Use your Body for the Sake of God

These days you are using God for the sake of the body. You are not using your body to worship God. You pray to God for good health whenever you are sick, but you are not using all your physical strength and faculties, when you have them, to worship God. You imagine that there will be plenty of time later on to engage in worship, and so you go on wasting your time. You think that after retirement you can begin to take up the contemplation of God and do spiritual exercises. Perhaps you feel that it is better in the meantime to enjoy life and to enjoy the objects of the world while you are still young. But how can you start thinking of God when you become old, after having lost all your capacities.

If you are not using all your physical powers and capacities for the worship of the Lord now, then later it will be too late. When children make fun of you and call you 'old monkey!', will you then have the strength to start an intensive spiritual life? When your hair is gray, when you are hardly able to move, when you are barely able to see, when all the sense organs have become weak, will you then be able to use them for the worship of the Lord? No, it will not be possible. The scriptures have very forcefully described the futility of starting your spiritual practices only during your last days. It is stated that when the god of death finds you and shouts, "Come! Come!", when your own relations are anxious to get the corpse out of the house, when they are all shouting, "Take it away! Take it away!", and when your wife and children are there sobbing, can you think of the Lord at that time? Can you tell your relatives to stop crying, can you tell death to wait a little bit because you want to think of the Lord for a few moments?

You should accumulate in youth all the things which are necessary to lay a strong foundation for a happy future. Do you really think that it is possible to think of the Lord only after you retire? No, it is not possible. You should be fully engaged in regular spiritual practice before retirement. But instead, you immerse yourself in business, and continue with that even after retirement, or waste your time going to clubs, and in many other ways dissipate your precious life.