Kirjahaku

Have you ever wondered what's on the other side? Most of us are so preoccupied with life in the here and now that we hardly stop to think about what eternity is actually like. It is, after all, a long way off for most of us--so we think we can give it some thought when it looms a little larger.However, the Bible speaks of eternity as "present tense," i.e. we are in it now. John 5:24 tells us that we have eternal life as soon as we believe in Jesus. So it begs the question, "If eternity is real and present, why can't we see it? What is stopping us from perceiving its reality?"It's an important question because our identity is intrinsically linked to our environment, and so we need to be people who actually live in the environment of the kingdom Jesus restored to us. To do this, we must examine the reality of the realm of God and decide if we really are in it.

It would be very strange to see a butterfly living its life like a caterpillar, never trusting its wings to carry it and never embracing its new identity. It would be a denial of all that defines its existence. It occurred to me some time ago that I had spent a significant part of my life making statements about faith, but not actually living my life as if they were true. That's why I gave this book the title 'As If' - because I wondered how different my life would look if I lived as if everything I claimed to believe about God, was actually true. Was I a butterfly who was living like a caterpillar? So I decided to wipe the slate clean and rewrote my faith statement. I decided that no Christian clich or well-used Christian catch phrase would pass my lips unless I really believed it and was ready to live as if it was true and stake my life on it. The biggest 'As If' of all has been that I have decided to live as if I am the focus of the greatest love in the universe - that I am the object of God's unsearchable and extravagant love. I have found that the greatest battle I wage is against myself as I try to be true to the life of Christ that lives in me. So that's what I've decided to do, to look Jesus in the eye and live my life as if His love for me is enough to carry me through everything. It's simple really. So simple that anyone can do it, and I don't know how I could have missed it for so long.

The thing that makes God's dream of humanity so wild is... He knew. He knew all our days, all the good and evil, and He didn't even blink - such is the extravagant love that has held me from eternity to eternity. God's wildest dream and my wildest dream coincided on the cross of Jesus. The ancient longing within me to be loved without any strings attached, and the ancient truth about God that I would be the object of His wild love, became one magnificent reality when Jesus cried out "it is finished". At last the circle was closed, the heart-longing of the creator and the created were satisfied for all eternity - because it was God's design that I would know Him as He really is.

Adam handed to us a broken version of God's original design of humankind; our spirit and soul were now two completely individual and unrelated parts. Adam's actions starved our spirit of the freely given nourishment that comes from the heart of God, and he set our soul a task it wasn't designed for - to generate self-worth from our management of good and evil. The work Jesus accomplished on the cross was the reunifying of ourselves, and once again we have a seamless union between spirit and soul. This seamless reunion has been fully enacted by Christ, and the damage to humanity caused by Adam has been repaired. Jesus has restored the whole of me, He has brought me back into perfect union with His Father, and He has set my soul free from the burden of self-made righteousness. He has freed me to live once again as the object of God's love, just like I was designed to in the beginning.