What is eternal life?

 

I have to admit that the idea for this article was inspired by Pastor Cory Martin's sermon on John 17:1-5 last week. He discussed the concept of eternal life and how we often perceive it in terms of infinite time. However, John 17:3 states, "And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." From this, we learn that eternal life is not simply about existing forever, but rather about being in an eternal relationship with the true God through the work of His Son, Jesus.

The truth we all intuitively know is that life is not merely about going through the motions each day, but about living with purpose, love, and in connection with others. When our lives are filled with suffering, loneliness, depression, and pain, we often contemplate ending our existence because we recognize that essential elements of life are missing. We experience the brokenness in our lives and understand that a part of us has succumbed to a little bit of death.

What Jesus expresses in His prayer to the Father is that true life is not found in simply finding temporary meaning and significance in worldly things or relationships. Instead, it is found in a relationship with the eternal God. When we truly know Him because we have been saved by Jesus, we discover the true meaning of life, experience boundless love, and have a relationship with someone who is always with us. This means that eternal life does not commence when we physically die in this world but rather when we die to ourselves and accept Jesus as our Savior. Paul articulates this in Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me."

Moreover, eternal life should not be understood as simply existing forever in a place that might eventually become dull or tiresome. Instead, eternal life means living eternally with God. This is the same creative God who fashioned the entire universe and who will forever be infinitely creative. The goodness we experience in this world and universe is an expression of His own goodness and will continue to exist in the next life. Life with Him will be infinitely good and infinitely captivating.

If you currently know God through the work of His Son and are deepening your relationship with Him, you should be growing more and more excited about spending eternity with God. During the same service that Cory spoke about, an 80-year-old man shared his testimony of how he came to know Jesus. Afterwards, we watched a video featuring a song about spending eternity with Jesus. It is my hope, at 52, that I will be even more excited about knowing Jesus at 80 or 90, so that I will be fully prepared to meet Him face to face. I hope you, too, are excited about eternity with Jesus.

Where stands it written?

 

"Var står det skrivet?" is the actual title of today's article, which, when translated from the original Swedish, means "Where is it written?" This was one of the common phrases from the Free Church movement in Europe and the United States. The meaning of the phrase is an encouragement to go back to scripture as the primary authority of our faith. Now, I could talk about a lot of different doctrinal controversies where this phrase might be used, but instead, I want to describe how I use the idea in interpersonal conflict resolution.

As a Christian, it is important to be willing to hear criticisms and accept correction. So when someone comes and tells you that you have hurt them or done something wrong, it is important to listen to them and be willing to examine yourself. God wants to examine our hearts (see Psalm 139:23-24), and He often uses other people to help us see where we have gone wrong (see Proverbs 27:6). On the other hand, just because someone is upset with you or perceives that you have wronged them does not mean you have actually sinned. It is important to examine yourself in light of what scripture says. Second Timothy 3:16-17 says, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." So we can and should use scripture to correct us and help us grow.

Therefore, both when examining ourselves and when considering correcting another person, we should look to scripture and ask, "Where is it written?" In other words, how have I specifically broken a command of God, either according to the letter of the law or the spirit of the law? Likewise, when we feel wronged by someone else or think they have sinned, we should try to be specific about how they sinned. We should think about what specifically happened and how that made us feel (it's a good idea to write it out), and then search the scriptures for how these actions, words, or attitudes violated specific principles and commandments that God has given us.

A good example of this can be found in an article by Rosaria Butterfield, where she identifies what she did wrong by going to scripture and referencing the specific commandment. She goes further and identifies the motives and why those were wrong. She also explains why she is making a public apology for a public sin.

Getting specific from scripture helps in a number of ways. First, when we have sinned, we cannot know what to apologize for or what to correct unless we know specifically what we have done. Therefore, identifying the specific wrong helps to correct it so it will not happen again. Second, it takes the burden away from the interpersonal conflict and helps us see that sin is first and foremost against our Creator and Judge. It is easy to get defensive when you believe that the offense is primarily against another imperfect human. You can look at their faults and fail to take your own wrongs seriously. But when you know that you have sinned against the perfect and holy God, you know you cannot use the excuse of being no worse than the other person (See Psalm 51:4 for David's example of repentance to God).

Third, sometimes we discover that, in fact, there is no sin for which we need to repent. People might feel bad or take offense for any number of reasons, and sometimes their emotions are directed at the wrong cause. Emotions tell us something about what is going on in us but are not very accurate indicators of the truth. Therefore, we need to examine them to discover what is causing them and whether our thoughts and feelings conform to the truth of scripture and the reality of the world around us.

If we ask, "Where stands it written?" before and during a conflict, we will more likely get to the truth of what is happening. Then rather than escalating it, we can either defuse it by discovering that no sin had taken place or resolve it by repentance and forgiveness for the specific wrongs done.

Rejoice Always?

 

 

 

I was recently working on memorizing Philippians 4:4, which says, "Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice." This passage does not recommend being joyful; rather, it commands us to be joyful and gives us the object of our joy, namely the Lord. This reminded me of a teaching from Pastor John Piper, where he encourages his listeners to fight for joy. The ideas that we are commanded to be joyful and that we should fight for joy seem counterintuitive because joy appears to be an attitude or emotion that we cannot simply generate spontaneously when we want it. Yet if God does command it (see 1 Thessalonians 5:16 as well), then God also gives us the ability to fulfill His commands.

So, how can we rejoice always? First, we have to understand our own limitedness and the brokenness in the world, which means being happy or having the emotion of happiness all the time is not realistic, at least at the beginning of our joy journey. I have conducted several funerals in the last year, and while there is often smiling and laughter as we consider the good times, there is certainly a time to cry and not be happy when sad things happen. Likewise, there are times when we are simply tired and worn out from long days of life, and even if we are not exactly sad in those moments, we are not exactly happy either. On the other hand, the words for joy in the Bible are about having the emotion of joy, so how can we be joyful always? The answer must lie in finding a deeper sense of joy in life that flows beneath all the day-to-day events and shapes how we view the events of life. Therefore, the command is not simply to be joyful on its own, but rather to be joyful in the Lord and establish our foundation of joy on Him.

To maintain this constant state of joyfulness, we need to nurture our relationship with the Lord. We need to incorporate practices into our lives where we spend time seeing the glory and beauty of the Lord, allowing Him to remind us of who He is, who we are, and what our eternal purpose in life is. A famous Christian teacher from the 19th century, George Müller, learned the lesson of daily finding his joy in the Lord. He said, "I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord... Now, I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it, so that my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed, and that through the Word of God, while meditating on it, my heart might be brought into experiential communion with the Lord."

Even if we have a morning practice of finding our joy in the Lord, we will often lose our joy throughout the day when we encounter difficult situations, difficult people, boring times, pain, and temptations to find joy in other things. So, another practice of joy that God is working on in my life right now is that when I become aware of a non-joyful attitude, I need to stop and fight for my joy in the Lord. I need to reflect on the truths that I know. I need to pray and ask God for help. I need to preach to myself and believe what He has said. In each situation, by stopping and reminding myself of the truths I have learned from Him, I can release the cares and concerns and be reminded of the big picture where God is in control, and I am in His hands. I can then rest in peace and have joy in the Lord.

Rejoicing always does not come naturally. In fact, God calls us to have a supernatural attitude that we can only have when we find our joy in Him.

PS. Here is an article by John Piper about how to fight for joy, where some of these ideas came from.

The Reason for Worship

The other day, I was listening to Coleman Hughes' podcast, "Conversations with Coleman," and he was interviewing, Samaneri Jayasāra, a Buddhist Nun. I have done a little study on Buddhism in the past, and I was curious to learn what more. Coleman is an atheist, but he often has interesting guest who deepen my understanding of the world. Furthermore, because he is not a Christian, he helps me to understand a different point of view. I like to see how he views life and how he handles day to day situations.

He had this particular guest on because meditation is one of the ways that he has attempted to deal with the stresses of life. Samaneri apparently teaches some of the practices of Buddhism on her youtube channel, including how to meditate. She has lots of people who watch her channel because like Coleman they have stresses or have not found peace in this world, and she appears to have found a path to contentment through her Buddhist practices.

I was curious to know if she came to some of the same conclusions that I had read and heard from other Buddhists, namely that the key to peace is to get rid of desire. Whenever you fight internal strife, you just identify what you are desiring and then deny the reality of your need for that thing. When you stop desiring things, you stop having discontentment, and you can feel peaceful. In fact Samaneri did promote such a view of the world, and in fact promoted a view that in fact nothing in the world is real. Once you realize that then your meditation becomes a practice of reminding yourself of the unreality of the things you desire.

Now I can see several real problems with this perspective. First, it calls people to deny their own experience. Yes, we often desire things that we cannot attain such as money, health, or fantasy relationships, but that does not mean all of reality is an illusion. The physical world is real. Your body is real. Relationships are real. In fact, we even seem to have an internal sense of the goodness and then the brokenness of things in the world. When we see a baby, a flower, a mountain, the stars, or a thunderhead, we see incredible beauty and have a desire to extol their beauty. The same goes for good tasting food, beautiful music, and love between a man and woman. Likewise, when we see good things used wrongly or abused, we are angered because we know that something has gone wrong with the goodness. Our internal nature seems to confirm both Genesis 1 where God calls His creation good, and Genesis 3, where the whole of creation was affected by sin. Buddhism seems to recognize the suffering caused by the brokenness in the world, and proposes the solution to deny the reality of both the bad and the good.

This leads to my second problem with Buddhism, namely that is it primarily a solution to a negative problem, namely suffering, but gives us no way to go toward or extol the good. Since there is no ultimate reality, Samaneri's form of Buddhism is like many forms, ultimately atheistic, in that they do not propose a higher being or reality to explain the good things of the world. Coleman is someone who also does not believe in a personal god, although I believe he comes at it more from a scientistic or naturalism mindset, so he also does not have anything higher that gives us a reason to believe that the beauty and goodness are real things beyond our personal experience of them. In other words, something beautiful or good is just relative to the experience of individual people, and does not conform to some higher or supernatural definition of good.

Now interestingly this actually agrees with a main point from the book of Ecclesiastes, namely that everything under the sun is meaningless or vanity. Buddhist, like atheist,like all of us have to deal with how to live at peace in our world, but they have limited their view of the world to "under the sun" or just to the natural world. Christians on the other hand, have resources to look for outside just the physical world, which is where the author of Ecclesiastes finally leads his readers too. We internally feel the need to worship or extol the goodness of good things, but when we try to find their ultimate reason inside the universe, we cannot find it. Therefore, it seems that we desire something that can only be explained by something outside the universe. C.S. Lewis said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

The solution then for the desires is to look beyond this world. The good things in this world have their origin and meaning outside this world in the very nature of God. Christians then do not need to deny reality and their own innate knowledge of goodness, rather we need to acknowledge its source. When we do we see that the goodness of creation leads of beyond creation. When we see that baby or mountain, or hear the beauty of a melody and harmony, or experience the look of love in your spouses eyes, we know that they are expressions of God's goodness. Our hearts turn to worship, not the creation, but the creator. And since His goodness and beauty are infinite, we will never in all of eternity grow weary of His goodness, like we often do of earthly pleasures. He grounds our desires in something, no someone, real, and the way to true peace and contentment is not to deny our desires, but to turn them toward God in worship.

I am find myself worshiping more and more as see the frailness of our world, and as I see my own need for fulfillment can only be met in Him. I not only worship by turning on music, but when I am biking and feel the muscles of my body being used or see the sunset, or when I look in the eyes of my wife and give her a kiss, or when I listen to my daughter ask a great question, or I hear my son's excitement about his first day of work. In any number of ways throughout my day, God reminds me of His goodness, and my heart turns to Him in thanks and adoration. I cannot image that the emptiness of Buddhist meditation can possibly bring the type of rich fulfillment that worship of the one true God and His son, Jesus Christ brings.