I have been struggling recently with combining these two ideas.
The first says that God is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in him, or Jonathon Edwards puts it the chief end of man is to glorify God BY rejoicing in him (I may be writing something on my struggles through this later)
The bible would put it,
“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. . . . Your steadfast love is better than life” (Ps. 63:1, 3).
“Rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4)
C.S. Lewis would put it,
Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility. . . . But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them “bad pleasures” I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean “pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the stealing of the apples that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. . . . I have tried since . . . to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I meant something different . . . Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun. . . . If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour.
I think that I have been convinced of this, mainly through reading Dr. Piper.
Here is my problem though, I was listening to a sermon a while back called “the revival sermon” that I tried to advocate, but evidently was too weird for most people. The main sermon in it was given by a Pastor/missionary named Paris Reidhead in the mid 1900’s. He said a quote in it that was something like, “even if I go to hell, I will follow God because he is worthy.”
When I heard that I was like amen, because if we would not follow God if we went to hell then it would seem that we were worshipping the idea of heaven and hell more than the idea of God (of course this is only a hypothetical question as heaven would come along with the belief of God). This idea seems to go hand and hand with the idea of finding joy in God, on earth, and that was what I think was preached to me as a child, that finding joy on earth was plausible not just hoping for heaven. As I became Christian I found that this was true, at least most of the time I found joy in God on earth, and found that I was more joyful than people who did not have God in their lives. Then I stumbled across these verses which is the second idea which I will attempt to integrate with the above thoughts.
The second idea says that if heaven does not exist than our joy is in vain, “if only in this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men (1 Corinthians
“ Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb.
Or as C.S. Lewis put it, “It was when I was happiest that I longed most. . . . The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
My problem has been integrating the joy and satisfaction of God right now, with the idea that without an after-life we are to be pitied the most. These questions arose in my mind: if we have so much joy and satisfaction in God on earth (God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him), why would we be most pitied if it was only in this life? Is our faith a result of the idea of heaven or a result of God’s love for us? Is there a way that our hope in heaven and our joy in God right now can coexist?
The way that Piper explained this was that our joy on earth is in the hope of a heaven. When I began to think about this more and more I found that this idea did not match my idea of how God would win us. Assume that somehow it was proven that God exists to all people, and heaven and hell were real. Any rational person would ask Jesus for forgiveness because they wouldn’t want to go to hell. Since I believe in God it seems that rationally I should choose to live a life for God. My problem is not that Christianity could be rational because the bible says, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). The problem for me is in the focal point behind this rationality. I am choosing God here rationally because I get to go to heaven, not because of God. Because choosing heaven is a rational choice (since it is better than hell) Christianity seemed conditional to me, and I never saw Christianity as conditional before. You can picture yourself as a parent and you are trying to teach a kid to love you and you say, if you don’t follow me then I’m going to send you to your room. This is conditional… the kid will love the parents because he doesn’t want to be sent to a bad place.
After meditating through the conditionality of Christianity though, I began to realize that the idea of heaven and hell is not only biblical, it is love. As a child I hated street preachers with bull-horns that would yell, “you are going to hell!” Naturally, after I became a Christian I still hated these people, so it confused me a lot when Dr. Piper (my favorite teacher now) shadowed himself after Jonathon Edwards, whose most famous sermon was called, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” Although it is still uncomfortable to me, preaching hell and heaven precisely shows us how much God loves us, and precisely shows us how unconditional Christianity is. If you know you are guilty, and you know you deserve hell, grace becomes that much sweeter. No matter what religion you are a part of, humans seek to absolve themselves from their guilt. You’ve all heard the scene before, you are in a court room and you just murdered someone, and the judge comes in and says you are free to go I will go to jail for you. That is what Jesus did for us, and so the lack of conditionality is what we call unconditional love. Piper made me realize that biggest problem there ever was, and the problem that needs to be preached is not “how can God convince ME to believe in him?” it is “how can God justify such a horrible sinner and still be considered just?”
Finally I think we need to fix our view of heaven. Heaven is like the word Christian in that its meaning has been changed so much from its original meaning. A Christian was simply a Christ follower and would bring images of martyrs, love, grace, the cross, etc. Christians now have a shameful history, and I guess we’ll leave it at that. Heaven, just like the word Christian has been changed. Heaven is a place where God is present in every corner and everyone is worshiping God at all times. There is no way we can desire heaven without desiring God. Our desire for heaven should be our desire to finally know God! “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”(1st Corinthians 13:12) As children, we are told that everything that is not God is bad because all we need is Jesus. Since many of us have disassociated heaven from God we think that “getting into heaven” is a bad motivation when in reality our hope is spending eternity with Jesus. Instead of thinking about spending eternity with Jesus we’ve replaced it with just a word. It is obvious that many Christians become Christians because of heaven, and many people still bow down to heaven (the word) and not God, but this is because we have skewed the definition of heaven to our own liking. I conclude that Paris Reidhead’s quote (“I will worship God even if I go to hell because he is worthy”), as hip and good as it sounds, is not only unbiblical, but misses out on the message of Christianity. We ought to love God
If you want to listen to Paris Reidhead’s sermon “Ten Shekels and A Shirt” (which I highly recommend and think is brilliant) it can be found here: http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?lid=282
