How Will You Spend Your Life?

We've all seen the billboards & church marquees: "How will you spend eternity?" Many of them will even give you a choice, Heaven or Hell? Some try to be cute in their presentation, Smoking or Non-Smoking? While I understand the desire of people to ensure that your soul is secure in salvation, I believe our focus on the hearafter has kept so many from embracing the herenow.

When you look into the Gospels and Apostolic writings, you discover that their presentation of the Good News was/is quite different from what we hear in Western Christianity. Much of what we have preached & taught has focused on eternity. Even our discussions on how we live right now is consumed with the idea that we don't want to mess up that destination. What has been lost in all of this is how faith in Christ affects our lives this very moment. Our relationship with Christ should affect every relationship. Our time spent with Him should affect our time spent everywhere else. Jesus said, "I have come that they may have LIFE, and that LIFE MORE ABUNDANTLY." It's time to get busy living.

I saw a post this morning that stirred my thinking in this direction so you will just have to bear with me. The constant focus on Heaven & Hell within much of Christendom has hindered us from embracing life. Always looking for the "sweet by and by" causes us to miss out on the glorious here and now. Don't you find it interesting that we spend so much time talking about leaving Earth & going to Heaven while Jesus prayed that Heaven would come to Earth? We are telling people how to avoid Hell in eternity but not teaching them how to avoid Hell now. The questions that we have to answer revolve around what Jesus taught. Was He simply trying to affect eternity or was He trying to affect the present? To be sure, the "afterlife" would be affected but the "nowlife" matters much more than we realize.

There are certain passages of Scripture that have been twisted in this current train of thought. When Paul talks about "keeping your mind on things above", I don't believe he is trying to get you to focus on the reward of Heaven. I believe he wants your thought life to be consumed with the atmosphere & environment of Heaven. It's the understanding that there is a pattern of life set forth in Heaven that should be emulated in the Earth. It's the recognition of the Kingdom of God in all of its purity, all of its light, & all of its glory that needs to be manifested here & now. Many Christians are content to leave the world in an hellish state rather than see it transformed through the life that is in us. AND...this is the reason why I'm going after this type of thinking. Our desire to escape, our thinking that it's only going to get worse, & our belief that this is necessary/proper keeps us from engaging the culture.

Think about it this way:
"If you were to live 100 more years, would your life be Heaven or Hell?"

Jesus spoke to people where they were & in what they were experiencing.
"If anyone thirsts..."
"Come to me all of you who are weary & heavy laden..."
"I am the Bread of Life..."
These are all statements & declarations that were meant to alter their current experience of God & life. The affect of Western Christianity upon our thinking has kept us from seeing the "NOW" aspects of what Jesus is saying. His desire was to affect life which would ultimately affect eternity. He had seen what Adam's Fall had done to His creation. He saw the current Hell they were living in. He had witnessed firsthand what Death was doing to their lives. He chose to defeat it all so that we would no longer have to live in fear. We would no longer have to be bound by shame. We would no longer have to bear the yoke of the Law that continually condemned.

My dear friends, I'm not saying that there isn't an eternal aspect to the Gospel. I'm not saying that there isn't a reward for believing nor consequences for rejection. I'm simply saying that Jesus wants to affect your current state of life. Why else would Jesus spend so much time teaching on how we treat one another, how to respond to our enemies, or how to handle trials & tribulation? If God's ultimate goal was to get us to Heaven then He could transport us at the moment of our conversion. Yet here we are, here and now. How are we going to spend our lives?

You may not think this is a big issue, but I want you to consider that this is exactly how so many people are introduced to the Christian faith. One of the most popular evangelistic tools of our day opens with these two questions:
"Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you can say you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven?"
"Suppose that you were to die today and stand before God and He were to say to you, 'Why should I let you into my heaven?' what would you say?"
Has anyone ever heard Jesus proclaim the Good News in this way? What about any of the Apostles? Jesus would say things like "This is why I have come", and the Apostles would simply tell the narrative. Why? Because His coming was meant to affect their current experience of God & their current experience of life. Most of us don't even realize that Jewish thought on life was that our current experience would carry over. "From Judaism’s perspective, our eternal soul is as real as our thumb. This is the world of doing, and the 'world to come' is where we experience the eternal reality of whatever we've become." In other words, the now would affect the later so focus upon the now. There is very little teaching about eternity. At least much less than what we have in our statements of faith. Why is this important? We have visited this question before. It's important because the Bible you read was influenced by Jewish culture. The cultural relevance of the Gospel must be carried over into our understanding or we miss out on the experience.

In closing, I want you to imagine a Christianity that focused upon us living in our identity in Christ. A Christianity that recognized that we are continually being conformed into the image of the Son. A faith that drew upon that experience to affect the lives around us. A Christianity that recognizes that the Kingdom of God is within us & needs to be let out. A faith where we lived in the moment & affected the culture around us. This is why you are here. How will your spend your life?