The Unfulfilled Future – Sunday, March 25, 1951
Perhaps it’ is time again to say some things that have been said before and to say them gratefully and soberly in this Easter setting. Perhaps the world never needed more a reassurance against what sometimes seems to be fleeting futility. Perhaps it never needed more the assurance that men are immortal, that justice is inevitable, that there is a personal perpetuation of the human soul, and that truth and intelligence continue eternally beyond time.
Easter is somehow the symbol that these things are so—and with the destructive forces we have found, perhaps we never needed more the assurance that they are so. Sometimes we hear of people who profess indifference to death. But no man who himself comes close to death or who sees someone he loves leave this life is indifferent to death.
When we face the fact that cherished associations here are moving ever nearer an earthly end, we inevitably think deeply of death and of the promise of everlasting life. And as we face the uncertainties of this world, we are grateful for faith and assurance for the future. And for the strengthening of this faith there is the further fact that thoughtful men always do some of their living and thinking for the future.
The time never comes in the life of a person when his planning and purposes are not projected beyond the present. This is true of those who seemingly yet have much left of life and also of those who seemingly have little left of this life. This ever-present awareness of an unfulfilled future is born of man’s consciousness of his own eternal continuance.
Young and old alike look toward things to come because, the soul of man will always continue to contemplate things to come, and because the Creator in whose image men were made has not planned or placed before us all this opportunity and effort of existence without the certainty of everlasting life. Sometimes the uncertainties loom large, but the realities exceed the uncertainties.
And those who have lost those they love and those who look to the end of this life may rely on the reality that life is limitless, that truth and intelligence and personality are perpetuated, and that the path was pointed, and the way was opened by Him who returned from death to life on that first Easter day.
“The Spoken Word,” heard over Radio Station K S L and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System, from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, March 25, 1951, 11:00 to 11.30 am., Eastern Time. Copyright, 1951
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March 25, 1951
Broadcast Number 1,127