Several years ago I conducted two funerals in one day. One was for a sweet, dedicated, soul-winning Christian teenager. The other was for a lady who had passed away at the age of eighty-three. She wasn't a Christian, and she had wasted her life in ignoble matters.
Someone said at the end of the day, "What a tragedy that the godly teenager lived such a short life, when the unbelieving eighty-three-year-old lady was privileged to live such a long one."
I replied, "The teenage girl lived longer than the elderly lady."
The person with whom I was talking could not understand this. "How long did the teenager live?" I was asked.
"Sixteen years," I replied.
"Well, didn't the lady live eighty-three years?" asked the other person.
"Oh, to be sure," I said, "she served more time on earth. But she did not really live at all. She breathed longer, but she lived less."
Paul wrote, "But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth" (1 Timothy 5:6). Consequently, the sixteen-year-old had lived longer than the eighty-three-year-old because she had lived sixteen years with a full, packed life.
How old are you? How long have you lived? These answers are not necessarily the same.
Dr. Jack Hyles
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