Get into Heaven or get Heaven into us?
Now I must say something you can be mad at me about. A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the Western church, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to heaven. It aims to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people. This of course requires that these people, who are going to be “in,” must be right on what is basic. You can’t really quarrel with that. But it turns out that to be right on “what is basic” is to be right in terms of the particular church vessel or tradition in question, not in terms of Christlikeness. Now, the project thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with one another, much less those “outside.” Often their most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment. They have found ways of being “Christian” without being Christlike. As a result they actually fall far short of getting as many people as possible ready to die, because the lives of the “converted” testify against the reality of “the life that is life indeed” (ontos zoas, 1 Timothy 6:19, PAR). The way to get as many people into heaven as you can is to get heaven into as many people as you can—that is, to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation or full-throttle discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting up results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being. Charles Finney used to say that the Christian minister is frequently in the position of a lawyer who states to the court the case he intends to prove (that would be the biblical picture of life from above), and then calls his witnesses (professing Christians), who contradict in their testimony (their life) every point he said he would prove.
Simply stated, the local congregation that would adopt the “principles and absolutes” of the New Testament, with the natural outcome of being and producing children of light, has only to follow Jesus’ parting instructions: “As you go throughout the world, make apprentices to me from all kinds of people, immerse them in Trinitarian reality, and teach them to do everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20, PAR). These instructions are bookended by categorical statements about the plentiful resources for this undertaking: “I have been given say over everything in heaven and earth” and “Look, I’m with you every moment, until the work is done” (verses 18,20, PAR). These few words give the principles and absolutes of the New Testament church, and history declares the result. As long as we do what these words say, we can do anything else that is helpful to this end. And the rest doesn’t even have to be “right” for God to bless us—though no doubt it is always better it should be so, as long as we don’t put our confidence in that rightness. Anyone who thinks God only blesses what is “right” has had a very narrow experience and probably does not really understand what God has done for them.
Disciples of Jesus are those who are
with him learning to be like him. That is, they are learning to lead their
life, their actual existence, as he would lead their life if he were they. This
is what they are learning together in their local gatherings, and with those
gatherings a constant part of their life, they are learning how to walk with Jesus
and learn from him in every aspect of their individual lives.
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