How do you get to heaven? Part 4: A Letter to My Old Best Friend

What follows is a letter I actually wrote to my friend the other week, but I wanted to share it because I could write something like it to so many of my friends. (I explain about it being open in the letter cos I wanted to check they were OK with me posting it publicly, obviously with them anonymous. And they were indeed happy with it.)
Dear Friend,

We’ve been mates for a long time – it’s a while now since we were climbing over bus seats on long school trips. Well, to be fair it was mainly you climbing over the seats, I probably had my seat belt on. But still, even though we don’t see each other that much these days, I really do care about you.

And the day you told me that you thought you believed in God was one of the happiest days of all seven years of school; and it was good to see you today, but it was also gutting.

You said that you just don’t think about God much these days, and that you know you could never be someone who’s really committed to it. (‘It’, not Him.) You said you could never move it from your rationality into really believing it, really wanting to do something about it. So you’re happy to wait, and not bother about it – maybe something bad will happen, maybe you’ll just get old, or maybe God will speak to you in a dream or something – but until then you’re happy as you are. And I really love you and so that’s gutting for me to hear.

I wanted to make this an open letter because, as we said tonight, it’s not just you – tonnes of people I love are the same. People who don’t really believe in a God but they’ve never really thought about it for just the same reasons you’re putting it out of your mind. Or people who grew up going to church and have never really decided that it’s all rubbish but they’re just not that bothered with it anymore. In our particular demographic – young adult, uni-educated, rich, Western – feeling reasonably fulfilled by our lives and accordingly apathetic towards questions of ultimate meaning is pretty normal.

I wanted to write this because seeing that indifference in someone I care about is heartbreaking for me – and I know you already know that, and I feel like you half get why, but let me try and help you empathise properly. Let me try for a second to help you see what it looks like from my eyes.

I am convinced that God is actually real, and that he has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ, who lived and taught so we could know what God is like, then died a hellish death that he did not deserve so that we could be forgiven for the deep wrongness in all our hearts and our lives, and then genuinely came back from the dead – smashing a hole in death and giving us properly solid grounds for believing that everything he said was true. I’ve become convinced that this means that God is real objectively. Not just true for me, not just a nice idea that helps me make sense of things – actually Real with a capital R so big that the uni/multiverse fits inside it. This means that I believe the following things about you:

I think that you were created by God. Not in a distant, indirect and indifferent Great-Great-Great-Grandpa kind of way, but in an ‘I knew you before you were born’, breathing life into your snotty little baby nostrils kind of way. He created you like an artist creates a masterpiece. He cares about you like a mother cares about her child. You’re not ‘just another human’ to him, he knows your name, and he knows your face, and he knows every single gift he planted in you. It seems insane but I’m convinced it’s actually true.

I think that you – like me, like everyone else – have run away from home. You’ve rejected God. For you it is actually a more explicit conscious thing than for most people, but you’ve done the same thing we all do in and of ourselves. We look at God – the Infinite Creator, the Passionate Father, the All-worthy King – and we say, ‘I’ll make the decisions thanks.’ You’ve said, ‘I get that if you’re there then logically I owe you everything, and I really ought to follow you, but that’s a really profound commitment. I prefer being in charge of my own life. And I don’t really feel like I need you.’ You’ve said that to God. Since the Enlightenment we’ve been very good in the West at teaching ourselves to forget that we are creatures. But the fact is, we are not gods. We are creatures and He is the Creator and in reality any attempt to set ourselves up against him – any stance towards him other than devotion and worship – is madness. It’s suicidal.

I think that Jesus died because of you, and for your sake. Against all probability, against all good sense, in the middle of our silent rebellion, in the face of our quiet hatred, this Creator came as a man and let us beat him, and spit at him, and kill him, in order to make a way for us to come back to him. It’s insane but he has loved us to death, even before we’ve done anything other than reject and ignore him. And right now, somehow, you are able to look – through the smoked glass of uncertainty and a bit of apathy – at the Son of God himself, nailed to a piece of wood and bleeding to death, crying out ‘Father, forgive them’; and decide that you’re not particularly interested in it. Let me be clear, here, I actually believe that if there had been no other human on earth to die for, Jesus would have died purely to offer you redemption, he cares about you that much, and right now you are shrugging and walking away.

I think that you, as a human being, created and loved by God, have the capacity to share in Jesus’ resurrection. He actually came back from the dead and said you can come with him and I mean that in two ways:

First, I mean right now. I mean this world, this life. God is at work putting the world to rights. Redeeming, restoring, healing brokenness and fighting injustice and putting the pieces of this smashed up world back together into a mosaic that glimmers with eternal beauty. And he’s doing it through real life, unimpressive, flesh and blood people who have trusted Jesus and are being filled with the same Spirit that raised him from the dead. He said he has come to give us “life, and life to the full” and he calls us to be so much more truly human than we even realise is possible right now. He’s inviting you into that. He’s inviting you to make a difference that will genuinely last forever. He’s inviting you to live a life of love – of selfless, sacrificial, servant love – and discover in it a joy and a peace that the world can never give, and the world can never take away.

And then I mean that life overflowing into forever, when God completely recreates and restores heaven and earth and he is inviting you to be part of that perfect creation forever. And I know that’s hard to actually conceive of – because I find it hard myself. But if an arts student can learn anything from serious physics it’s that just because I can’t wrap my head around something doesn’t mean for a second that it’s not utterly real. I’m not going to try and describe it to you, but I can tell you that I’ve only been properly learning to love Jesus for 6ish years, but already my excitement and longing at the thought of seeing him face to face is growing pretty strong. There is nothing truly good about this world that it won’t be, and better than it all he will be with us, close enough to wipe the tears from our eyes.

But right now, instead of accepting that life, that smashed-through-death life, that once-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found life, you’re settling for less – for so much infinitely less.

There’s a bit in the Bible where – as so often – the people have forgotten God and decided they’d be better off without him, and God says,
“My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

CS Lewis put it like this:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

And so two things scare me right now.

One is that you’re on course to waste your life. You might do amazing things, you might not. But either way, you were created to love God and be part of the eternal work he’s doing restoring this world, and while as it is you might stumble into being part of it for a moment, without him you’ll miss the point entirely. The point for which he knit you together in your mum’s womb. You are brilliant. You are so blatantly bursting with abilities and gifts and you are unique and you are creative and you have the capacity for deep love. Please don’t waste your life.

The second thing that scares me is that right now, as far as I can see, you’re on the wrong side of Jesus’ warnings about eternity. I know it’s uncomfortable, but I’m trying to show you what this is like through my eyes, and this is a big part of why it’s so painful for me – I believe in hell. I don’t know exactly what it means, what it will be like, but Jesus again and again warned people, and talked about darkness and fire, and weeping and gnashing of teeth. As much as I wish I could find a way to explain it away, I’m convinced that whatever he means by that imagery he doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t worry yourself too much about it. I worry about it.

That’s what I believe about your life. Infinite potential. Insanely loved by God. Offered real life, to the full, now and forever. But right now, walking calmly towards eternal death.

And I know you said you’ve ‘tried’ this stuff before, but it’s impossible to ‘try’, really, because what Jesus asks is for you to ‘turn and trust’ like I explained before. And you can’t experiment with turning around completely and throwing yourself on Jesus. I remember someone telling me about going skydiving once – they make you sit on the edge with your feet dangling out, and you’re only allowed one buttock in the plane, and then they count down and say ‘jump’, and you just have to jump. You can’t half jump out of a plane. You can’t half follow Jesus. And you know that, I think.

But here’s the thing, that doesn’t mean you need to make a blind leap of faith. That means you need to put every effort in to actually work out for certain whether you trust the parachute. (Please forgive me for the fact that a parachute is a really rubbish metaphor for the all-consuming richness and brilliance of Jesus…) So this is me half daring and half begging you: think about it again, look at it again. Read Luke’s gospel and ask yourself, ‘What if this were true?’ Investigate the evidence, hear out the arguments on both sides. Get serious about this. Don’t you dare spend your life with one buttock in the plane. Use your brain, engage your heart, think through what it would look like in practice. I’m always keen to talk – so so keen – and I’m always up for pointing you in the direction of any resources you need on whatever topic. I would cut my arm off if it would help.

But it wouldn’t. Cos it’s up to you.

Love,

Mike

How do you get to heaven? Part 3: Piggybacks.

Grace means that… We all need a piggy back.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28

So in the last two blogs we’ve established that ultimate reality is about our personal relationship to God, rather than our ranking on the Hitler-Teresa scale, and that Jesus made it very clear that the way to put right our relationship with God isn’t ‘moral goodness’ as we know it. So what is it? What did Jesus say we needed to do to be in a mutual relationship of love with God that starts now and lasts forever? Who’s in that and who’s not?

Now I’m not going to get into here the whole question of people who don’t know anything about Jesus. That’s an important and complicated question but it’s one for another blog, because anyone who is reading this right now, has heard about Jesus. So we’ll leave that question for another day and think about what Jesus demands of us. And what he seems to demand, as we read the stories of his interactions with people, is a particular kind of response to him.

Jesus’ message, from start to finish, was this: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

The kingdom of God has come near because he has come near. The theologian Glen Scrivener puts it like this: “Jesus is like a walking, talking garden of Eden – a sphere of paradise on earth. With him wrongs are righted, darkness is dispelled and everything that’s twisted gets smoothed out again.” He walks around being the kingdom of God, bringing the kingdom of God, revealing that he is God come amongst us to put things right. And the response he’s looking for is to ‘repent’ and ‘believe’. Or as a friend of mine translates it: to ‘turn’ and to ‘trust’.

To ‘repent’ means to turn around. It means realising that I’ve turned my back on God and tried to ignore him, and that that has grieved him. It means recognising that that was wrong. It means deciding to turn around and follow him instead.

And to ‘believe the good news’ is to trust him, and what he’s done for me. It means saying, ‘Yes, I trust you when you say that you love me. I trust you when you say that I had messed up the relationship between us so badly that you had to die to put it right. I trust that when you died, you took all of the pain that I deserve on yourself. I trust that you came back from the dead, genuinely, so I know that if I’m willing to trust your death for me then I can share your impossible life as well.

And in a really important way, it’s as simple as that. Repent, and believe; turn and trust: that’s all he asks.

Of course though, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy or painless. Repenting hurts, because it takes a deeply uncomfortable level of humility. The people Jesus was always warning, were the ‘good’ people. The ones who didn’t think they needed anything more than advice from him, certainly not him dying on their behalf. It’s why he leaves the older brother outside in the story (from the last blog, in Luke 15) – he’s saying, ‘Look, you’re going to have to swallow your pride and come inside.’ You’re going to have to admit there’s something wrong before I can put it right.

I know a Christian who says, “All you need is nothing, but a lot of people don’t have it.”

If you run up to someone in the street saying, “Thank goodness I’ve found you!” but they don’t think they’re lost, they’ll just look at you like you’re a lunatic, and that’s exactly what ‘good’ people did to Jesus and still do today. They declared him a madman, or they just smiled and politely ignored him. He can’t find someone if they insist they’re alright where they are. He can’t save a drowning person who shakes off his hand and assures him they can swim just fine. This is the tragedy that followed Jesus all his life. It’s what made him weep when he looked over Jerusalem. And the same tragedy makes him weep today.

Turning and trusting Jesus means admitting that we need help – it means refusing to trust ourselves – which means wanting to follow him instead of following our own plans and preferences, which is a pretty big step.

So what does this actually look like? Luke gives us two dramatically different examples.

Early on in Luke’s biography Jesus comes across a guy called Levi – later called Matthew, the one who wrote Matthew’s gospel. Jesus says to him, “Follow me.” And he does. He leaves everything – profession, home, family – and goes with Jesus. Why? Because there’s nothing better. Because from what he’s seen of this guy, he wants to be close to him. Because he wants to be more like him. Because this guy seems to be living a life that is properly human – human like it was meant to be – and so close to God it’s like being in the Garden of Eden all over again and Levi wants in. He wants in so much he’d give anything for it. And Jesus comes and just says, “Follow me.” No entrance exam, no initiation. The only qualification he needs is that he wants it.

Towards the end of Luke’s book Jesus has allowed himself to be mocked, spat on, and nailed to a cross to die. People are calling out – laughing at him – “Save yourself!” “If you’re really the Son of God, you could get down from that cross whenever you want!” And he could. But he won’t because he’s saving them. He’s dying the hellish death that they and I and we deserve. He’s experiencing the agony of separation from the Father he never even rejected, so that we wouldn’t have to. And as he’s dying, there’s a criminal dying next to him. He’s lived a terrible life – he admits that he deserves the death sentence he’s received. But he does admit it. And as he struggles for breath, biting back the pain, he looks at Jesus and asks,
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
He’s saying, Help. You’re the King, I know that. I’m going to die and I’m not sure that’s going to be the worst of it. Please have mercy on me, I want to be with you in your kingdom.
He knows he’s helpless. There’s literally nothing he can do now but die. No chance left for good deeds, no chance left to earn his way, to pay off everything he’s done. All he has is ‘Please’. All he can do is throw himself at Jesus and trust that somehow this King can save him. And Jesus says:
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” He says yes.

For both men, it’s the same decision – one with half a life ahead of him, and one with just a few hours more of excruciating pain. The message of Jesus, the message of Christianity, is that ultimately the question is not how many points have you earnt. It’s not some crazy system whereby you could have been on track for an eternity with God but then in your last day you got angry with your mate and said something you shouldn’t have and you slipped beneath the pass mark. Or where you weren’t going to make it but in a rush of last minute fear you gave away all your money just in case it would help you get into heaven and it actually works.

The question Jesus asks of people is, Who are you counting on to get you God’s approval? Yourself? Are you relying on your own merits, achievements, character, record? Do you reckon that you’re probably a good enough person that if there’s a God he should be generally pleased with you? He’s supposed to be pretty forgiving anyway, right?

Or have you looked at Jesus and felt all your good deeds falling apart in your hands – because this is something else entirely. Have you let Jesus show you that you are lost and you don’t even know the way home? Have you thrown yourself at him and said, ‘Jesus, can I rely on you instead? Can I come with you?’

And the answer to that question, when it’s really asked, is always, Yes, child. Yes of course.

Piggy-backs.

Jesus was always picking up little children and telling people that the way to the kingdom of heaven was to be like one of them. Which confused people quite a lot, I think. But I love that idea because when I was a kid, I loved getting piggy-backs. I was asking for piggy-backs all the time. And in everything he did, everything he said, Jesus kept telling people, basically:

You want to come to God? You want to find your way into a relationship of love with him that will last forever? There is a way – absolutely there is. But you’ll need a piggy-back.

And he grins, and crouches down, with one knee on the ground – and he bends his back forward – and it reminds you of how he looked on that day as he staggered, bleeding and faint, under the weight of his own cross. And he looks up and asks:

Do you want to get on?