All I have ever wanted, was to make a difference in this world, and the people that live in it. God has allowed me to travel all over the world, encouraging and strengthening, even the most hopeless of lives. I have not lived a perfect life. I have had my bouts with a variety of issues. I have never had great wealth. But, in all that I have been through… I remain incredibly grateful. God has been so faithful to allow me to do things in this life…things which before I could never have imagined to do!
When we walk with God through his forgiveness and love, He fills us with hungers and desires for good things. Being hungry is a subject that extends itself far beyond simply food. Jesus eloquently makes this truth crystal clear by saying, “He that hungers and thirst after the right things will not be disappointed.” Matthew 5:6
Yet there are those in this life that seek happiness, but happiness for them seems to be as slippery as a greased rubber ball. They fill their mouths with food...but are never satisfied. Their portfolios are perfect...but their days are filled with strife and discontent. Just as righteousness means the right way, wickedness means the wrong way. The wrong way is a path full of desire, but empty of satisfaction and peace. Dig all you want... but you are never going to find what you crave down in that hole of the temporal.
The comparison that I am trying to make here is a comparison between “the soul” and “the substance”. This is a picture of the comparison between that which is eternal and that which is temporal. I once spoke concerning a story in the Old Testament about two men, one was a king named Ahab, and the other was a commoner named Naboth. Naboth had a vineyard of olives that had been passed down to him from generation after generation. Ahab wanted to buy this vineyard from Naboth, cut down the grove, and replace it with a garden of mere herbs. Of course, Naboth refused his offer, not based on his willingness to sell the property, but rather based on the fact of what Ahab said he would do with the property.
The olive grove represents the eternal, a tree that needs not to be replanted year after year, but is a perpetual source of its own life and sustenance passed down from one generation to another. The olive trees of Vouves Crete are estimated to be nearly 3,000 years old! Olive trees are resistant to drought, disease, and even fire! No wonder God uses these trees as an illustration of the eternal.
However, on the contrary... a garden of herbs is a picture of the temporal. It grows up and bears its fruit, but not long afterwards it begins to wither away, die, and is eventually consumed of the very earth in which it was planted. Nothing of it is left. Upon what is our life built? Let us not build our lives only upon a mere temporal foundation with no spiritual quality, but rather upon a more permanent one that will retain its value…both now and throughout all of eternity.
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