The choices seem obvious, of course I would rather have an eternity of joy than a few years of it, especially if the latter meant an eternity of hell later, but do I really believe that?
The present stings. It's a timer waiting to finish and each day that passes by, each year that I accumulate, every wrinkle, every joint pain, and all the ways in which I become aware that I'm getting older mean I'm running out of time. It also means I'm almost at the close of my life, and like all good scrap books I want to be able to look back and smile because this was my life.
But today I've got eternity stamped on my eyeballs, as Jonathan Edwards once wrote. Thinking about eternity always reorients my thoughts, flips them upside down like a layered cake on the floor mushed to a blob. What the hell am I doing? What the hell is going on? Why do I keep saying what the hell? Because everything changes when eternity comes into focus.
We talk about how hard it is to surrender everything to God, but no one ever says how hard it is to stop self gratifying ourselves and accept that God loves us. We want to say that it's just difficult to sacrifice and count the cost to follow Jesus, but really what we are saying is that we don't trust Jesus, we don't even know Jesus, and we are skeptical that He even exists. But we don't say that, we prefer saying what makes us sound much more humble or vulnerable. Sure, as baby Christians that's likely where it all starts, but as you mature in your faith it shouldn't keep coming back to that. Eventually you realize that the real reason for why it's so hard is because you just love your sexual pleasure, fame, acknowledgment, beauty, and instant gratifications more than you love God. Even though we know God died for us, and that He loves us so faithfully, the more we keep saying or thinking that we are trying to love Him back or that we are giving up something for God sounds like bull crap. He died for you? So what does that mean? He died for you. For you. It was something He did for you, so what was in it for us? Salvation. Everyone who then believes in Jesus is saved, because that's what was in it for us. So where do we start coming off with the idea that we are doing something for Him?
It's a sick delusion, and everyone attempting to give something back to God is decaying from it. We don't give anything back to God, we enter into intimacy with Him. That's it.
Once that's fixed in our hearts, and it may take years to accept it, we can expose the real issue. The real issue then becomes, what about my life and the circumstance of it? Why aren't I happy? Why don't I feel great? Why does my wife or husband have to be like that. Why are my kids like that? Why am I still single? Why do I feel ugly? Why am I not successful? Why this, why that, why all this crap in my life? And we point our crooked fingers at God in the secret depths of our hearts, disguising it as "I'm sacrificing this for God" or "I'm doing this for God." So, as C.S. Lewis put it, we inwardly put God in the dock.
What the hell is up with that? It's sick, and it's a delusion. We don't believe in God and then never struggle. In fact we don't believe in God and then have things go our way in this life at all. I don't know why I sound so angry, probably because I have a bad case of this disease myself and it's so stinking rotten. It leaves me discontent with God, with myself, and with life. I can't have God and my life the way I think it should go. I can have God and bank all my life on the hope of eternity with Him as I suffer and see things happen so out of my control with only a prayer in my heart that God would somehow take care of me as I am tossed and smashed by things that do that to me in my head, or I can remain holding on to life's pleasures like a steady sailing ship with cheap lip service that I believe in God.
Here's what I'm not saying: I'm not saying that we shouldn't live our lives to the best of our ability with what we have been given, and to always seek out to learn from our past mistakes as we strive at it. That's all common sense, and anyone who claims that that's what I'm saying just wants to validate their lip service to God.
What I'm saying is that when we have eternity in our hearts, it means eternity with God. It means after all this and that has run its course, we have what we want at the end! We have eternity with God! So what about now? What about all these desires and needs and feelings that cause us to be either happy or scared? These, my friends, are precious taps by the Holy Spirit. Every feeling matters when it comes to what's really going on in our hearts. Do not ignore the feelings, because they need to be touched and felt by you otherwise they will callous over your heart like a fibrous layer, desensitizing the place where we experience God's love most. I may be wrong, but it just makes sense to me that feeling my pain and disappointment are signals that the Spirit sends me when He is letting me know about an area in my heart that is resisting God. It's about getting very very specific as to what exactly I am resisting. At this stage in my life, I need to be emotionally open to God about every feeling, because that's what relationship is about. It's about communicating what's really in our hearts and then being communicated back to regarding that feeling with other feelings. When I tell a friend how bad my day went and they communicate back to me with a matching feeling, that's good! We all know it feels good to be understood, and we all know how bad it feels to be talked at instead of to. God wants to talk to me, and at this time I'm just learning how to do that.
So He's been spiraling the conversation towards eternity. Each feeling I've had and dealt with with Him has lead me more and more to this specific place: eternity.
I started out feeling numb and unheard. And He spoke to me in that and understood me by validating those feelings in me. I wasn't wrong for feeling numb, because I was feeling numb! You can t go wrong with feelings, that's the crazy things about it. All your feelings are your feelings. Haha. Meaning they are literally what you are feeling, and you know it because you feel it. Haha. God validates every one of my feelings. If I'm feeling alone He validates it, when I feel scared or angry He validates it, and when I feel hopeless He validates it. It is in this validation that intimacy comes about. When God validates a feeling of mine He uses gentle wisdom and understanding as the means. I feel sad then He says "yea! I know! And you are sad because..." And this is where trust, love, truth and grace take place. I trust that God understand me, I experience love because He understands me, and I become open to the truth because I know it's out of love, and finally I recognize the grace He gives me for every change that takes place without me having done anything but receive.
Where am I going with this? Well I guess I am saying that feelings have lead me to see eternity. Not just good feelings or holy feelings, but all my feelings. In fact the worse my feelings were the more I met with God. To be honest in my heart was to see how resistant I was to eternity. When we think about eternity it must be beautiful for us to desire it, otherwise it's just some meaningless word that we throw around. Ugh.
But God cares about how you feel, like when Jesus went to go see Lazarus, even though He already knew He was going to raise him from the dead he saw Mary crying and He wept too because she was weeping. She felt sad, and God cares about validating how we feel even if our feelings are wrong about the situation. It's how we feel, and it's how we relate to God. Without feeling it's not a relationship.
Eternity must feel real and true and awesome.
How does eternity feel to you? Do you feel curious? Do you feel uncomfortable? Do you feel nothing at all? However you feel about eternity will be a good indicator how you actually feel about God. So bring that, whatever it is, and let the relationship begin right where you are. You can't feel differently until you feel what's first there and work through it. Or maybe you should just ignore all your feelings and just do a bunch of stuff that you think God wants you to do, and that will be good and common grace will help you do a lot with that, but it is not a relationship with God. God cares about you. Not about what you do. I guarantee that once you get intimate with God the doing part will be so much more meaningful.
But to each his own. I can't tell anyone to do anything, I can only point to God and how He changed my heart. I'm just a beggar telling every other beggar where to find food. We get and we get and we get. We never give God anything that wasn't already His. Haha. We get love. But if you don't feel it how will you know it's real love?
Right? Knowledge of love is one thing, but even knowledge of it has its limits. Nothing feels as powerful as when another person makes you feel genuinely loved versus a quick text from a distant friend saying "love ya!" That's not love, but love is when someone meets you in your pain, holds you, and takes care of your needs. Your actual needs, not some vague need. What you really need. Validation. Safety. Understanding. Touch. Warmth. Blessings. All of those deep needs.
God wants to give that to you. Will you be open to His presence to give you all of your most sacred needs? All you need is to open your heart and come as you are. It's harder for us to accept that God loves us, we would rather work for it, earn it, and beat ourselves up for when we don't do it well. That's what everyone prefers to do. Can you just accept that God loves you as you are? That who you are is who He wants to give love to.
That's it. That's the gospel. That while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, Christ loved us while we were still sinners. We sin and He loves us. Sin is taken care of. It's not about sin, it's about accepting His love. It's about eternity with Him and His love. An eternity of that very same love from where we started to where we end at our last dying breath on earth.
From now on it will be the Holy Spirit changing what's in your heart, He does it, not us. Sometimes we just need to sit back and let Him search our hearts. We need to feel our pain, feel our sorrow, and all the while He will be the one feeling with us. We become weak, but He becomes strong as we see how much we really rely on Him to bring us our every need: Him.
Feeling the realness of eternity.
Jmegrey
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