by R.C. Sproul
This column’s title, “Right Now Counts Forever” is designed to focus attention on the relevancy of our present lives to the eternal destinies we all face.
We live in a culture that places the stress on “right now.” Short-range goals, pragmatic methods of problem solving, a quiet hysteria to make it happen “now,” all point to modern man’s despair regarding the future. The unspoken assumption is that it’s “now or never” because there is no ultimate future for mankind.
Our Christian assertion is that there is more to our lives than “now.” If there is not, then even the “now” is meaningless. But we say now counts. Why? Now counts because we are creatures who have an origin and a destiny that is rooted and grounded in God…. (Tabletalk, May 1977)
It has been thirty years since I penned my initial essay under the byline “Right Now Counts Forever.” It was in the decade of the ’70s, at a time when our culture was still reeling from the deleterious effects of the war in Vietnam, and even more significantly from the radical moral revolution that marked the decade of the 1960s. History has shown that that moral revolution of the ’60s has introduced far more change into life in the United States than the political revolution of the 1770s. Our culture was described in the ’70s as one that was strongly influenced by secularism. The principal motif of secularism is that life is cut off from eternity. All life must be lived in the here and the now, in this saeculum, for there is no eternal dimension. On the heels of secularism came the philosophy of relativism. Though relativism was embraced on many sides in the 1970s, it has since become so firmly entrenched in our culture that the estimated number of Americans embracing some form of philosophical or moral relativism reaches over 95 percent. In this regard, our culture has moved from what was then called neo-paganism to a culture now of neo-barbarianism. Though Roe v. Wade was already in place when I penned my first essay, the proliferation of abortion on demand, which reaches a million and a half a year, has so marked our culture as a culture of death that all vestigial remnants of our civilized culture die with the death of every unborn baby. Our nation is a nation at war with itself, where values, family, and morality so split asunder families and counties, states, and the nation, that the unified basis of our former civilization has been shattered.
One thing, however, has not changed in the past thirty years, and that is the fact that because God reigns, everything that happens today has consequences that last well into eternity. It is as true today as it was the first time I picked up the pen for my byline, that what happens right now counts forever. Let the culture be paganized, let the culture be barbarian, but let the church be the church and never negotiate the eternal dimension of life.
Dr. R.C. Sproul is senior minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida, and he is the author of more than sixty books.
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