A New Kind of Christian - Chapter Ten

This is about my own spiritual life. It’s about my own pursuit of truth. “Just remember, often the discomfort gets worse before it gets better.”
Neo and Dan had both been raised to believe that the central story of the Bible was about saving individual souls. It was about getting individual souls into heaven. Neo had begun having problems with this belief for several reasons:
1. First it smacked of selfishness. Would God want a heaven full of people who wanted to be “saved” but didn’t necessarily want to be good? We run the risk of attracting people who want salvation from hell without necessarily wanting salvation from sin.
2. Second the individualism of this approach sounded downright evil, like using insider trading information to gain an unfair advantage over others. Maybe we should think that we are chosen by God not for privilege but for service. “I love my neighbors, and if receiving God’s salvation will help me help them, then I want it!”
3. Third, there have to be two dimensions of salvation, not just one. For conservatives it’s all about the eternal dimension saving one’s soul from hell. For liberals it’s about the historical dimension – saving the human race and the planet from destruction. The biblical view of salvation is not either/or but both/and.
A key component of working this out is to distinguish the church from the kingdom. The church exists to be a catalyst of the kingdom. It exists for the benefit of the kingdom of God, something bigger than itself. The church exists for the world – to be God’s catalyst so that the world can receive and enter God’s kingdom more and more. The kingdom is where the historical and eternal come together.
There are two dominant stories alive in our culture today. Story one goes like this: Once upon a time, the universe banged into being no apparent reason and with no apparent purpose. Someday it will end and there will be no one left to remember it ever existed. In the meantime we live and die. And that’s about it.
Story two begins with a Creator who designs the universe to produce life. The Creator cares about everything he has made, including us. The Creator reaches out to us in many ways, constantly inviting us into a relationship of trust. When we die, we enter into the Creator’s presence so that in some sense this life that we now live is a prelude to a dimension of life that never dies.
We are becoming on this side of the door of death the kind of people we will be on the other side. The reality of death gives us an important gift every day: it reminds us that we can’t keep putting off the work of becoming. It tells us to prepare to meet God then by entering into a relationship with him now. What we will have become on this side of the door, that we will be on the other.
I don’t think we are ever in a position to judge others. I don’t think it’s our business to prognosticate the eternal destinies of anyone else.
According to C. S. Lewis heaven will be above all a place of joy: “Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for down here is not their natural place.” Joy is the serious business of heaven.