Our Goals ...

The goal we seek is to share the joy we have found with everyone we come in contact with, and especially those we love. The gospel message as we have discussed earlier is one of hope, joy, peace, love, and immediacy. We do not need to wait for heaven to experience His victories over sin in our lives. We are free to begin the process of perfection right here and right now. This changes us. Being born again from the inside out, being remade in His image once again is life altering. It is transformational. It remakes our characters. In short it is the purification process God has been longing to give to us. Only waiting for us to accept His gift, and humble our stubborn will to allow it. With the absence of “self” comes the beginning of His victories over our sins.

Because many in Christianity have yet to experience what it means to have His victories over the sins they still fight against, they seek withdrawal from the world. Those that call for us to come apart, to clear away from the lost, so that we do not unite with them in their evil purposes – do not understand the freedom of victory through Christ. Sin and evil are nothing but pain. They are not goals to be sought after, they are a curse we are finally freed from by Christ in us. Having been made free from the chains of sin, we do not seek to return to bondage with others in the world – rather we seek to see them freed as well. This is the burden of those who have tasted freedom, and something that those who have not simply do not understand.

If Bill Gates randomly decided he liked you, and thought that you deserved to receive one billion dollars tax free (he would take care of all of that), just to make your life better – what would you do with the money? Sure, most of us would pay our bills, get out of debt, buy the home, cars, college education for the kids we may have always wanted. But then what, one Billion is a lot to spend. The interest alone could easily be 50 million dollars a year with conservative investments. Would you keep every cent for yourself? Would you share it with no-one you are related to, no-one you love, no-one you know? Would you seek to move into a cave somewhere in the mountains away from the entire world so as to avoid the risk that someone may try to wrong you? The real benefit of a gift of this magnitude is in our ability to change our lives, and the lives of those we love for the better. Outside of that, the money would be a curse. The same is true of the Gospel.

We treat the gospel as if it were some horribly distasteful medicine taken only when on the verge of death. Instead of sharing how Christ has made your life so much better, we put up walls to keep “the needy” away from us, so as not to get us dirty with their uncleanliness. Sometimes, we fear the ridicule of family members, and so do not bring up the subject of the gospel, thus trying to keep our light hidden like in a cave somewhere. This embarrassment over being a Christian, this hesitation over bringing up the subject of Christ, is a sure indication that you have not felt His freedom or His victories yet for yourself. You still have nothing of value to offer. For when you do, it is very much like receiving MORE than one billion dollars; you simply HAVE to share what you have found. You just cannot contain the good news, once you realize just how good it is.

When you begin to see people through His eyes of love, you realize just how precious they are. You begin for the first time to rightly value the uniqueness and worth of the individual. You begin to see how Christ works so personally, so one-on-one with each of us to save each soul to Himself. And as such you begin to share His burden not to lose even one of them.

There is no soul, no person who is not worth saving. There is no-one that heaven’s streets would be better off without, including you. It is not because we deserve His rewards, or His gifts, but it is because He loves us just that much. When you begin to love like this, you simply cannot sit still, with mouth closed, and silently witness the pain your brother goes through. Not while you could speak out, and show them the way to freedom. Not when you could point them to Christ and in so doing, connect them with the source of freedom from sin and pain.

There will come a day, when by His grace, we finally see the home He has prepared for us from the foundations of the world; a day when we walk his golden streets and eat at His fine banquet tables. But perfection is much better shared. I wish to sit next to those who I knew here on earth, not find them missing for my silence. I wish to learn to love my enemies even better in that perfect place, not lament their absence over my foolish pride on earth, over my apathy on earth, over my inaction on earth. If my family is not within the perfect realm, my first question will be directed into the mirrors of heaven, could I have done something more? Was it me who might have made the difference in their lives, to encourage them unto salvation? Was it my silence or inaction, or apathy that has seen them miss the opportunity to find Christ and be saved.

When our Lord wished to use me in His service of redemption, When He wanted me to just share what I knew, will I be found too busy, too embarrassed, too hesitant, too reluctant, too afraid of human ridicule? And if so, will I not have all of eternity to realize my blunders? The text in which God has to wipe away the tears from our eyes, even in heaven, is aptly applied to this dilemma. I wish not to be counted as unwilling, uncaring, and inactive. I wish to be able to say I did everything I could, I left no stone unturned, I tried until I was dead to make a difference. God will still have to wipe away my tears, because despite my desires, I will have made substantial mistakes in His cause. But from now to then, how will I live? How will you? How much is enough in the cause of redemption of His people, and your family?

Those in darkness do not need compromise to be led away from it, they need the light. They need to see us live His victories, not share with them their pain by participating with them in their errors. We do not need to condemn them for their wrongs, nor try to identify all their sins to them. We need simply to live the victories He wishes to bring us in our own lives. By this we show them a light that is not tainted with compromise, but pure in His victory. We show them that we share their weakness, but are made whole through His strength. It is not by our own will that we are made free from sin, it is by the submission of our will to Christ. This is the light the world needs to see in living example. Words alone will have little effect. We are called to witness from firsthand experience.

Adam faced this choice in the garden and chose poorly. After Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, and before Adam did, he was faced with a choice. Trust God, even in the face of her certain death, or break trust and choose to embrace death with her. He chose poorly. We should not repeat his mistakes. We may have loved ones who do not wish to know Christ. If faced with a choice of uniting with our erring loved ones, or trusting God in the face of their apparent death, we must choose to trust our God. Had Adam done this, God could have enacted a plan of salvation for Eve alone, and perhaps the legacy of our world would have been different.

In our cases, though our love for our family may be strong, we must look to God to save them in spite of themselves, as sometimes He has done with us. We must trust that the strength of God’s love is greater than our family member’s ability to resist it. We must remain true to our submission of our will, our decisions, our desires, and our love to Christ that He may continue the work He has begun in us. This ALONE is the only hope our family members may have. Their last chance at seeing what a connection to Christ and His victories is all about may be through us. We must not abandon our course and doom them as well as ourselves to the fate of evil and pain. Rather we must remain faithful, and constant, and consistent in our pointing them to the source of the joy in our lives. Love is a hard thing to resist.

Christians, who have seen no personal victories, sometimes fall into the trap of searching out sin everywhere around them. They believe to call sin by its right name, and point out the errors of the world is the only way to avoid the dangers of evil. This is misguided thinking and focus. It puts our emphasis and our focus on sin, rather than on the cure for sin, in Jesus Christ. The point of the Bible is not to define sin; it is to define how love conquered sin on our behalf. The Bible is a love story, of how God reclaims his erring children. It is His victory story of how love conquers evil and that ONLY love could. It is the story that love and mercy are greater than justice. And it is why we are able to live in His victories, though we deserve them not. For our value is measured in how great He loves us, not what we have done to earn that love. Salvation is His gift to us. Let us remember to keep our focus on how we heal from the pain of evil and sin, not on the sin itself. Let us behold the cross, and the victory it represents. Let us keep our focus and our eyes upward and towards the work of redemption and encouragement to Christ. Let us remember to see the world through His loving eyes, and His tender mercy, and show the world what unconditional love really means – a way of escape from the pain of evil, not a prolonging or participation in it. The work of redemption and reclamation must remain our goal, until breath leaves our bodies, or we are translated into the skies of glory for an eternity with Him and those we may help along the way.