Lent #24: beyond fire insurance/ or "love wins"

Servants and Officers:  You too are one of His followers, aren't you?
Peter: No, I am not.
from John 18

We spend a lot of time on the conversation "who goes to heaven?".  I grew up with a fear that if I wasn't in the clear (with no unrepented sin on the record) and I was hit by a truck that heaven's gate would be closed to me. I remember for awhile when I was in early elementary school praying every night for Jesus to come into my heart--just in case I had missed it or somehow in the previous 24 hours wandered unintentionally from the fold.  Actually, my first remembered answered prayer request was me asking Jesus if it was necessary to ask God into my heart every night, and the following week the Sunday School teacher brought up the topic with the 2nd grade class and relieved my anxiety.

I now understand that God looks at the trajectory of my heart--am I moving toward Christ or away from Christ? Is the deepest part of my heart responding to the truth of God as I have been given grace to understand it?  Am I someone who is embracing being a person of God or a person of Self?  What a grace to know that it's not about am I "in or out of the Holy Club", but instead, "am I on the journey of holiness?".  Only God knows the deepest motivations of our hearts and how we have responded in our most inner most being to the truth of the Spirit that we have had the grace to comprehend.

I think that the deeper question to ask one another is "Are you a follower of Jesus?". This isn't a question about who's in or who's out of the heavenly gates.  This is a question of our very human-finite existence on Planet Earth.  In the moment of the crisis of faith:  am I following Jesus into the unknown and into the dark?

Can you "go to heaven" and not be a follower of Jesus?  Certainly, there must be many, many people who have only known and responded to the glimpse of the Creator in the cosmos around them who will spend infinite years memorizing the face of Christ. And many who have never opened a bible or heard of John 3:16, or understood who the person of Christ is who will one day be at the Great Banquet, learning what the Voice sounds like.

But for those of us who have the grace to know the God-with-us, the question is not about heaven and hell somewhere out there. It's the daily, monthly, yearly, life-ly following of Christ--in the beautiful and the despair, in the light and the dark, in the rough and the smooth.

Not because it gets us into heaven. Because we love him.
It doesn't get more at the heart of what it means to be an evangelical--we follow Jesus because he loves us and we love him, not because it's an insurance plan against hell.

The question is before us every day of our lives:
You are one of his followers, aren't you?

And sometimes its easy to yes and sometimes we are honest and say no--today this is too difficult. And in our betrayal and in our fidelity, Christ continues to say, I love you, son of Adam, daughter of Eve, child of God-I love you and die for you and long for you to know me intimately. I have a big house that we will share some day, and for now, let's share the house of your life for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. I am in it for life.

That's it. Relationship with Jesus.
Love wins. :)