Pulse check. The heart beat murmur of the steadily unchanging pitter-patter echoes a real and hearty challenge. Are you consistent? Are you pacing to the noise that lives inside you? Are you inhibiting it with poison and popcorn?
The metaphor may or may not do, but the reality of untempered commitments may very well keep you racing to the nearest stimulant irrespective of how good or bad it makes you feel like a dog waxed on by cats right and left only to wain back for a quick snack on yesterdays vomit. This life-style will only lead to fickleness and heartache. Someday the wounds are going to show. Someday the blister is going to pop. Someday the hollow tree is going to fall and there are no roads back to wholeness once the timber is burned.
The eschatological vision pent up in Revelation helps. Yesterday's forgotten mantra about death and taxes has a surety epistemologically tested by all known methods of observation. I suppose it is discouraging for some people to think about death. I suppose it may be scary or ripe with noisy absolutes we would like to avoid. Whatever the case maybe, I am quite confident I will die and the impending reality bolsters sobriety.
The surety of God's judgment may not have the same kind of observable validation, but the Scriptures have conclude that death assumes a call to trial, a judgment. Judgment language is quite impressively common in the Scripture and yet comically absent from the Evangelical pulpit. I have heard it said that while God is fully capable of blessing, he is incapable of condemnation. This seems belittling and arrogant to me. I suppose if someone is interested in the Scriptural attestation, they would have to take God's right to judge and bless seriously.
