Stars in My Eyes
Lisa Cooke

One of the things I love to do when Tony and I visit Rocky Mountain National Park is to go into the park late at night, away from city lights, and look at the night sky with the uncountable number of stars. Those stars, even though they appear as just pinpricks of light, have always fascinated me. I could look at them for hours and not grow tired of their beauty. I believe there’s a message in those stars for us, a calling they send out into the world for those who have eyes to see.

Daniel 12:3 says “And those who are wise will shine as bright as the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness will shine like the stars forever.”

Barnes Notes on this verse says “Nothing can be more sublime than to look on the heavens in a clear night, and to think of the number and the order of the stars above us as an emblem of the righteous in the heavenly world.” The night sky is an illustration of the great cloud of witnesses in Heaven, reminding us that we will have a place there as well if we stay faithful until the end.

The last part of Daniel 12:3 particularly catches my attention: “…and those who lead many to righteousness will shine like the stars forever.” If we want to shine like stars in Heaven, we must be about our Father’s business here on earth, which emphasizes evangelism, the salvation of the lost. If we truly desire to have God’s heart as our heart, we will be intentional about reaching the unsaved for Christ.

It seems too easy to put that emphasis on soul winning on the back burner of our busy lives. It’s not that we don’t want to see people come to Christ—of course we do! But I often find myself over engaged in other aspects of my Christianity and neglecting the “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” command of Jesus. Seeing the stars in the night sky reminds me that I want to be a soul winning so that I can also shine like a star forever.

There are those to whom soul winning is as natural as breathing. They have a grace and a gifting to be able to reach people’s hearts and lead them to Christ. The “Billy Grahams” of this world are especially appointed by God to fulfill their calling as an evangelist. But what about the rest of us? In 2 Timothy 4:5, Paul tells Timothy to “do the work of an evangelist,” and I think no matter what our primary calling, we can all do the work of an evangelist in being ever sensitive to people’s need for Christ as their Savior. We may not find ourselves speaking to large auditoriums filled with people, but we do find ourselves sitting beside someone on an airplane, or working alongside someone at our job. Grand scale or small scale, we can do the work of an evangelist by allowing God to speak through us to the person or persons in front of us. The Holy Spirit is constantly intent on drawing others to Christ and we can offer Him our lives and voices to use in the witness of God’s love to the unsaved.

We need to think about Heaven, about our eternal life there, remembering that God “will render to each one according to his works (Romans 2:6).” We are wise when we invest here on earth for our future retirement season, we would be wiser to invest time and effort in the things that matter to God, in the things that He will one day reward. We are to lay up for ourselves treasures in Heaven (Matthew 6:20) by living the life and doing the spiritual work God has ordained for us.