The Pursuit of Comfort

 

Living in America is easy. Christians face no real persecution. Anyone is allowed to worship freely. We can buy anything we want and have it shipped to our door, usually within one or two days. Food is abundant in grocery stores and restaurants. Medicine and medical treatments are readily available.

In fact, it is easy to label oneself a Christian while living a comfortable life being nice. It is when one takes on a lifestyle of self-sacrifice and the pursuit of holiness that life becomes difficult. We are constantly bombarded by the worldview of modern evangelicalism where fitting into society is easy and as long as you are a nice person, there are no problems.

When Scripture tells us that Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light, this is not a description of modern-day America. It is telling us that what Jesus requires of us is not a grueling burden that will crush us under its requirements. The gospel is simple, we are to love God and love neighbor. As we strive after holiness, we will be fighting against sin.

When we are fighting against sin, we will find ourselves at odds with the majority. We will not fit in, we will not be supported by the world around us, and we will be seen as odd at best and possibly as an enemy of culture.

Personal Responsibility

 

If you live a life of inactivity and fast food and then die from a heart attack at 35, there is no one to blame but yourself. If you are given a Ferrari and then use it as a farm vehicle to pull a plow, are you going to complain to the manufacturer that it does work? If you buy a box of lightbulbs and try to use them to pound in nails, will you sue the manufacturer for selling an inferior product?

These are all metaphors for our life. God created us to love him, to love one another and to wisely tend to the world around us. If we instead opt for a life contrary to these, who is to blame when life goes wrong? Sin is nothing more than life choices that are contrary to our well-being. We need to stop thinking of sin as a list of naughty things, instead sin needs to be seen as those things that are physically, psychologically and spiritually bad for us.

Tending the Land

 

Again, a false dichotomy has made itself apparent. We are not limited to the two choices of “capitalistic, suck everything you can out of nature and the environment” versus “live at harmony with the world around you and leave no footprint that mankind has even been here”.

We have been commanded to function in the middle ground between these two extremes. When God created man and placed him in the Garden, he gave us the command to take dominion over the earth. We immediately faltered and became enslaved to sin, which led to many wrong choices and negatives impacts on our world. But since the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, we have been brought back to a place where we can begin to fulfill that command. This means that we are in charge of this world but at the same time, we need to take care of it and not irreparably destroy it.

Just because we can do something does not mean that we should do something. We shouldn’t create products that will ruin the land, water, or air. We need to be intelligent and wise enough to learn to say no to some things.

The State of Eternity

 

There is a great amount of debate in the world of Christendom regarding the afterlife. Some people believe in “once saved, always saved”, some people believe in earning one’s salvation and some believe that being nice gets one into heaven, while being evil sends one to hell for eternal torture.

But all this completely misses the point of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. Jesus Christ defeated the power of death and restored the relationship between God and men. No one is guaranteed bliss, and no one is guaranteed torment. What we ALL are guaranteed is eternal life. No one matter who you are or what you have done, you will live forever. When all men stand before the judgment seat of Christ at the end of history, we are not being judged for what we’ve done wrong, we are being judged for what we have done right (Revelation 20:11-12).

It is the responsibility of every person to love God and to love their neighbor. This is the criteria for our judgment. We will live forever, temporarily after death in a disembodied state, but after the final judgment we will live in a perfected body that will last forever. That state that we live in will be determined by the shape into which we formed our souls. Was our life built on love or selfishness? The more we strove after being like Christ, the more glorious our bliss will be in the presence of God. Those who only sought after pleasing themselves and being comfortable will not find the holy presence of God a pleasant experience.

Time and Money

 

Everything is on a scale. How we spend our money will be determined by what is most important on that scale. How we spend out time will be determined by what is most important on that scale. This is not to say that some things are not important but simply that, because we have limited time and limited money, some things are not purchased, or time is not spent.

The difficult part is when your scale is radically different than others. There seems to be a demand to explain oneself and how one spends time or money. While on one hand, we don’t owe anyone an explanation for our use of time and money, at the same time, responsibilities have demands and this forces us to spend our time and money in ways that we would probably not prefer.

From a Christian understanding of reality, our use of time and money needs to be a balance of addressing actual needs and helping others. If our life is focused simply on satisfying our whims and seeking to be comfortable, we are living with misaligned priorities.

The Meaning of Death

 

Reading the narrative of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden ought to raise the question, “What did God mean when he told man that in the day that he ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would die”? Clearly, God was not speaking of physical death, for Adam went on to live more than nine hundred years.

The relationship between the death that came as a result of Adam’s sin and physical death are connected but are not a one-to-one relationship. When we look at the description of death all throughout the New Testament, it is a state of separation from God, which, coincidentally is what happened when Adam sinned. The moment that Adam and Eve sinned, they were cast out of the Garden of Eden, which represents the immediate presence of God.

Describing Eternity

     You have certain criteria that you use to decide with whom you spend your time. For those who decide that religious activity is not deemed worthy of one’s time, what happens when your eternity becomes a state in which the holiness of God is unavoidable? How would you describe that?