Living faithfully as a Christian often puts us in direct conflict with what the world

promotes. On Truth For Life Weekend, Alistair Begg considers the futility of worldly pursuits and

outlines for us three biblical facts that ought to frame the way we live and spur us on to reach

others for Christ. It's another selection from our series Lessons For Life.

We'll turn in our Bibles to Ecclesiastes chapter 12 and I want to focus our attention on these

verses in the time that we have. They're well-known verses, they're well-known to you and they're

well-known to me and anytime we turn to something that has familiarity to it we need a special measure

of God's grace to prevent us from immediately saying oh yes I know that because the proof of

our knowing it is our living it not our being able to recite it or verbalize it. In 1978 our first

child was born and was a momentous occasion and the reason I mention that is because it seemed

like yesterday that I sat where you sit and people used to come and stand on platforms like this

and tell me what I'm not about to tell you. Namely that life goes past an awful lot quicker than

we imagine and already you're saying oh yes we've already heard that about 40 times and it

isn't seem to be going fast fast quick enough for me and I wish I could be beyond these next set

of exams etc but it would appear that somehow there's a kind of exponential propulsion to time

and suddenly we wake up and we're 40 years old in the 60s through which I lived

although I was not allowed to listen to Beatles music in my home I lived through the 60s

and they regarded the 60s as a decade of idealism the 70s were a decade of disillusionment the 80s

were referred to as a decade of terror and the jury is out as to what the 90s will be described as

although the first edition of Newsweek in 91 referred to it as the age of anxiety

and many of the people who are reflective of our generation

display the fact that they have virtually no hope in the age of tomorrow

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