Consider a typical workday. You are jolted awake by the alarm and quickly get the children fed, dressed, and off on the school bus. Then you get ready yourself and fight the traffic all the way to the office, where you dance between appointments and deal with a steady barrage of emails and conference calls. The same traffic is fought all the way home (only now you’re sharing the ride with a stack of assignments that was dropped on your desk at the last minute). You have a hurried dinner with the family, help the kids with their homework, and trot them through the evening routine of bath, books, and bed. You finish up your own work, catch a few stories on the news, and call it a night … just so that tomorrow morning you can be jolted awake by the alarm and do it all over again!

It’s no wonder we occasionally ask ourselves: Am I really getting anywhere? Despite our best efforts to stay on top of everything, it can often feel as if we’re climbing stairs of sand. We finally get the car paid off and the transmission goes out. We send the youngest child off to college and the oldest one can’t find a job and moves back home. We take account of our lives and it winds up looking like a handful of loose change. A little is spent here, a little there. But in the greater scheme of things, does what we’re doing actually amount to very much?

The Apostle Paul certainly seems to think so. He wrote to the Corinthians, “We know that in the Lord our labors are not in vain.” And the reason Paul can be so sure of this is because of the Resurrection. The way Paul figures it, we can be confident that our work here is not in vain, because in the Risen Christ, we know that life now has a destination, and not just an end.

Picture it this way. Suppose you were on a cruise, and one afternoon the captain got on the intercom and announced: “Ladies and gentleman, I hope this won’t panic anybody. We have plenty of food, plenty of entertainment, and plenty of activities to keep all of you occupied and content. However, we’ve decided not to head for a port. Instead, we are going to cruise around the ocean until we run out of fuel, and then drift idly along until we sink. Have a pleasant trip.”

If you were on such a ship, what would be your reaction? Would you just sit back in your lounge chair and soak up the sunshine? I don’t think so. You and I—as well as every other passenger—would be heading for the life rafts and paddling for shore. Not because the cruise wasn’t still enjoyable, but because if there is no destination, it’s meaningless. And the same is true of life. Enjoyment is not enough. If the only future we can expect is that tomorrow will be a duplicate of today, and the day before that, then our work here really is in vain. In effect, we are merely killing time until time kills us—like an endless game of cards where we’re never dealt a new hand.

However, in the power of the Resurrection, that’s precisely what we’re given—a new life. In the meantime, of course, there is much work to be done. But because of the risen Christ, we now have the assurance that our labors here are not in vain.