Lostness - the ultimate horror (next: allowing Jesus alone to find us)

THE SOUL’S LOSTNESS - A ruined soul is a lost soul. What is a lost soul? Someone God is mad at? Theologically, the outcome of lostness is hell—a most uncomfortable notion. Certainly, if you are lost you are not likely to arrive where you want to be. 

But the condition of lostness is not the same as the outcome to which it leads. We’re not lost because we are going to wind up in the wrong place. We are going to wind up in the wrong place because we are lost. To be lost means to be out of place, to be omitted. 

Gehenna, the term often used in the New Testament for the place of the lost, may be thought of as the cosmic dump for the irretrievably useless. Think of what it would mean to find you have become irretrievably useless. When your car keys are lost, they are useless to you. 

When we are lost to God, we are not where we are supposed to be in his world and hence are not caught up into his life. We are our own god, and our god doesn’t amount to much. To be lost means to be self-obsessed, to mistake one’s own person for God. 

Such a person really does think he is in charge of his life—though to manage it, he may have to bow outwardly to this or that person or power. But he is in charge (he believes), and he has no confidence in the one who really is God. This self-idolatry sees the universe with different eyes. Each is a god unto himself. Thus no one chooses to go to hell or to be the kind of person who belongs there, but his orientation toward himself leads him to become the kind of person for whom away-from-God is the only place for which he is suited. He would choose that place for himself rather than humble himself before God and accept who God is. 

We should seriously inquire if to live in a world permeated with God and the knowledge of God is something we truly desire. If not, we can be assured that God will excuse us from his presence. In this case, we have become people so locked into our own self-worship and denial of God that we cannot want God. We cannot want God to be God. Wanting God to be God is very different from wanting God to help us. The ruined soul is not one who is mistaken about theological points and flunks a theological examination at the end of life. One does not miss heaven by a hair but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.

Johnson, Jan; Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice: Experiments in Spiritual Transformation (Redefining Life) (pp. 40-41). The Navigators. Kindle Edition. 

 

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