I know two men who have had near death experiences. One of them was my father. Their descriptions of their experience have left me confused. This week’s post is my attempt to explore that confusion.

So, I begin with a question:

Am I afraid…….of death?

Are you afraid…….of death?

To begin with, we need to look at two groups of people.

If you are an atheist or a secular humanist, then death is the end. This is a very bad thing……..the worst event in your life. It is perfectly reasonable for you to fear death. I’d worry about you if you didn’t.

If you are a Christian…….and I am…….things are much more complicated. So, going back to the question of the week.

Yes…….I am afraid of death.

My faith teaches that when I die, I will go to paradise and spend eternity surrounded by the love of my creator, my father, God. My faith teaches that when I die, I will go to a place where the things in my life that are wrong, broken, will be made right. My faith teaches that when I die……….I will be reunited with family and friends who died before me. In a word…….my faith teaches that when I die……things are going to get better……..a whole lot better.

Going back to my father and my friend and their experiences with near death. Both of them describe an experience that was wonderful. Both said, in so many words, that they liked being dead and wanted to stay that way. My father said that he almost punched the guy who revived him. Their experience aligns very well with the teaching of Christianity. Their experience says that things on the other side of the curtain are much better than they are in this broken world.

And that is what confuses me.

My Christian faith tells me that death is going to be a huge improvement for me……..a quantum leap forward in the development of my soul……..and yet I’m afraid of death. I do everything that I can to avoid death……..to put it off. Everything that I feel and say and do in relation to death is contrary to my faith.

Why?

I get that there may be some pain or illness leading up to my death. So it is sensible to fear dying…….but not death itself.

The only conclusion that I can reach is that I am afraid of the unknowns surrounding my death. I am afraid of what lies on the other side of the curtain.

And that is an indictment of my faith.

My fear of death is a direct measure of the weakness of my faith in my Father’s promise.

My fear of death is a direct measure of my lack of faith………..in my Father’s love for me.

Mea Culpa.

“For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”

Paul, ESV

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

Jesus, ESV

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever.

David, ESV

Are you a good person?

People are generally modest. You can’t ask them that question face to face without being rude. But, if you conducted an anonymous poll, I suspect that the vast majority……..almost all…….would say “yes, I’m a good person. It is the rare human who goes through life dogged by the sure knowledge that they are a fundamentally bad person.

So, if you ask me that question……….I would answer, “Yes, I’m a good person”. You would too. So far so good.

The trouble is this:

Adolph Hitler would have given exactly the same answer.

And here is the scary part…….Hitler would not have been lying. I am sure that he sincerely believed that he was a good German serving his people. His belief in his goodness was just as sincere as mine…….and yours.

Hitler’s belief that he was a good person was just as valid as mine is………and just as valid as yours is.

This speaks to the power of the rationalizations and justifications that we use…..all day every day. We all do bad things……all day every day. How can we say that we are good? It’s simple…….we have a justification for the bad thing…….in fact, we have a separate justification for each and every bad thing that we do.

Not me…….you say.

Well, do you keep track of your internet purchases, report them to your state revenue department, then calculate and pay the use tax on each of them?…..not likely. Do you donate to the charities fighting starvation in Africa……all of them. Do you give to the guy with the sign on the exit ramp?

That we fail to do good every day is a fact. That we fail to show love to our fellow man every day is a fact. But, that is not the point of this post. The point of this post centers around the absolutely reasonable justifications that we use hundreds of times each day…….. every time we fail to do good.

The point is that I cannot trust my opinion of how good of a person I am……….and neither can you. We are both far too skilled at justifying our failures to be able to honestly assess our goodness.

Every few days I hear something like this…..”I’m not religious, I don’t go to church, though I do believe in heaven. I’m going there……..because I’m a good person.”

Herr Hitler could easily have believed the same thing.

What to do?

Since we cannot rely on self assessment, it is clear that we need a stable, objective, universal, tool to measure our goodness against.

The Bible is such a tool. But there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that we don’t measure up. We continually fall short of God’s expectations. The good news is that there is a workaround……..Jesus. Accept him and the fact that you aren’t good enough…….that you never have been good enough…….becomes irrelevant.

With Jesus………the fact that you are not a good enough person no longer matters.

So……..you have two options:

Ignore God and trust in your own goodness……….trust in the quality and the validity of your justifications.

Or

Recognize your failures and accept Jesus’s “get out of hell free card”.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Jesus, ESV

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Paul, ESV

I am truly blessed. I live on a wooded lot out in the country. There are all kinds of trees in my woods……oak, hickory, sassafras, walnut and many more. Some are spectacular. Some are just plain Jane. The plainest of the lot…….is the maple tree. It just sits there filling up space……..for 51 weeks a year. But, for one week a year, every fall, it turns a brilliant red , yellow, or orange. For that one week a year……..the maple is the king of the woods. That one week is God’s gift to the maple tree…….and the maple tree’s gift to me.

So what does this have to do with spiritual gifts?

You may see yourself as an ordinary Christian……nothing special……..just another maple tree. But, the Bible is very clear, you too have a spiritual gift. You may not have identified it. It may not have manifested itself yet. But, make no mistake, it is there. Some gifts are obvious and those who have them are widely celebrated. Think of Billy Graham and his gift for evangelism. Other gifts are much less obvious: wisdom, encouragement, support for others, the ability to tithe…. and the greatest gift of all……..love. Some gifts are active…….some are latent. Your gift could be pre-directed at one specific person…….perhaps someone you have not yet met……or may never meet. Some day you may interact with that someone and change their life….. for the better. You may never even know you did it. My wife Cindy has an amazing gift……..she cares…….deeply……..about just about everybody.

So, you have been given a gift……. by God no less. I have to believe that he took that gift seriously. So you too should take it seriously. God is not wasteful. I have to believe that he intends for you to use his gift…….your gift. If you can identify your gift and cultivate it…….like Billy Graham…..fabulous. If your gift is latent or directed at someone specific, it will be harder. Know this…..when it is time to use your gift……it will be comfortable, it will be natural, it will feel good, and you will be good at it. It will jive with rules one and two……love God….love man. And finally, when you walk away from the encounter……..you will glow………because you will have done exactly what you were created to do.

The best example of exercising a latent spiritual gift that I know occurred in a prison. A prisoner shared Jesus with another prisoner. The first prisoner was beaten to death a few hours later. His words stuck and the second prisoner became a Christian. He wrote several books, one of which helped to destroy the Soviet Union. His name……Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

So, whether your gift is obvious or latent, know that it is there. Be ready to use it. And the best way to be ready is to study the Bible and pray.

I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.

Jesus, ESV

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

Paul, ESV

My Bible reading today is Jeremiah. It is basically a list of Israel and Judea’s failures followed by a warning of upcoming disaster. The impending disaster is caused by the failure of the Jewish people to manage their country.

Sounds familiar.

The highest heavens belong to the Lord,
   but the earth he has given to the human. race.

Psalm 115, ESV

Heaven and earth are different……..seems pretty obvious. The Bible spends a lot of ink describing heaven. No doubt, much of this description in symbolic. But, the thrust of it is that heaven will be a place where the things that are wrong here on earth will be made right. Not only the things external to me…….but also the things internal to me………all of them will be made right. Sounds great.

But, why do I have to wait? If God is as strong as all of that, why doesn’t he clear up the mess here on earth…….right now. It is clearly within his power. And yet, he seems to just sit there and watch the mess unfold. I often hear people say words to the effect, “I don’t understand why God allows………(fill in the blank).”

In the movie “Forrest Gump”, lieutenant Dan is angry at God. He makes a list of complaints and says ,”God is listening????” Lieutenant Dan is asking “why doesn’t God straighten out this mess?”

Decades ago I read a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer……”Gimple, the Fool”. It is the story of a simple man, not unlike Forrest Gump. He runs his life by a simple code of honor and collides every day with a thoroughly broken world. I strongly recommend it. This story changed my life.

The conflict between a perfect paradise and this imperfect world has always been difficult to understand.

Why is there such a chasm between this world and the next?

It comes down to ownership.

God created, owns, and actively manages paradise.

God created earth and everything on it. But the similarity ends there. God gave earth to man. He signed over the deed. God doesn’t actively manage earth. We own it and managing it is our job. In many ways, on our earth, God acts like a guest. We invite him over for dinner. We ask him to drop in from time to time to help us with a problem. Then we say goodbye and send him back to his home. We control how much we allow God, our guest, to participate in our world. And the footprint in our world that we allow to God is clearly shrinking. God will drop in……..if we invite him over. He will help us with a problem…….if we only ask. God loves us………but like a good guest, he will not force himself on us. If we do a bad job of managing this world……our world……..and tell God to mind his own business……….tell him that we have things under control………that his input is neither wanted nor needed……..he will honor that request.

We poison our world with carbon dioxide, plastics, and every imaginable toxin. We kill 3000 of our children every day. We tell God that he is not welcome in our schools and most other public venues. We teach our children that their physical and emotional sex……is whatever they want it to be. Then we stand there and watch the wheels fall off. And we tell ourselves that if God was real……he would fix things.

Here is the simple truth.

If we leave a pile of dirty dishes in the sink and go to bed………God doesn’t let himself in uninvited at 3am, wash the dishes, and leave.

After all, we own the world……..we created the problem.

We own the problem.

Open mindedness

This is a good thing…….isn’t it?

The current term for open mindedness……..is tolerance. Tolerance is putting open mindedness into practice. And it turns out, that in practice, open mindedness and tolerance are almost synonymous.

We want to be open minded…….people tell us that we need to be open minded…….but why?

So…..today’s question……is open mindedness good or bad?

I propose that open mindedness/tolerance is nether good nor bad. As with many other things…….it depends.

It depends on whether the idea that you are considering……is true or not.

It depends on whether the act that you are tolerating is good or evil.

And that is where we get into trouble.

Our current society does not seems to value truth very much. And that becomes a problem for open mindedness. Without truth, open mindedness and its cousin, tolerance, become logically untethered.

Mitigating climate change is an idea that may save the planet. It can also be a fools errand. It all depends on whether the greenhouse gas theory is true.

Abortion is either a tool for self determination among women……or murder. It all depends on whether the humanity…….the soul……..of the child is true.

God…..the trinity…….is either the creator and head of the universe…..or a giant hoax. It all depends on whether the Bible is true.

And this is where our culture gets into trouble.

The trouble is that our modern culture has largely replaced the truth…….with our appetites. We tend to believe things that allow us to pursue our appetites……our desires. Whether they are true or not is secondary…….if we ever consider the truth at all.

So…..in the absence of truth………how do we sort these things out?

We support/opppse abortion because we want sexual freedom/want to save children.

We support/oppose the green new deal because it will save the planet/wreck our economy.

We accept/reject God because we want paradise/we want to be in charge.

The simple answer is that…..without truth…..we cannot navigate this morass.

The only way out of this logical thicket is the truth.

The answer is to stop pursuing our appetites and to search out the truth. The answer is to subordinate our appetites to the truth.

Here are some guidelines.

If your plan for living consistently steers you toward satisfying your appetites……..you are probably kidding yourself.

Listen to your heart………you may have beaten it down over the years…….but the truth is still in there.

Be skeptical when you pursue something because you really want it. The truth is often that tiny voice that says “don’t”.

Love and relationship are true. If your appetites damage love or a relationship……stop.

Finally, ask your heart………is 70 years of life…..preceeded and followed by a black void…..all that there is…….or is there something more…….is there a part of you that lives on after your death.

The solution to the open mindedness/tolerance conundrum is this:

Ignore your appetites and search dispassionately for truth. Be prepared to listen to the little voice that says “no”.

The Bible is the most widely accepted moral code on the planet………it is a good place to start………far better than your appetites. And God will toss paradise in……..as a bonus.

I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.
“But my people did not listen to my voice;
Israel would not submit to me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,
to follow their own counsels.

God, ESV

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Paul, ESV