A Nobel Look

A newspaper printed the obituary of Alfred Nobel, and it said that he got rich from the death of others. He was the inventor of dynamite. Fortunately, Nobel wasn’t actually dead, and when he read the newspaper’s obituary, he was horrified!

Nobel got a chance to do something few of us can do: he watched his life from the viewpoint of death. It rattled him, and he didn’t like what he saw. So he took his fortune and set it aside into the Nobel Prize foundation, and today "Nobel" is famously associated with excellence in the arts and sciences. People are surprised to discover that Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite.

How would they write your obituary? What we do with our money speaks tellingly what we did with our lives. Money is "compressed life". When we give it to God’s purpose, we’re saying, "Here is my life, my time, my effort, my life’s blood!"

God offers us a glimpse of our obituary, if we are but only willing:

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Ephesians 2:10

This immediately follows the famous passage, "For by grace you have been saved…" Do we make the same connection in our lives? We’ve been saved by God’s grace in order that our lives might be transformed from meaningless wandering and self-indulgence into a life of testimony to the glory and beauty of the Lord.

• ← Ye Are Gods
• A Nobel Prize →