Finish Well

“But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.” (1Pe 4:7 AV)

Peter wrote this almost two thousand years ago.  How can the end of all things be at hand?  Because it always is.  Or, we should live as though it is.  Whether it is the end of our life or the end of the dispensation of grace, it matters not.  We do not know the years of our pilgrimage.  We do not know if we will pass in our early years, or live to be very old.  We never know.  Death is always right around the corner.  The rapture could be at any time.  It could be tonight or a thousand years from now.  We simply do not know.  The advice of our loving and wise apostle is the live each day as though it is our last.  To that end, we must be sober, or serious-minded, and pray constantly.  For those who have fought hard and long, this verse is encouraging.  It is also a challenge.  This life is limited.  We have only so much we can do.  Because this life is limited, there is only so much the LORD will require of us.  He knows what we can and cannot handle.  The end is at hand.  The key is to finish as well as we started.

This brings me back to our Klondike Derby days.  This was a weekend in February when the Boy Scouts thought it was a great idea to tent camp in the middle of the coldest month of the year.  Most troops arrived on Saturday morning and competed during the day, then went home to a nice warm bed.  Not us!  No siree!  We arrived Friday night, pitched tents, and waited out the fridged weather in sleeping bags designed for the summer.  The next day our competition began bright and early.  We built a dog sled from old skies and wooden pallets.  Our competition was a timed competition where each patrol went through a course laid out in the woods, pushing or pulling that sled.  We stopped at several skills-testing stations like knot tying and first aid.  Overall time was a factor.  Did you ever try running through feet of snow pushing a sled with one of your fellow scouts riding along?  You may start out well, but running through the woods with thirty pounds of clothes and equipment on your frame has a way of wearing you out rather quickly.  Finishing at all was a feat in itself.  Not many patrols could finish.  Many quit before the finish line.  Not us!  It didn’t matter how we placed.  Often it was dead last.  But we were going to cross that finish line even if we had to crawl.  Once you broke through the woods and saw the finish line in the distance, you got your second wind.  The best we did was third place.  But that was out of thirty to forty teams.  And, we were the only ones to spend the night before in the woods.

Time is running out.  Our lives inch closer and closer to the conclusion.  It is not time to relax and coast to the end.  It is time to watch and pray.  For what?  What is it that should catch our eye?  What is it that we should be looking for?  Is it the end?  Or, is it a purpose of life considering the end is inevitable?  What is it we are supposed to be praying for?  Are we supposed to pray that God would hasten the end?  Or, is it that we might be faithful unto the end whenever that might be?  What we do see is Peter never suggests we are to wait out the clock.  We are not to run up the score and then coast to the end.  No.  Rather, because the end is always at hand, the watching and praying is in the context of time remaining and not the absence of time.  Eternity is not in focus here to the exclusion of the present.  Peter encourages us to watch and pray because time is fleeting.  There are fewer and fewer opportunities to serve the LORD in our human tabernacle.  The open doors to serve Him are becoming fewer and fewer.  Watch and pray because the end is at hand.  We must pray that as we had started our race, so we must finish it.  It does matter not how tired and worn out we are.  The race is still on and the tape has yet to be broken.  So, watch and pray because the finish line may be right around the next bend.