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WTSIWTG
MCLEODS, New Brunswick, May 8, 2024 – Jesus says that you if you love your loved ones more than him, you’re not worthy of him.
Jesus says that if you don’t pick up your cross and bear it like a yoke every day, you’re not worthy of him.
We see through our own eyes and by our own understanding, but we need to see through God’s eyes and by his grace.
Heaven is a hella place to get into. I wouldn’t want to be there if I weren’t worthy of it. I wouldn’t want you to be there, either, if you weren’t worthy.
The world, for want of a better word, sucks. I wanted to be more positive here, but there’s no point in lying. There’s no point in using a sugar-coated donut word when a plain one will do. The world is the realm of death and dying, of built-in obsolescence, and it was made that way by God himself. God made it to be the realm of death and dying and built-in obsolescence. God made the world to suck so that we’d look for something better and hope for something more, not in the way the devil does, trying to make something of time and space that it can never be, but wishing and hoping for something, I don’t know, something we can only see in our mind’s eye and feel with our heart. The realm of dreams and visions, but dreams and visions from God, not from the other side.
I don’t want anything in Heaven to suck, and from I’ve seen so far, nothing does. It’s perfect, but not in a cloying way, not in a fake way, like impossibly white capped teeth. Heaven and all those in it are unaware of their perfection because they have nothing to compare it to – there are no imperfections in Heaven and no memory of the imperfect world, so what they see is what they get, and what they see is perfection and only perfection.
I have cried over people I know who are gone now and I do not think made it Home. I weep and pray over those who are still here but who want nothing to do with God, let alone Jesus. God tells me who to weep and pray over and who to let be and let go. I do as he says. There’s no winning that argument with God.
There are those who call themselves Christian and yet who question God’s decision about who gets into Heaven and who doesn’t. Well, that’s an argument as old as the fall of Lucifer himself and just as unwinnable. Who are we to question God’s judgement? Jesus argued with his enemies over this same point of doctrine. They thought being a child of Abraham was all it took to get into Paradise, but they were dead wrong. The more Jesus tried to warn them just how wrong they were, the more they hated him for it.
People today think you only have to “believe” – close your eyes and cross your fingers and click your heels together three times. They think believing is as easy as blowing out birthday candles. But believing is what Jesus said it is – picking up your yoke daily and labouring not in a course of your choosing but being driven by a hand you cannot see. That means choosing to love your enemies when every cell in your body wants to kill them in their sleep. That means choosing to do what Jesus taught us to do rather than what we want to do. Belief starts with a decision of the will, not a feeling. Belief starts with doing something you may not want to do but you choose to do for the sole reason that Jesus taught you to do it so you know it’s the right thing to do. And after you’ve sincerely made the decision and God knows you have, he fills you with belief, the way a child colors inside the lines.
I do not know if I’ll make it Home. I played the Wicked Witch of the West in my high school musical. Not Dorothy. Not Aunty Em. Not the Good Witch. Not even Toto, the dog. I was the witch who was condemned even before she’d stepped into the spotlight. In my stage make-up, I was as ugly on the outside as I was on the inside and I scared “Dorothy” so much that she refused to go on stage with me at one point. The children in the audience were screaming and howling and running out of the auditorium in tears. I didn’t see all this; I only found out about it afterwards when the adults were laughing at how scared their kids were of me. I had no recollection of it; it was to me as if it hadn’t happened.
You would not have wanted that Charlotte in Heaven.
The world is full of what I once was. There are billions of what I used to be running around out there. I don’t want any of what used to be inside of me and is now inside of them to get into Heaven. Jesus says that if we love brother or sister or mother or father or husband or wife more than him, we are not worthy of him. He said if we love our own lives here, we’ll lose the only life that’s worth living.
Those who make it to Heaven will have no recollection of the Hell they left behind, including anyone they knew who didn’t make it Home. They’ll only remember the good, but only God is good, so they’ll only remember God. I am grateful for that promise.
It’s God’s decision, who makes it Home. Being a Christian isn’t a ticket to paradise. Even being born-again isn’t a ticket.
Belief isn’t a mindset or a recitation or a forced opinion; it’s not something you put on like a costume or stage make-up: It’s a state of being that comes from God and God only. You don’t choose to believe; you choose to submit to God, who then fills you with his Spirit and you believe. Belief becomes your de facto state of being so that it’s not something you contrive but something you are.
Submission to God you can choose. But belief – genuine belief – comes only from God.
REPENTANCE AND BELIEF
CHARLO, New Brunswick, September 27, 2023 – Repentance is critically important for us Christians. The sincerity of our repentance determines the strength of our belief, which then impacts everything we do. Without sincere and full repentance, there can be no or only superficial “learned” belief and therefore no genuine witness to others and no one-on-one personal relationship with God and Jesus.
And without a one-on-one personal relationship with God and Jesus, there’s no chance at Heaven.
During the time of Jesus’ ministry, the people of Nazareth, including Jesus’ own blood relatives, did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. Scripture tells us that Jesus, when he visited Nazareth during his ministry rounds, was unable to perform any miracles there because of the people’s “unbelief”. But what was the cause of their unbelief? What stopped them from seeing Jesus for who and what he was?
Belief is an inner knowing that cannot be easily explained beyond saying that it just is. Belief cannot be easily explained because it’s seated in the soul, which itself can’t be measured, at least not with the crude instruments we have on Earth. Belief is not something we’re born with; it comes to us courtesy of God’s Holy Spirit. Without the presence of the Holy Spirit in our soul, we can have knowledge of things, but we can’t truly believe. And without truly believing God’s Word, we’re constantly in danger of falling away.
Repentance is the key to believing in the Gospel. I know an angry young atheist who’s all but memorized the book of Revelation. He can quote circles around me when it comes to scripture, but he questions everything he quotes and he believes none of it. That’s not to denigrate knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge is not something most people would stake their lives on. Knowledge tends to change and be replaced with something else as new facts emerge, whereas belief remains constant, unchanging, and unshakeable in those whose belief comes not by their own power but by the power of God’s Holy Spirit.
Both Jesus and John the Baptist preached the essentiality of repentance, and both of their ministries were grounded in repentance. So what is repentance and why is it so important for belief?
WHAT IS REPENTANCE?
When we repent, we not only acknowledge our sins and failures, we also acknowledge our weaknesses and our need for help. At the same time, we pledge both within ourselves and to God not to do the sinful behavior ever again and we ask God to forgive and absolve us of our sins. That is generally what is understood by most Christians as being repentance.
So far, so good, but that’s only half of the repentance equation. The other half is equally as important but rarely gets much coverage.
Here is the other half of the repentance equation: Along with acknowledging our sins and weaknesses and asking God for help and forgiveness, we just as importantly need to forgive those who’ve sinned against us, which means we not only need to forgive them, but we also need to forgive them whatever sins they’ve sinned against us. This is the half of the repentance equation that most Christians miss and so remain for all intents and purposes unrepentant, even after they think they’ve repented. Being unrepentant, these Christians still have a hard heart (an unforgiving heart is a hard heart), and God’s Spirit cannot and will not work through a hard heart.
Without full and sincere “both sides of the equation” repentance, there can be only superficial belief that is based on knowledge, not on God’s revelation through his Spirit. There can be knowledge but not belief. You cannot learn belief; like grace, belief is a gift that comes from God. You cannot on your own steam increase your belief just by trying to believe harder. Many have attempted this impossible task and all have failed. Your belief can only be established by the power of God, not by your own efforts. But the one thing that you can do on our own steam is to repent sincerely and fully.
When Jesus told us to “REPENT, AND BELIEVE THE GOSPEL!”, he was advising us to repent, while letting us know that belief would come as a natural outcome of the repentance. Repenting was something that we needed to choose to do, but belief would follow as a consequence. In other words, belief requires no effort on our part. Jesus wasn’t urging us to believe, he was urging us to repent. Belief would then follow as surely as day follows night.
This is the main reason why so many Christians don’t really believe the Gospel. They have knowledge of God’s Word, but they don’t really believe God’s Word because they haven’t sincerely and fully repented. Not having sincerely and fully repented, their heart is still hard and God’s Spirit cannot come into them. They remain supernaturally spiritually deaf and blind, as foretold by Isaiah.
Again, repentance is not only acknowledging your own sin and weakness and asking for God’s help and forgiveness, it’s choosing to forgive those who’ve sinned against you as well as choosing to forgive the sins they’ve sinned against you. If you only acknowledge your own sin and weakness and ask for God’s help and forgiveness but refuse to forgive those who have sinned against you, you haven’t repented. You’ve only done half of what you need to do to repent. And if you only do half of what you need to do to repent, your heart will remain hard and your belief in the Gospel will remain superficial and perilous.
So I guess the reason why the Nazarenes, including Jesus’ blood relatives, didn’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah was because they had hard hearts, which made them supernaturally spiritually deaf and blind. They all needed to repent, and to do so fully and sincerely.
How about you? Is your repentance full and sincere, or are you missing out on the second half of the repentance equation? If you haven’t yet repented in the way that you need to repent in order to truly believe the Gospel, maybe you should take Jesus’ advice and do so now. You shouldn’t have to work at believing – you might have to occasionally work at repenting, as it sometimes takes us some degree of discipline to drag ourselves before God and admit we were wrong, but no effort should be required to believe. If we fully and sincerely repent, belief in the Gospel just happens, thanks to God.
“The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye and believe the gospel!“
Mark 1:15
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 