If you died and were forgotten, would your life still matter?

By Scott Sauls, Op-ed contributor Thursday, September 03, 2026

We want our lives to matter.

We want to know that our years have added up to something, that our work has made a difference, and that the people we love are better off because we were here.

There is nothing wrong with wanting this. The trouble begins when we try to satisfy the desire by pursuing recognition, achievement, or control over how we will be remembered. These things can tell us that our lives are visible. They cannot tell us whether our lives are meaningful.

Johann Sebastian Bach understood the difference.

When Bach died in Leipzig in 1750, he was buried in St. John’s Cemetery. No lasting monument was erected, and the location of his grave was eventually forgotten. The man now regarded as one of history’s greatest composers was put in the ground without any of the recognition that we assume greatness deserves.

For decades after his death, much of Bach’s music received little public attention. Some manuscripts were scattered, neglected, or lost. Almost 80 years passed before Felix Mendelssohn’s celebrated 1829 performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion helped renew widespread interest in his work. By then, Bach was long gone. He never got to see even the beginnings of what his music would become across the globe and across generations.

But the markings he left on many of his manuscripts suggest that he had already settled the question of why his work still mattered.

At the beginning of a score, he would write the letters “JJ,” an abbreviation of the Latin Jesu juva: “Jesus, help.” At the end, he would write “SDG,” for Soli Deo gloria: “To God alone be the glory.”

Jesus, help.
To God alone be the glory.

Between those two prayers, Bach gave himself to his work.

A life larger than recognition

Bach’s practice reflected something the first disciples of Jesus had discovered under far harsher circumstances. They learned that the meaning of a life cannot finally be measured by its comfort, its recognition, or its length.

James, the brother of John, was killed by the sword under the vicious king Herod. Jesus told Peter that he would one day stretch out his hands and be carried where he did not want to go, and Scripture tells us that Jesus said this to show the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Clement of Rome, writing near the end of the first century in one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, remembers both Peter and Paul enduring persecution and remaining faithful to the point of death.

Tradition tells us that eleven of the 12 disciples died as martyrs, though those details cannot all be confirmed. But the central picture is clear: the people closest to Christ did not build their lives around survival, applause, or the preservation of their reputations or even of their own lives.

John’s ending was different. Rather than dying young as a martyr, he wrote from exile on the island of Patmos. He described himself there as a “brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus.” He was on that island, he said, “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 1:9). He is also the one who, in the Gospel that goes by his name, called himself the disciple whom Jesus loved.

By the ordinary measurements of success, all of these lives ended badly. James was executed. Peter and Paul suffered and died. John was removed from his community and confined to an island. None of them lived to see Christianity spread across continents. None of them saw the reach of the work God had begun through them, which is still going on across the globe today.

But with their own eyes, they had seen the risen Jesus.

That changed the way they measured everything.

The resurrection told them that death was no longer the final word on a person’s life. It told them that faithfulness could appear defeated without actually being defeated. It told them that what is offered to Christ can be hidden, opposed, or buried in the ground and still not be lost.

Their lives mattered, not because the world recognized their importance, but because their seemingly small stories had been gathered up into the larger story of Jesus, the story in which suffering is always redeemed, death is always undone, and every hidden act of faithfulness will always, one day, be brought into the light.

Between help and glory

This is what makes Bach’s two inscriptions, JJ and SDG, so compelling.

Jesu juva came before the work. Bach began from a place of dependence: Jesus, help me. Give me what I do not have. Sustain my attention. Strengthen my hands. Keep me faithful to the work I have been entrusted with. Soli Deo gloria came afterward. Whatever beauty had emerged, whatever excellence he had achieved, and whatever influence the music might have now or later, all of it belonged finally to God.

The first prayer released Bach from self-sufficiency.
The second released him from ownership of the result.

This is the Christian way to live. We begin by receiving grace from God, and we end by returning glory to God. Between the two, we offer our work as faithfully as we can.

Most of us will never compose a St. Matthew Passion. We may never create something people remember centuries from now. But we all face the same question Bach faced every time he sat before a blank page: Can I do the work in front of me without depending on it to prove my worth?

That question reaches far beyond the work that we do. It touches the mother caring for a child who does not yet understand or appreciate her sacrifice. It touches the friend who keeps showing up through another person’s long season of grief. It touches the leader who tells the truth when concealing it would be easier and more profitable. It touches the person who prays daily, gives generously, forgives freely, encourages gently, and serves sacrificially without any assurance of or need for being noticed.

These things may not look important enough to build our lives around. But the life of Jesus Himself teaches us to be suspicious of appearances. His greatest victory looked, for a time, like humiliation and defeat. The salvation of the world was accomplished through a man who was despised and rejected and erased, with a body that was bruised, beaten, and broken before being placed in a borrowed grave.

Then came resurrection.

The cross and resurrection free us from having to manufacture our own significance. Jesus has already secured our place in the story of God through His finished work. We do not work for a verdict of love; in Christ, we work from one. We do not have to make ourselves notable and memorable. We are already fully known and will forever be remembered by the one whose memory does not fail. He calls us by name, reminds us that we are His, never leaves or forsakes us, and promises to be with us always, even to the end of the age.

What will make your life meaningful?

A meaningful life is not necessarily a prominent life. It is a life received as a gift, lived in dependence, offered in love, and entrusted humbly to God. A line often attributed to Luther says that the humblest sweeping maid, sweeping for the glory of God, is filled with as much dignity as the greatest preacher in the world.

The disciples could give themselves away because the risen Jesus had promised that resurrection was ahead of them too. Bach could leave the reception of his music to God because the glory was God’s to receive and not his. The circumstances of the disciples and of Bach were very different. The freedom was the same. Neither needed visible success to establish the meaning of his life.

We need that freedom too.

The world we live in teaches us to measure nearly everything: income, influence, followers, sales, advancement, and impact. Some of these measurements are useful to a point. But none is capable of telling us what our lives are worth.

Perhaps, then, the question is not, “How can I make my life significant?” Perhaps it is, “What has God placed in front of me, and what would love and faithfulness require of me here?”

Maybe it is the work that needs doing, even though someone else will receive the credit. Maybe it is the relationship that needs patient, careful (full of care) attention. Maybe it is the apology you have been putting off, the person from whom you have been withholding forgiveness, or the act of courage no one else will ever see.

We cannot know what God will do through such things. Bach could not hear the orchestras that would play his music centuries after his unmarked burial. The apostles could not see the nations and generations that would receive the Gospel through their witness.

They did not have to see the outcome in order to remain faithful, and neither do we.

At the beginning of the day:
Jesus, help.

At the end of the day:
To God alone be the glory.

And between those two prayers, a meaningful life takes shape.

Originally published at Scott Sauls Weekly.