The Only People Who Will Go to Heaven

I have become convinced that the only people who will go to heaven at the end of this life are people who want God. 

Heaven is God's home.  It is filled with Him.  If we don't want God, we wouldn't feel at home there.  In fact, if we don't want Him, we probably wouldn't even notice His presence, and the greatest pleasure of heaven would be lost to us.

It is lost to us now. 

We were created for fellowship with God, and when Adam and Eve broke that relationship by their rebellion against His authority, that relationship was lost to them, and to all of us who are their descendants. They lost the joy, and eventually even the awareness, of His presence.  And they passed that loss on to us. 

God's presence is still here.  He is everywhere, touching us with His love. He touches us in the sunlight, and in all things that give pleasure on this earth; He gives us every breath we breathe.  But in our natural state, we go about our lives seeing only the things we can relate to with our five senses, unaware of spiritual realities that are all around us, including the reality of God's presence.  And we wonder why we are so lonely.

We try to fill that God-shaped vacuum with everything else.  We fill it with other relationships, and when those fail to satisfy we fill it with work, or temporary pleasures. 

Our striving for fulfillment drives us so frantically that we become addicted to our attempts.  Every substitute we put into our lives becomes a bondage that only makes us more miserable.

I'm pretty sure it was an awareness of God's loving presence that filled the Garden of Eden with pleasure for Adam and Eve.  They walked and talked with Him, and that had to be the most wonderful part of their Garden experience. 

Walking and talking with God was natural to them.  Because they knew nothing else, they probably couldn't imagine not being able to do it.  They were unprepared for the horror of losing that relationship. 

Maybe that's why they were so deceived by the lies of Satan.  They didn't realize, in that one fateful moment, that God's presence was their central delight, and so the pleasure of God's presence was lost to the human race forever.

But no.  Not forever.  God dearly loved the human beings He had created. He knew they would fall, so He had a back-up plan. Adam and Eve hid from God but He did not hide from them.  He sought them out. He drew them back.  At great cost to Himself, he provided a way for them to enjoy His presence once more.

And He draws us back too.  That deep loneliness we feel is the draw.  When it gets deep enough, demanding enough, we begin to want Him again.  And if we are willing to give in to that wanting, He will fill us with the pleasure of His presence once again.

Yes, there will be other pleasures in heaven--pleasures more wonderful than we can imagine.  In heaven, the distraction of pain will be gone forever and we will be free to enjoy the blessings of God's love that we are blind to in this life. But all those freedoms and wonders will be intricately entwined with the pleasure of His presence. 

If we do not want Him more than anything, heaven will hold no real pleasure for us. 

So God gives us a choice while we are alive on earth. 

We can choose Him and heaven, or we can turn away, as Adam and Eve did. 

God will honor whatever choice we make, for eternity.

FOR GOD, the Lord of earth and heaven

SO LOVED, and longed to see forgiven

THE WORLD, in sin and pleasure mad

THAT HE GAVE the only Gift He had.

HIS ONLY SON, to take our place

THAT WHOSOEVER--Oh what grace!

BELIEVETH, placing simple trust

IN HIM, the righteous and the just

SHOULD NOT PERISH, lost in sin

BUT HAVE ETERNAL LIFE, in Him.

John 3:16 in poetry, by an unknown author.

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Christmas Angels and Demons

This summer, for no apparent reason, a vicious bout of anxiety hit me, knocking me off my normally sturdy emotional feet.  It persisted for a full four months, resisting all my tried and trusted coping mechanisms.  I'm still thinking about the experience and learning from it.  Once I had thoroughly dissected and analyzed it, I decided the reason was probably an overall angst about the state the world is in. 

 

Evil news invades our hearts and minds in this information age.  There seems no place to hide from it.  Just when we think nothing worse can happen, a new media revelation bursts upon us. 

So maybe anxiety is not so unreasonable after all?

I am tempted to think the world is getting more evil, but I suspect it's not.  As I begin to come out of my funk and start thinking about Christmas, I realize evil has been around for a long time.  The Nativity Story is full of it.  And when I realize this, the age-old question comes back at me again. 

Why? 

Why is there evil in the world? 

Why, if there is a good God, does He let it happen?

This morning I'm reading a book by Carolyn Arends called, Wrestling with Angels.  In it she talks about the Mother of all Mysteries--the Incarnation. 

She says:

Of all the paradoxes in the New Testament, there is one more impossible than all the others, and the contradiction is not in something Jesus says but in what He is . . . . fully God and fully man, together.  A crazy (and ultimately violent) collision of human and holy, somehow contained in ordinary flesh and bone.  It is the Mystery of Mysteries, and it starts with--of all things--a baby. 

(p. 193)

She goes on to point out that this "violent collision of human and holy" happened for a very deliberate reason.  It happened for Love.   And then she gives us one of the most lucid and engaging answers to this question about the problem of evil that I've seen:

If this is the whole quest of God--that we should love Him as He loves us, that we should become His friends--we must be free to reject His offer.  This is a terrible freedom, and I suspect it is at the heart of most of the terrors in this world.  We cannot love God unless we are free not to love Him.  Many of us don't.  He does not override our wills.  He does not move us about like pawns in a cosmic chess game, always ensuring an agreeable outcome.  We are free to bring hate into the world (and indifference too, which is really hate in its most lethal form), and so we bring also disease and pollution and crime and death.  If God were to force us to stop the hate, He would eliminate the opportunity for us to choose love.  (p. 202)

I'm going on a Carolyn Arends binge this Christmas.  I'm going to fill my house with her Christmas music.  Her unique and vivid song lyrics follow this theme of the violent collision of the human and the holy, with an underlying echo of God's love that Christianity claims will one day swallow up all the evil.  

If you're looking for a reason to believe in the Good this season--if you want something that will counter-balance the Bad you will continue to hear in the media--I heartily recommend you check out her music.  You will find in it thought-provoking reasons to hope in the midst of the mess we humans have made of the world.

Her message--the message of Christmas--is an antidote for anxiety. 

Check out these clickable samples of her music:  

Long Way to Go, the Christmas story in a nutshell.

The Power of Love, an old song but a good one.

What's Wrong With Faith?

Last post I shared a story from Will North's book, Water, Stone and Heart. The story was a sermon about Peter walking on water. 

I told you I had a problem with the Vicar's sermon and I asked you to tell me what my problem was.  Kind of like Nebuchadnezzar asking Daniel to interpret his dream, I guess.  Not really fair.  But Jean Pedersen picked up on my question and gave me the response I was looking for.  I suspect others of you would have come up with the same thought, but Jean stated it in a nutshell.

She wrote: "It's not faith in faith. It's faith in Jesus."

In all fairness, I thought the sermon was a pretty good one, as far as it goes.  It communicates truth in an entertaining and effective way. But at the end, in the vicar's application of the truth, her message strays a bit, and that straying has the potential to lead us off a cliff into thin air (or into cold water, depending on which of her great analogies you follow.)

For sure, faith is important.  Lack of faith can keep us from being saved. But it's not our faith that saves us.  Faith is only the conduit that connects us with the source of salvation.  When it comes to our eternal well being, it's the source of our faith that saves us.  Until we get to the place of realizing we need that Source, we are lost.

There's another story about drowning that illustrates this concept.  It's the story of two men sitting on a grassy bank by a river, watching their friend struggle in the current, trying to stay afloat. One of the men is a strong swimmer, totally capable of rescuing the drowning man. The other looks at him, astonished and even angry to see his capable friend watching the drowning man flail in the water. 

They both watch as the man goes down once, twice, and finally three times.  Only then does the strong rescuer jump in, swim to the friend in the water, and haul him back to safety on shore.

As the three of them rest on the riverbank, the dry one asks, "Why on earth did you just sit there so long and watch him struggle to stay alive?  Why did you wait until the very end, when his hope was gone, before you saved him?"

The rescuer looks at his friend and explains, "As long as he felt he had any strength to save himself I was not able to rescue him.  If I'd gone out sooner, his struggling would have drowned us both.  I had to wait until his strength--his last vestige of hope in himself--was gone before he would let me do it for him."

Faith in ourselves--in our own ability to be good enough to merit heaven--can keep us afloat until we no longer have the strength to dogpaddle.  But in the end, we will drown if our faith is in anything except the Master of the waves who alone can walk on water--the One Who waits to take our hand when we have finally given up all hope in ourselves.

That's the message of the Gospel. Later on, in the book of Acts, that crazy, impetuous "rock," Peter, explains this important truth:

With that, Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, let loose: "Rulers and leaders of the people, if we have been brought to trial today for helping a sick man, put under investigation regardint this healing, I'll be completely frank with you--we have nothing to hide. By the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the One you killed on a cross, the One God raised from the dead, by means of his name this man stands before you healthy and whole. Jesus is 'the stone you masons threw out, which is now the cornerstone.' Salvation comes no other way; no other name has been or will be given to us by which we can be saved, only this one."

Acts 4:8-12, from The Message

About Water, Stones and Hearts

I've escaped happily into a few novels this summer.  This one, which may be my last for the

season, is a gentle read, and is pretty much a perfect escape, in spite of the one fatal error I encountered on page 476 of the Readers Digest Condensed version.  The last sentence of the Vicar's sermon was the killer.

Here's a rather long but satisfying excerpt from Water, Stone and Heart, by Will North:

_____________________

At the top of the Valency valley, Andrew climbed over a stile in a stone wall, walked through the cemetery of St. Juliot's Church, with its lichen-encrusted headstones leaning this way and that, and ducked under its fifteenth-century porch.  He'd been looking forward to this moment.  He wanted to see what [Thomas] Hardy had done during the restoration of the church in the late 1800's.  But when he pushed open the church's heavy oak door, he found a small clutch of parishioners, Lee and Anne included.  A female priest stood at a raised pulpit.

He mumbled an apology and took a seat in a pew at the rear.

Heads turned to regard the stranger who had joined them.  Lee grinned at him and waved.  The priest looked across the tiny congregation and smiled.  "Welcome," she said.  "I was just about to tell one of my favorite stories."

The priest's informality won him over immediately.  Andrew smiled back and nodded.  She began.

"I'm sure you've all heard variations of this joke: A mountain climber loses his footing and begins to fall from a cliff--perhaps a cliff like those along the coast path here in Boscastle.  He grabs the branch of a shrub growing from the cliff face--perhaps it's gorse or heather--and it arrests his fall.  But the branch is slender and brittle, and he knows it will not hold him long.

"'Help!' he cries.  'Is anyone up there? Help!'

"And a deep voice answers, 'I am the Lord, your God. I can save you if you believe in me. Do you believe?'

"'Oh yes, Lord, I do--with all my heart, especially right now!'

"'Good,' says the Lord. 'Let go of the branch.'

"The climber hesitates. 'Is there anyone else up there?' he asks."

There was a faint titter of laughter in the congregation.

"The Bible tells a similar story," the priest continued. "In this case, Jesus has just performed the miracle of feeding the multitudes. . . ."

. . . .When the crowd disperses, Jesus tells his disciples to get into their boat and set across the sea.  He stays behind to pray and reflect and tells them he will join them soon.

"That night, a storm rakes the sea, and the disciples' boat is tossed for hours.  Finally, as Matthew tells us, on the fourth watch, early in the morning, they see Jesus walking toward them on the surface of the water.  They cry out in fear, 'It is a ghost!' But Jesus says, 'Take heart. It is I. Be not afraid.' Then Peter jumps up and says, 'Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you over the water.'

"And here's where I think Jesus shows us his sense of humor--in a way not all that different from the joke we began with. What does he do? He says simply, 'Come.' And so Peter clambers out of the boat. He lets go with one hand. He lets go with the other. And he walks across the water toward his Lord.

"So here is Peter, striding across the surface of the sea, when he sort of wakes up and looks around. He sees that the sea is rough and the sky is stormy. And suddenly he is afraid. He has, to put it simply, a crisis of faith. He fears that the branch of salvation, like the branch our climber was clutching, is slender and brittle.

"What happens next? Well, it's useful to remember that the name 'Peter' means rock, which is exactly what he begins sinking like. 'Lord, save me!' Peter cries.

"And Jesus reaches out, pulls him up, and returns him to the safety of the boat. 'O ye of little faith, why did you doubt?' Jesus asks.  And the rest of the disciples, in awe, declare, 'Truly, you are the son of God.'"

The priest paused and rested her eyes on the villagers before her.

"We are only human," she said. "Our day-to-day lives test our faith repeatedly--in ourselves, in those we love, and in God. And sometimes we sink. What does Matthew's account of this episode tell us? That faith can buoy us up. That faith can calm the storm. That faith can produce miracles--big ones, little ones, it hardly matters. Faith can enable each and every one of us to walk upon the water of our lives. Faith can be our salvation."

_________________________

Did you notice the one fatal error?  Comment below and let me know what you saw here.  I'm curious. 

I'm also wondering if any of you have read this far.  It's a long blog post, and I often wonder if anyone reads even the short musings I post.  Are you there??  If you have read this far, whether or not you have a comment on the content, will you let me know you've read it?

Next post I'll talk about what I think is fatally wrong with this sermon. But I'd like to have your thoughts first.

Water, Stone and Heart, by Will North.

Besetting Sins: the Root Cause of Depression and Anxiety

"The most powerful incentive for change in our lives is discomfort."

I plan to post suggestions for getting rid of besetting sins, but first I want to talk some more about the most important, and the most difficult beginning step in that direction.  

I want to talk about putting Christ at the center of our lives.

Depression and anxiety are rampant in our society. The signs of this discomfort are all around us. We spend billions of dollars on sedatives--both legal and illegal--in an attempt to ease our pain.  We charge headlong into distracting activities--from pornography, to internet gambling, to obsession with physical fitness and recreation--all in an attempt to escape our unhappiness.

This is not a new development.  Depression and anxiety have been around for a long time.

In 600 BCE, the prophet Jeremiah suffered this ailment on behalf of his people, the Israelites. They had turned away from Yahweh, their Creator, to worship the idols of the nations around them and they were miserable.

Jeremiah blames God for this unhappiness, but he also recognizes that his sins (and theirs) are the root cause.  In Lamentations 1:14, he says,

My [our] sins have been bound into a yoke;

            by [God's] hands they were woven together.

They have come upon my [our] neck

             and the Lord has sapped my [our] strength.

He has handed me [us] over to those I [we] cannot withstand.

Like the writer of the song, Amazing Grace, Jeremiah sees God's grace in allowing the pain.  "Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved," says John Newton.

Both Jeremiah and John Newton recognized that only pain, coming as a consequence of our waywardness, will lead us back to a place of peace and joy in fellowship with God.

The truth is, anxiety and depression are symptoms of a heart problem. They come into our lives when we have allowed the wrong things to become the center of our focus and our worship.

St. Augustine says, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

So here is both the cause and the cure for depression and anxiety:

Jesus says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul."

And then he tells us how to do that: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."  

When we feel the pain of restlessness and anxiety in our hearts, it's a sign that we need to turn to the only One worthy of our love and worship. 

We need to make sure that Christ is at the center of our lives.

This first step is essential.  No human heart will feel release from the pain of anxiety and depression until it is centered properly.  Once this matter has been settled, besetting sins will lose their power and we will experience an unbelievable peace and joy at a deep, deep level that cannot be disturbed by any circumstances in our lives.

Next post will talk about the mopping up process of getting rid of those pesky besetting sins.