Tag: Gospel

Saying What You Need to Say Before You Die

This blog concerns itself mostly with what happens after death. I say “mostly” because what happens after death does have major implications on what should happen before death. There are a number of things we should talk about with people who matter to us. In that list I would include that we should be reconciled with those from whom we are estranged, communicate our love to people, and communicate the Gospel to them in the most honest and vulnerable way possible.

Sometimes people just feel they need to communicate about financial matters and personal wishes. This belies a very sterile view of our priorities and pretty much screams, “when we’re dead, we are gone.” These things do matter, but that is what a will and perhaps one printed page would take of. The other things are far more important and perhaps scary, so we are inclined to procrastinate. You might even be afraid of blowback or failure. I get it, but you will regret not being brave. Perhaps speaking about such deep, emotional, and serious matters is something you have avoided all your life.

Let’s start with reconciliation. If you are estranged, a victory isn’t necessarily suddenly becoming close. A victory is mutual understanding, forgiveness, and peace in your relationship. Obviously there are lots of relationships and situations that can end in estrangement. I can only speak in general terms here.

If reconciliation matters to you, then you initiate the contact. Face-to-face is best for this, but not always possible. You might get a stiff arm from the person at first. They might be coping with the situation by avoidance and perhaps denial of their own culpability. Be persistent. It might seem annoying to the other person, but it also demonstrates sincerity on your part.

If you do get a chance to communicate, be sure that you understand why they are estranged from you. You may have your own reasons, but you may not know how they feel. Ask them for their take on the situation. Don’t look for reasons to disagree. Look for reasons for you to take some responsibility for the situation. Own your part and let them know it first. Then ask if you may share how you feel. Don’t be angry, but be matter-of-fact and humble. They may be defensive. Let them know that you just want to be understood. This is how you feel. If you can say, “I used to feel that way, but I now want the matter to be water under the bridge”, then let them know that.

Sometimes it is better to be wronged than to harbor anger and to leave this world unreconciled. Are there corrective actions that you can take? Be the bigger person. Let the other person decide to act for their part. God is judge.

Bringing another person around to some form of repentance often takes time. Don’t wait to start the process until you are at death’s door. Maybe you can ask to speak about it again in the near future.

Reconciliation does not always work. But it does feel good to know that you tried.

Saying that you love someone shouldn’t be that hard. Maybe your family culture has not included using the word “love”. Use the word “love”. To love isn’t necessarily the same as enjoying someone. To love is to want the very best for them. To love is to mean that they matter deeply to you. Explain what you mean when you say, “I love you.” Maybe such statements as, “I pray for you every day”, or “I want us to have a continued (or better) relationship in Heaven”, or “I am proud of you”. These can matter a great deal to a person. They can feel strangely awkward for some, but it is liberating to say.

Then there is the matter of sharing the Gospel. Maybe religion has been a divisive topic for you. Sharing the Gospel should begin with loving the person. You may need to restate that first.

Do they know what you believe? Rehearse a short explanation of why you think talking about Jesus matters:

“I want you to know (or I know you know) that I believe the Jesus is a real person. Not a fiction. I also believe that I am a sinful human being. My hope for eternal life is that Jesus lived the perfect life I could not live, and that Jesus absorbed the sentence that I earned by being sinful. That included His death and being damned/forsaken on the cross. It is my only hope.”

If you don’t know, ask them what they believe about God and eternal life. look for points in common. If you can articulate why you believe what you believe then share it without evoking a debate. Give it in a FYI (for your information) manner. That is not threatening or contrarian. You do not argue somebody into the Kingdom of God, you expose them. The Spirit works where He can work through the exposure.

Expose them to your love for them. “I do disagree with your idea of God, but I truly love you. I want you to be with me in eternity. That is why I am talking to you about Jesus. I want to do all I can. I can’t make you believe. I can show you Jesus.”

You may not get the satisfaction of seeing the person confess their faith or be baptized. At minimum you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you did what you could. That matters. I expect it will also matter in Heaven, no matter the result.

If you are nearing death and actually planning your funeral. Consider including either a read statement or video clip of expressing your love and explaining Jesus. It can be very powerful coming from you posthumously. A pastor can do it, but you would be better. Too many funerals are just eulogies. You want a funeral to work for you. You want impact.

Will Good People Be Lost?

The text discusses challenging biblical concepts, particularly the harsh consequences of sin and the unpredictability of salvation. It highlights that both minor and major sins lead to damnation unless atoned for by Jesus. It explores divine love and justice, emphasizing God’s plan for salvation, the unique role of Jesus, and the urgency of sharing this message with others.

There are a couple of things that God reveals in the Bible that are tough to accept. One is the severity of the punishment for sin. Sin can manifest itself in people in ways that are not that destructive. Still, unless it is atoned for by Jesus minor sins are as damning as major ones, and damnation is serious and permanent.

The other difficult thing is that some fairly serious criminals can come to faith and be saved, while other nice people never do and, yes, they are lost. That doesn’t seem fair to us, but we have the wrong perspective on the situation. It is almost inherent to our being to feel that good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things. Other world religions fall in line with this tendency. But that is not how it always works in this situation.

If I were to add a third difficult thing to accept it would be that a God of love would accept this arrangement. To sort this out, we have to take a deep dive into the character of the being who has created all things and who is the ultimate judge of what is good and evil.

The first thing to note is that God didn’t create any being in order to damn them. He foresaw that certain individuals would rebel against His primacy and that sin and evil would be a real thing, but rather than scrap Creation God had a plan from the beginning.

4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

Ephesians 1:4 (NIV)

The plan wasn’t for every creature. It doesn’t have a way to save or reform Satan, a cherubim/seraphim. It doesn’t have a way to save rebellious angels/demons. Their rebellion is different in a way. They choose out of a completely free will to reject God. Adam and Eve did not conceive of evil on their own. Satan deceived them. The rest of us are deeply influenced by our “sinful nature”. This is some sort of genetic abnormality created by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3) and passed along to everyone. Other creatures are dragged into this cycle of sin, death, and decay unwillingly.

The plan shows the primary characteristics of God, which is love and justice. He is willing to make to ultimate sacrifice to save. The Son of God becomes a human and absorbs the main penalty for sin Himself. But God doesn’t just forgive because He can. He keeps His law in tact. Jesus even asked if this could be done a different way as He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Father’s commitment to not arbitrarily change His own law led to Jesus going through with the plan.

25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Romans 3:25-26 (NIV)

He is “just” (i.e. He won’t change the Law), and the justifier (He makes a sacrifice out of love to save.)

A further statement about God’s intent is found in the most famous passage in Scripture:

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

John 3:16-17 (NIV)

Because of the nature of the plan, Jesus is not an option. He is the only way to stand before God as sinless. Even very good people are sinful. We all do something contrary to God’s will every day. We are all modified physically from what we are meant to be. When we call somebody “good” or think of ourselves as “good”, we are speaking relative to others we have known or heard about. We don’t meet that criteria relative to God.

“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good.”

Matthew 19:17 (NIV)

Even knowing the interplay between God’s love and God’s justice, the situation of those who are not connected to Christ can be disturbing. Especially if we know them personally. It is not a bad thing to be disturbed. God is disturbed. It should move us to do what we can. We can tell people of the pertinent parts of Jesus’ story and urge them to read it if they can. We can tell of the promise and the Bible’s description of our human situation. We can even share the rational proofs for the reality of the Bible’s revelation. (Please look at my other blog: http://givingchrist.com for some of these.). We can also demonstrate the love of God through action. God must do the rest. If there is a chance of connecting them to Christ, God will do whatever He can during life and possibly beyond it until Judgement Day. But people will be lost, and some of them will be “good people”.

What Did Jesus Mean By “Few Are Chosen”?

My picture of Heaven and the New Earth is one where there are many people and everybody who I ever knew in life. I don’t like funerals where there is any degree of doubt about a person’s destiny. Even if there is, we tend to put the best face on it.

Reality and desire rarely match. And even if the Gospel is literally the “good message”, there is some bad news mixed with the good news. The good news is that Jesus successfully fulfilled the Law for every person. A promise of forgiveness of sins and consequently eternal life with God is on the table. God has made good on long standing promises and His mission to save mankind, even potentially all mankind, has been enacted. The bad news is that in practice “few” get saved.

Where do I get this grim news. From my least favorite passages in the Scriptures:

“14 For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Matthew 22:14 (ESV)

13 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Matthew 7:13-14 (ESV)

Both are out of the mouth of Jesus, who I have to consider an authority on the matter. There are other passages that corroborate this, so the fact that these are both from Matthew is of little consequence.

What does this mean? And why is it true? We have the universal desire of God to save all. We have the complete and sufficient life and death of Jesus to fulfill the legal requirements.

The Matthew 22 passage comes at the end of the Parable of the Wedding Feast. In the story a general invitation has been given to the populace to come to the wedding. One dude shows up without “wedding garments”, which would be provided. The King reacts strongly and the parable dissolves to bare truth, “Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.”

The implied rejection of the wedding garment does in this man’s salvation.

The other quote is a part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus adds this information in the midst of a series of commands on how to live. Without the context of the whole Bible, one might conclude that the “narrow way” is a strict observation of the laws Jesus had just laid down.

The Sermon on the Mount is an example of how God uses the Law in different ways, even at the same time. The rigor of the Sermon on the Mount is meant to convict and to break any attempt to save yourself by your own actions. It is unachievable and already lost for a person with a sinful nature (that’s all of us). Martin Luther referred to this as using the Law as a mirror. We see ourselves, and the image isn’t good. Jesus’ statement of the narrow way is meant to create worry and to drive a person to another answer–God’s grace.

Jesus’ statement doesn’t appear to be an exaggeration for the sake of impact, however. The narrow way and the wedding garment are the same thing–the one thing that can save us.

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

John 14:6 (ESV)

Being connected to Jesus is the one thing necessary. There are not other options that work, so it is “narrow”. It makes sense that this is true. If there were other options, Jesus wouldn’t have gone through what He did.

So how “few” is it? Many people lived and died and never heard the Gospel. I don’t believe that God would allow this to be a limiting factor. The function of Jesus’ “descent into Hell” seems to suggest, especially in 1 Peter 4:6, that Jesus can be evangelical even in Sheol. The limiting factors seem to be that many are hardened to the Gospel (Matthew 13:19) and Satan works to keep them that way. Others believe but find reasons to abandon the Gospel (persecution and difficulty, other worries of life). Some undermine the Gospel by changing the terms of God’s promise (the book of Galatians). Many become unrepentant sinners (John 3:19-20).

So what percentage can we expect? Is “few” relative to the whole population? Is “few” relative to the whole number that could have been saved? I hope it is the latter, but I wouldn’t be surprised that it turns out to be 10% or even less. Jesus seems to brace us for a low yield by some of His stories. But whatever the yield it will still be many people –a great multitude that no one could number (Rev. 7:9). We are blessed if we are counted among them.