“For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption, but he whom God raised up did not see corruption” (Acts 13:36-37).

What’s Your Life’s Sentence?

Clare Booth Luce, the playwright and Congresswoman, challenged President John F. Kennedy to consider his priorities. She worried he had too many goals, which scattered his focus. She said, “A great man is one sentence.” You can summarize Lincoln’s presidency: “He preserved the union and freed the slaves.” For Franklin D. Roosevelt: “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.” So she pushed President Kennedy to sharpen his focus by meditating on the question: “What will your sentence be?”

We could summarize the lives of men and women in the Bible similarly (see Hebrews 11 for a classic example). In this lesson, we’ll draw insights from Paul’s one-sentence summary of King David’s life: “For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers and saw corruption, but he whom God raised up did not see corruption” (Acts 13:36-37).

David Gives Us A Template

So many specific details could describe David’s service to God. He conquered, he wrote, and he collected materials for the temple. But if you get lost in the details, you miss the thrust of his life: He served God’s purpose in his generation, and then he died.

This sentence about David reminds us our lives can be both small and meaningful.

We get caught up (like Kennedy, perhaps) in managing so many details that we can miss the point of our lives. Isn’t David’s sentence our sentence, too, if we serve the Lord? Fill in the blank with your name: “For ____, after he [or she] had served the purpose of God in his [or her] own generation, fell asleep …” We can get pulled in two equally wrong-headed directions away from the proper perspective of our lives: caught between chasing greatness, and on the other hand, dismissing our lives as too brief and insignificant to make a difference. This sentence about David reminds us our lives can be both small and meaningful.

How to Write a Great Sentence

Someone asked two laborers what they were doing. “Laying bricks,” replied the first man. The other looked around and said, “Building a cathedral.” Cathedrals often took many generations to build, from the 577-year construction of Milan Cathedral to the 632-year building of Cologne Cathedral. If you have no sense of the architect’s plan, you could work a lifetime and miss the meaning of your labor.

Like those builders, we’re amid kingdom work that our kids and grandkids won’t see completed until Christ returns. Try to look far enough ahead to see how much your efforts matter. David served his generation in incredible ways. Who would have thought that some of the poetry he wrote would be more influential than his policies and wars? Like David, we serve God’s purposes in our own generation. And like David, the effects of our service will likely reach beyond our lives in ways we couldn’t guess. We’re building a different future, affecting our children, the church, new converts, and perhaps even people who haven’t been born.

Don’t live a run-on sentence about trivial things, because — if we let Him — God wants to author our lives.

You Only Get a Sentence

In the book of history, you don’t get a whole chapter; you only get one sentence. “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away … So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:10, 12).

Game designer Chris Crawford keeps two jars. One jar holds beads representing past days, and the other contains beads representing the future days he expects to live. Each day, he moves a bead from the future jar to the past jar, meditating on his finite life and telling himself not to waste a moment. Numbering our days gives us a heart of wisdom—it helps us focus on what matters.

In the book of history, you don’t get a whole chapter; you only get one sentence.

Getting older and realizing your life will end troubles a lot of people. Yet, strangely, the brevity of life is a gift because our mortality gives us focus. We can’t understand our lives without grasping that we’re just a blip, “a mist that appears for a little time” (James 4:14). You have a moment to do your part, so what will you write?

‘Your’ Sentence Isn’t Even About You

It’s humbling to realize that even this sentence about the great King David wasn’t really about him! It was about Christ. Paul finds three ways to say David’s dead before contrasting David’s frailty with Christ’s incorruptible life. While David 1) “fell asleep” 2) “was laid with his fathers” and 3) “saw corruption,” Jesus — “he whom God raised up did not see corruption” (Acts 13:36-37).
It’s humbling to realize that even this sentence about the great King David wasn’t really about him! It was about Christ.

It’s humbling to realize that even this sentence about the great King David wasn’t really about him! It was about Christ.

Likewise, our lives are about something much bigger than ourselves. In context, David’s sentence is a footnote in the story of Christ that Paul preached in six points:

1. From David’s offspring, God brought Jesus the savior (Acts 13:23).
2. John the Baptist pointed to Christ (13:25).
3. As prophesied, Jesus died on a tree and laid in a tomb (13:29).
4. God raised him from the dead (13:30).
5. He appeared to many witnesses (13:31).
6. Forgiveness comes through him (13:38).

Christ transforms our lives through his greatness. His resurrection promises eternal life. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on…that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!” (Rev. 14:13). Our lives—though brief—mean something. So don’t live a run-on sentence about trivial things, because — if we let Him — God wants to author our lives. “And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor. 3:3).