with the Lord in glory and power and significance. 

We don’t have a promise of remembrance after death. We have a promise of life after death (Romans 6:23).

Do you seek meaning? Purpose? Importance? Do you want your life to matter, far beyond your death? Then you can’t get anything better than what Christ offers freely—the gift of eternal life in which you are loved and known intimately by a personal God.

Our lives matter.

1 Corinthians 15:54-55
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?