HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, March 29, 2025 – You don’t have to do any of it – none of it. God hasn’t ordered you to serve him. He hasn’t forced you or coerced you, any more than he forced or coerced Jesus do give himself as a sacrifice for many. God made Jesus an offer, he invited Jesus, he gave Jesus the opportunity to come up higher, just like he gives us the same opportunity. No guns are pressed against temples, no arms twisted behind backs. It’s an invitation that no-one but God can extend – the chance to come up higher for all eternity.

Jesus was insistent, particularly during his final days among us in mortal form – Jesus was insistent that we understand that the trial he agreed to endure was his choice and his choice only. God had not forced him into it. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus was begging his Father to find another way to get done what needed to be done, God would have let him off the hook if he’d said he wanted off, only the terms could not be changed because prophecy had to be fulfilled. The sacrifice had to proceed as laid out in scripture or God would have to extend the offer to someone else. Yet even so, God mitigated the suffering that Jesus agreed to go through, allowing him to die so soon in the proceedings, it caught the guards by surprise. God softened each blow against Jesus as much as he could (even arranging for someone to carry the cross the final distance) while still keeping up his end of the bargain.

And it was a bargain, what happened that day, a bet made by the devil that Jesus wouldn’t make it all the way through. It was the devil who set the terms that God agreed to. It wasn’t God’s will that Jesus suffer; God permitted it, all the while betting that Jesus would indeed make it all the way through, which he did, and in so doing came up as high as he or anyone possibly could.

We, too, are in the process of coming up higher. With each test and each round of suffering that we don’t solicit but agree to endure, we inch up higher on the heavenly rewards scale. We come up higher. Sometimes it’s by a little bit and sometimes it’s by leaps and bounds. But just as we can come up higher, we can also slide down lower. God does everything in his power to prevent that from happening (the alarms ring loud and clear; trust me, you cannot not hear those alarms when you’re in danger of sliding), but it’s still up to us whether we want to go up or down, to say “yay” or “nay” to God. Heavenly rewards are not a guarantee until our time here is done. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and until it’s over, the upward trajectory can just as easily go downward.

Being born-again doesn’t prevent that slide. We still have free will. We can still say “no” to God. We can still go our own way or even the devil’s way. We’re fine now reading this, comfortable in our seats and with a full belly, but some day when the pain gets too extreme, some of us may choose to do or say whatever it takes to make the pain stop, including denying and betraying the Very Ones we now claim we’d die for. It’s happened before to others and will happen again, maybe to us. We need to pray and pray hard that it doesn’t.

This is a depressing article for me to write, knowing that some of you reading this have already made the deal that cannot be undone and that you’re only here to find a chink in my armour that you can use against me. It’s depressing knowing that some of you who haven’t sold your souls still resolutely refuse to accept any of God’s offers and that you’re only reading this because it amuses you and you look forward to mocking me afterwards. It was depressing for Jesus to dine with the hypocrites and to argue with them and endure their insults, but he did it because it was part of his duties, depressing or not. To get through these and similarly distasteful chores, Jesus always kept his eyes on the prize of his heavenly reward, knowing that with each sling he deflected and every arrow he endured, he moved up higher and therefore closer to God.

You have no idea how close Jesus was to God on that cross. No mortal being has ever been closer to God than Jesus was during his time of suffering. That’s how he got through it – putting himself entirely into God’s hands and letting God guide him, step by step, breath by breath.

You cannot endure what you have coming unless you do the same.