Wholly Following ~ The Pathway of Discipleship

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.   Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

So what are “the essential facts of life” to which Thoreau refers? We might begin the inquiry with some basic questions: What is a human being that God would take thought of him? What is the purpose of God’s creation of humans and His plan for their redemption? Is that purpose only to provide humans with a future hope that they will live forever with God after they die? Is the essential fact of life found by asking the question, “Where will you spend eternity?” Or, is the fundamental question of human existence something quite different?

Could it be that the primary purpose for which God gave His Son to die was that his human creatures might live fully in the here and now? Did God become a man so that men could live in heaven or rather, was it so that humans could become fully human and live meaningful lives in this present world? Maybe our question still needs to be refined.

What is the meaning of eternal life? When does life begin to be eternal? Does this happen only after we pass on from this present life? Or rather, could it be that eternal life begins the moment God grants a person the gift of faith – the moment that a person is born anew from above by the Word and Spirit of God?

Paul clearly taught that faith in Christ gives us more that just a reason to live in this present world. He wrote in 1 Corinthians 15 – “If only in this life we have hope, we are of all men most miserable.” In Paul’s day, the truth of the Gospel gave men and women a hope to live a meaningful and purposeful life in the here and now. It also assured each follower of Christ of an eternal on-going existence with Christ throughout all eternity. That hope inspired them to face and accept a martyr’s death for the sake of Christ.

In our day, however, we tend to be focused on the other extreme. We have hope for the life to come, but our faith does little for the way we live in the concrete realities of our daily lives. We are all too often simply living like everyone else around us – conforming to the world rather than transforming it. Maybe we need to be challenged by a new word: “If we have hope only for the life to come, we are of all men most meaningless.”

No one wants to live a miserable life. No one wants to live a meaningless life. So what makes the difference? What enables us to live lives freed of misery and full of meaning? Here again, our question needs to be refined. It is not a “what” that enables full and complete living in the here and now. It is a “who”. And the “who” is none other than the very Son of God, Jesus Christ. God, who became fully human that we, his creatures, could become fully men and women bearing His image, the Imago Dei, now calls and enables us to live responsibly in the concrete realities of life here and now.

[I'll continue on this theme in additional posts]