August 17, 2010

God’s Goal for your Life is not to Save You From Hell

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” Philippians 3:10

Pastor’s Blog

For perhaps the last year or so today’s verse has been my verse. It means that I seek to embrace every part of my life as the life that God has given me to live while I remain on earth. It means the goal of my life is not to avoid hell when I die. That is God’s goal for no one. What kind of father has as his goal for his child to keep her out of jail?

No, the goal of God for you is know Him and His Son Jesus Christ. Do you know the meaning of eternal life? Read John 17:3 and you will discover it is not “going to Heaven when I die”. God wants daughters and sons, nothing less. Sons and daughters who like him, love him, are happy to be his children, who find him fun, who find in him life.

Heaven, Eternal Life, Life eternal with God is both a state of being and a place. It will be populated with the kind of people who can live and flourish there. That is a certain kind of person. People who don’t embrace now wouldn’t like heaven. It would hurt too much. For them it would be hell.

This is why today’s verse matters. God is shaping you into the kind of person who knows him, knows his power and knows his suffering and, yes, faces even death as Jesus did. A God shaped person fits a God shaped eternity.

I am right now being shaped by Christ or I am being shaped by something else. No, Christianity is not about a ticket to heaven. Rather heaven is like happiness. In seeking it we miss it. In seeking instead the One who inhabits every inch of it, heaven comes as a piercingly beautiful byproduct.