Everyone Wants To Go To Heaven, But Nobody Wants To Die

 Heaven is pretty cool right? Gold stuff and pearly gates. Lots of singing, light and kiff houses everywhere. No crying or evil or injustice. Sounds like a trip. If heaven was conclusively proven, I don't think anyone would be unamped about going there. 

But to get to heaven you've got to die. And that's where my eyebrows perk up. I want to go to heaven, but I can’t say that death stokes me too much. It’s kinda painful. Its the ultimate fail of your body. That doesn't sound inviting.

Not only is it painful but its lank risky. What if I don’t wake up on the other side? What if I just die? What if I wake up and I’m not in heaven? And I’m not just talking about heaven as in the-heaven-in-the-sky. I’m talking about right now. I’m talking about the constant dying to self that we are called to. If I say “Lord not my way but yours” that’s kinda risky. That’s dying to what I want, and hoping and trusting that He will pull me through it all.

Giving up my life and what I want is hard. Everything about being human makes me want to keep control. I want to control how people perceive me, how God perceives me, what I do next in my life, and what I do right now. Giving up my life will mean casting aside my petty insecurities and coping mechanisms that give me so much fake comfort, giving up my future career, my five-year-plan, my money, my house. Giving all to follow Christ.

If I’m going to do this Christian thing I’m supposed to pick up my cross and follow Jesus. And last time I checked, carrying a cross to my death is not the fun part. I want the dessert but I don’t want to eat my peas and carrots. I want to get the sweet stuff without putting in the hard yards. 

I think what God is teaching me is that death gives place for resurrection. Death is not the end, it’s more like beginning. It’s the start of this awesome race with a living, inter-acting God. One of my favourite verses in the Bible is from 2 Corinthians 12 and it says “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness."

Death is the ultimate weakness. You can’t get more sick than dead. That means that the ultimate strength is shown by God when He conquers death. When we die, we allow God to show off how awesome He is. It’s not easy and I often get it wrong, and I’m sure you do too. But today, today I choose to pick up the cross and go and die.

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The problem with colours

Did you know… that the US army used to use colour blind people to search for the enemy. Colour blind people were actually able to see camouflaged vehicles and people more easily than full-sighted people who were simply fooled by the colours. I really could never have imagined anyone who had impaired eyesight being very good at spotting the enemy. That makes no sense, it’s almost like having a deaf composer, oh wait, wasn’t his name Beethoven.

Another story is that of Oscar Pistorius, a South African athlete whose legs had to be amputated when he was a child. Oscar has broken many records at both a disabled and fully-abled level. He was in fact not allowed to take part in the Olympics because the IAAF thought his prosthetics gave him too much advantage. If you think rationally about that it is almost hilarious that the person without legs was seen to have a bigger advantage in a track race than a person with both legs.

It seems as though sometimes what is perceived to be better is in fact worse. We become so conditioned to what is supposed to be better that we overlook the rest. What is interesting to note is that, especially in the case of the colour-blind soldiers, what was seen to be a strength was a clear weakness. The full-sighted soldiers ability to see clearly in fact clouded their vision. They were distracted by colours and so stopped focusing on what was totally important. It was the colour-blind people who were in fact able to disregard the useless information in order to get what is truly important. Often we put so too much emphasis on what we see as important and what we see as strength that we allow it to cripple us.

Often achievement does not always lie in our strengths, often the true strength lies in a weakness. A great example of that is Moses, a person that God appointed to be a prophet to Israel and to give them the Law, and to lead them out of Egypt. Firstly Moses had a speech impediment which might be a problem when trying to tell all of Israel what God is saying. Also Moses was a murderer who went into hiding in the desert and so was probably not a prime candidate to get given the Ten Commandments. Yet despite all of these problems and obvious flaws God chose to us Moses as a prophet and many amazing and miraculous things occurred during his life.

To me it is so encouraging that God so easily uses people’s flaws for His glory. In 2 Corinthians 12 v. 9 Paul says “but He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

“When I am weak then I am strong”. That verse is so powerful; that God can not only use our weakness, but that His power is made perfect in weakness. That means that God looks for weakness, for broken people and they make His power perfect. It’s not the people who get it right all the time, or the people who have enormous talents and abilities.

The whole thing actually scares me quite a lot, because I’m very comfortable with what I’m good at and would really like God to use my strengths. But if God had to start using my weaknesses I would only be able to rely on Him and that He would bring me through situations. I think that as we grow with God we can only start transforming our weaknesses into strengths as God uses them so much.

Christians often focus on gifts and understanding what God has gifted you in so that you can go and do that. I’m not against gifts in any way, but often they don’t look the way we expect them to. Perhaps God has gifted us with a brilliant social awkwardness, or amazingly bushy eyebrows, or a voice from a frog. Those don't seem like gifts at all, and yet what we see throughout the Scriptures is that God uses the people who suck. That the very nature of the people that God chooses to use are those who don’t have the best abilities or looks. Jesus himself was not even good looking; in Isaiah 53 it says “there was no beauty or majesty to attract us to him.” God seeks the people with problems, and that is tremendous as I've got a lot of those.

So my challenge to you is to not only rejoice in your inadequacies and weaknesses, but to allow God to use all of you; not just your strengths but your bushy eyebrows and frog voice too.