Grosey's Messages

CLOUDS,  A  NATIVE HEALING.

Some are pale and stray away.

Some present a fierce display:

whorls and smudges black and grey!

Some seem sad at close of day.

Clouds are evanescent friends.

Who or what on cloud depends?

Farmer smiles as rain descends.

Surely then his worry ends.

Find a time of rest to lie.

Stay and watch the clouds go by.

Find a beauty in the sky?

Find a healing in the sky?

Counselling as a profession was only really established in the UK in the 1960’s.  By 1970 there were a few hundred.  At the turn of the century, it was around 20,000.  But today it is estimated that there between 80-100,000.  In Australia the number is 40,000 – a doubling in the past 15 years.  It seems that counselling is in vogue.   We are a counsel culture.   

One of the reasons for the increase is that the number of issues we can receive counselling for keeps increasing.    We have moved from counselling for the trauma of death, horrific accidents and terrible abuse, to counselling for hurt feelings, ‘harmful’ words and even political results.  When Trump was elected in 2016, some school districts in the US offered professional counselling to their students (it is unlikely they would have done so if Hillary Clinton had been elected). I suspect that if Pauline Hanson spoke at Sydney University, counselling could be offered.   Perhaps counselling should have been offered to the long-suffering Scottish football supporters?

Where the culture goes you can be pretty sure that the Church will follow.  Which is why I was not surprised at an e-mail I received in preparation for the upcoming NSW General Assembly.   To quote the letter “The Assembly is providing confidential pastoral support through Jericho Road Chaplains for people affected by the ongoing discussions and decisions relating to the overture on eldership and the broader Assembly process.”

But. It’s not your best life now!  Scripture points us to our best life hereafter.  

When all labours and trials are oer 

And I am safe on that beautiful shore

With my dear Saviour whom I adore

THAT will be glory, glory for me!

Paul has struggled with his detractors. 

Some years ago my daughters gave me a little sign for my office door that I could not put up.  

“Do not disturb: I am already disturbed enough!”

I was in a struggle with detractors that included:

A pedophile network that expressed anger at my refusal to participate in fellowship activities with them. 

Denominational executives that were angered at my conservative beliefs and refusal to participate with the interdenominational committee representing the above network. 

local church members who supported both groups. 

Yes my daughters were concerned that the stress would kill me.  

Paul was disturbed by his detractors.  

He saw them as enemies of the gospel.  

Enemies of the gospel use lies and intimidation to pressure their opponents.  

I have experienced this many times in pastoral ministry.  

Paul lifts our eyes from the present dangers to the eternal perspective. 

Paul Tripp notes this counsel. 

eternity.

I won’t be focusing on what heaven will be like or what we’ll be doing once we get there, but rather, how living in light of eternity radically changes our everyday lives.

Embedded in the promise of future eternal grace is the guarantee of “right here, right now” grace for what you’re facing today. And when you begin to understand your story from the unique perspective and promises of Forever, you begin to live with unshakeable hope and confidence today as you wait for the promise of Forever.

The opposite, however, is also true. When you forget Forever and live as if today is all you have, then your life and faith will be anything but unshakeable!

Forgetting Forever

In my many years as a biblical counselor, a recurring pattern appeared. As I listened to their stories of disappointment, anger, confusion, and grief, I realized, “I need to give eternity back to this person.”

It became increasingly evident that most of the people I counseled were struggling with the situations, locations, and relationships of everyday life because there was a critical element in their story that they either never knew or had completely forgotten.

I was counseling eternity amnesiacs.(And I must admit, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I, too, was more like my counselees than unlike them!)

What is an eternity amnesiac? It’s someone who lives with unrealistic expectations, unfulfilled dreams, unmet goals, and a functional hopelessness that results when we tell ourselves that this life, right here, right now, is all there is to life.

Even though we say we believe in the promise of eternity, in very significant ways in our street-level Christianity, we don’t always live in a way that is consistent with what we confess to believe. We know this conceptually, but in practice, we so frequently fail to embrace this life-changing theology: our stories don’t end with the world we're living in right now.

What would seem like the last chapter—human mortality and drawing our last breath on this earth—isn’t the last chapter in the story. The Bible invites you to celebrate, and requires you to face, the exciting and inescapable reality of life after death.

This present life today is not all there is. In fact, it is just a speck, a tiny dot on your Forever timeline. There is a Forever on the other side of this life. Eternity is not a mystical creation of overly spiritual people. Forever is a reality. It is the product of God’s plan and design. And once you believe in Forever and live with Forever in view, not only will you understand things you have never understood before, but you will live in a radically different way than you did before.

But in the 10,000 mundane moments of everyday life, in the chaos, confusion, and busyness of today, we have lost sight of and forgotten about Forever. The results can be discouraging, if not devastating.

What happens when we forget about Forever? Well, here’s just a short list:

• Our marriages struggle because we load the burden of our happiness onto the shoulders of a far-from-perfect spouse

• We put way too much pressure on our children to be successful and live as trophies to our identity

• We have a hard time getting along with family and friends, constantly surprised and disappointed when friends and brothers and sisters hurt us

• We spend more than we earn and find ourselves in crippling financial debt

• We stand in front of full closets and say we have nothing to wear

• We look into fully stocked refrigerators and say we have nothing to eat

• We struggle with envy

• Trials and suffering paralyze us more than they should

• We overmedicate, overeat, and numb ourselves with entertainment and sexual pleasure

Losing Forever

A 2025 global poll revealed that the majority of people still believe in an afterlife of some form, even among the religiously unaffiliated. The problem is, eternity doesn’t practically mean anything to most people. It’s not formative in the way they go about their everyday lives.

As a culture, we “believe” in eternity the way we “believe” in God. Most people say they do, but you wouldn’t know it from observing the way they live. We have abandoned a self-conscious allegiance to the reality of eternity, which structures how we think about and approach the here and now.

The thought of Forever simply isn’t a thought many people carry around, at least not in a way that makes much difference. The functional philosophy of the modern person is simply devoid of eternity. Forever isn’t a topic written about much in our newspapers and magazines. It isn’t a topic of interest in our popular entertainment media. You will never hear a social media influencer, news anchor, journalist, or podcaster remind us, “I know things often look bleak and chaotic, but remember that this is not all there is. We are all heading for eternity, where all that is broken will be finally and forever fixed!”

It isn’t a serious topic of interest in the university or in the halls of government. Imagine if every school required an introductory Forever 101 class on eternity for all incoming students. The finest institutions of higher education in the United States—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, for example—were all founded by people who held firmly to a biblical worldview that has eternity as its final hope.

In a few days, America will be celebrating its 250th birthday. Consider the words that one of its founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, penned for his own epitaph:

The Body
Of
Benjamin Franklin,
Printer,
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents torn out,
And stript of its lettering and gilding,)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
In a new and more elegant edition,
Revised and corrected
By
The Author.¹

Yet today, eternity is no longer a category that our culture takes seriously when we think of what life is all about. The shift has been subtle and slow, but nonetheless seismic in its impact. This life-altering change didn’t begin a few years ago; it has been percolating for generations. The movement away from a biblical view of life, coupled with the materialism of our modern scientific culture, has affected the way we think about who we are and what is important.

It’s as if someone has entered the house of human culture and stolen a precious family heirloom—a Forever perspective—but most of us don’t know a robbery has taken place. We go on living as if nothing has happened, but it has, and in powerful and practical ways it affects us all. Without Forever in the center of our thinking, our picture of life is like a jigsaw puzzle missing a central piece. You will simply not have an accurate view of the picture without the piece of the puzzle entitled Forever.

Children watching Netflix cartoons have been robbed of Forever. Teens studying math, science, history, and literature won’t be encouraged to examine life through the lens of Forever. Businesspeople investing money don’t have eternity as the number one motivation for their portfolio. Brides and grooms embracing one another at the altar don’t get the importance of also embracing the sure and coming reality of Forever. The first thought of a young mother looking at her newborn isn’t to celebrate that Forever is hardwired inside her child.

This loss of an eternal perspective, the larceny of Forever, is happening not just in broader human culture, but in the church and in the everyday lives of believers all around the world. Eternity amnesia grips us all. We have bought into the “here and now is all you get” perspective that rules the day. We are Forever people who have quit believing in Forever. Again, I’m not talking about confessionally. No Christian will say they’ve stopped believing in heaven and eternity. But many of us don’t live as if we believe in it.

The Forever-ism that is hardwired inside you collides with the Now-ismthat is everywhere around you in culture. What we all know is true (Forever) collides with what we end up living for every day (Now). What we were hardwired to be (Forever people) collides with how we live (people captured by the Now). What was designed to propel everything we do (the promise of Forever) collides with what motivates us (the desire for Now).

Now was designed to be an introduction to Forever, and Forever was designed to be the living hope of Now. But so many of us have forgotten about and lost sight of Forever and only live for the Now.

Regaining Forever

So where do we go from here? Well, in a word: remember. It sounds so simple, but for many of us, we have just forgotten or neglected to remember Forever. So, pray every day for the grace to remember that this life is not all that there is.

I will continue writing about Forever in the coming weeks, but I want to end today with a simple phrase you can remember. Maybe even write it down on a notecard and stick it to your refrigerator or tape it to your bathroom mirror. Here it is: this life is a preparation for a final destination.

Many of us treat today as the final destination. Whatever our confessional theology says about eternity, at the functional level, we live as if this is all there is. We live with a destination mentality instead of a preparation mentality.

This present world, with all its joys and sorrows, is not our final address. When we treat it as if it is, we try to get from this world what we can only experience in the next. We try to pack as much pleasure, happiness, and excitement into our present life as we can. We do this because the thought that this life is all there is carries an inescapable fear that life will somehow pass us by.

Here is what a destination mentality fails to understand: our complete, present, personal happiness is not what God is working on in the here and now. Why? Because the plan of his grace is to deliver us out of this world to one that is much, much better.

You see, God has designed that this would not be the final destination for his children. He knows that this is a terribly broken world that, in its present state, does not function the way that he intended. This world is not a safe place to look to for a sense of well-being. For that, we need to live with a preparation mentality, approaching each day knowing that this world is not intended to be our final destination, and that God is preparing another world for us.

Living with a preparation mentality also means living with the knowledge that God is using the disappointments and difficulties of this world to prepare us for the next. God uses the pressures of the present to craft us into the kind of individuals with whom he would choose to spend eternity.

You were made for Forever. That is your inescapable identity, and it is your guaranteed destination. Life only works as it was meant to work when you live with Forever in view.

Could it be that you are trying to achieve your best life Now while forgetting Forever? C.S. Lewis said it best in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”