We Can't. God Can! (AUDIO)

Here.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

We Can't. God Can!

[This message was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, during both worship services earlier today.]

Mark 4:35-41

In today’s Gospel lesson (and really in all our Bible lessons for today as well), Jesus confronts us with a simple question: Do we want Him or do we want to be comfortable? Do we want the God we meet in Jesus Christ or do we want easy trouble-free lives?

Some of the religious hucksters on TV sell a brand of Christianity that tells us if we believe in Jesus and stay positive, we’ll be flush with cash, healthy, and successful. The problem, of course, is that Jesus never promises any of this to those who follow Him. 

Jesus does promise wonderful things. 

He promises that when we repent and believe, we will be part of the Kingdom of God. 

He promises that when we trust in Him as the only Son of God and the only way to reconciliation to God, we will have everlasting life with God. 

Believers in Jesus know that we have the presence and guidance of God with us in this life. He will give weary souls rest. He will be with His people always, even to the close of the age. 

Christ’s people have the hope of the life for which we are made--a life which at present we can only see as through a mirror dimly, a resurrected life in which tears are dried, bodies restored, work is meaningful, and joy is complete.

But not once does the God we know in Jesus Christ promise that following Him will make us comfortable in this world. 

Not once does he say that turning from our favorite sins to follow Him will go without a hitch. 

Not once does He say that decisions will be easy. 

Not once does He say problems will go away. 

Not once does He say that the life of discipleship--of following Him, of sacrificing ourselves and our own comfort out of love and worship for God and out of love for neighbors will be easy. 

In fact, Jesus says, "In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

Our first lesson for today comes to us from the Old Testament book of Job. It’s thought to be the oldest book in the Bible. In it, Job, a man who strives to follow God, who repents not only for his own sins, but also those of his children, is struck down by some of the horrors that this world can bring. All his property and livestock are destroyed. All his children are killed. He is stricken with a horrible disease. Job had worshiped God and played by the rules. But in one fell swoop, his world was decimated. Following God had not brought Job a comfortable life.

Job's friends try to tell him that had he been more faithful, these bad things wouldn’t have come to him. He insists he doesn’t deserve his suffering and angrily challenges God to explain Himself. At the end of the book, God chastises Job’s so-called friends. 

Faith in God isn’t a pass to easy street and Job’s distress wasn’t caused by Job being sinful. 

But, as we can see from our first lesson, neither does God explain Job’s suffering. Job suffered in spite of being a follower of God because we live in a fallen world in which bad things happen even to faithful people.

In our second lesson, written in about 55 AD, the apostle Paul recounts some of the sufferings he underwent because he followed and proclaimed the crucified and risen Jesus. Paul said that he and his ministry team commended themselves to people in the church at Corinth precisely because they had endured calamities for the sake of their faith in the God we know through Jesus. He then catalogs some of the horrible experiences he’d been through.

Believers in Jesus are called to keep following Jesus even when it’s inconvenient, painful, challenging, uncomfortable. 

When Christ commands sacrifice. 

When being faithful disciples of Jesus threatens our reputations, our financial security, our lives. 

Jesus calls us to choose between a life with Him, on the one hand, and a comfortable life, on the other.

He does this emphatically in our Gospel lesson, Mark 4:35-41. The incident narrated here comes right after Jesus gives a series of parables describing what the Kingdom of God, the kingdom He is going to die and rise to bring into being, is like. 

It all begins with a command from Jesus: “That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, ‘Let us go over to the other side.’ Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him.” 

Of course, when Jesus issued His command to the disciples, they probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Most of them were experienced fishermen accustomed to sailing the Galilean waters at night, as He was now commanding them to do at sundown. “Easy peasy,” they may have thought...only in Aramaic. 

Following Jesus may often seem easy peasy, a simple thing, comfortable. But we don’t know what storms may lay ahead.

You know what happens next. Verse 37: “A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’”

We Christians ask a version of that question every time adversity strikes, every time Jesus calls us to do hard things we’d rather not do, uncomfortable things: confront a fellow believer with a hard truth; forgive someone who has hurt us; give sacrificially. “Lord,” we wonder, “don’t you care if we drown? Don’t you care if we lose our comfort? Don't you care if what you're calling me to do could result in killing my reputation, killing my investment portfolio, kill my health, kill me? Can’t you ask me to do something easier than surrender my whole life to You?” 

Jesus' answer to these questions, quite frankly, is, “No.” 

The God Who tells us that "whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it," the God Who went to a cross to bear our sins cares more about fitting our character for eternity than about our comfort in this death-bound world. 

He cares more about our learning to follow Him faithfully than He does about our ease. Our ease can come in eternity. For now, our call is to follow even in the darkest, most difficult times.

But Jesus doesn't leave us to wallow in the darkness of this world without hope.

Verse 39: “He [Jesus] got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’ Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’”

When storms come, we wonder how we can survive. We forget that nothing can separate those who trust in Jesus Christ from the love God gives through Jesus Christ. Nothing.

A young woman, a member of our church in Cincinnati, Karen, was dying. She and her husband had two young children. She gave her testimony of faith during worship one Sunday. This was in 1999. She talked about all the things she hoped to be able to see in this world: her children grown, the new millennium. She knew that she might not see any of these earthly hopes come into being. And it saddened her. She tried to understand. (I remember her telling me once as her battle with two forms of cancer went from bad to worse, "I just can't seem to catch a break.") 

Yet she also told us that she was confident that the Lord Who was leading her through her darkest valley would not only lead her to Himself, but also lead her children. She said that she knew that Christ's Church in which her children were baptized would faithfully share Christ with them, forge their characters by the power of the Holy Spirit, and help them to know the eternity of hope we have in Jesus Christ.

When she died, she left a number of us with notes. In the one she wrote for me, she detailed some of her desires for her funeral service. But I can also recite by heart how she ended the note: "Please tell people, Mark, that just because I have died it doesn't mean that their prayers didn't 'work.' Life is so much more than having a whole and healthy body here." Jesus carried her through the storms and assured her of life, peace, and wholeness beyond the gates of death.

After Jesus had sternly spoken to the disciples, they contemplated in awe-filled fear, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey Him?” 

The answer to those questions can be found all through the Scriptures. But I mention just two places in the Old Testament. 

• In Psalm 104:7, the psalmist confesses of God, “...at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight…” 
• Genesis 1:1 tells us that God the Holy Spirit moved over the waters of primordial chaos and brought into being peace, order, and life. 

The One Who calmed the storm that so frightened the experienced fishermen sailing with Jesus that night was and is God Himself.

Storms, challenges come and go in this life. Jesus will sometimes ask us to do things, to endure things, to sacrifice things, and to trust only in Him, none of which, in our own power, we are capable of doing. 

But, listen: Whenever we can’t, God can. 

And after the storm, the God we know in Jesus Christ still stands. And so do all who put their faith in Him. They’re the ones who prove to be more concerned with following Jesus than with being comfortable. I pray each day that God will forge me to be one of their number.

What storms are you going through today? 

What is Jesus asking you to do that you don’t believe can be done? 

Is there a comfortable sin for which you need to repent? 

Has a spirit of fear, or bitterness, of self-worship or self-loathing hijacked your life and carried you away from Jesus? 

Follow Jesus and let the One Who can still our storms see you through and set you free to be the joyous child of God you are meant to be. 

Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Saying goodbye

Today I was talking with a person who mentioned a friend who is moving elsewhere. "It's so hard," this person said, "to have people move in and out of your life. But then, you know what it's like having to say goodbye."

In thirty-one years as a pastor, I've served four congregations. It is hard saying goodbye, particularly to people to whom you've grown close not just personally, but spiritually.

One of the many consolations I derive from the thought of the resurrected life is that in eternity, all who have trusted in Christ will always say hello and never have to say goodbye to each other.

I talked about this in a song I wrote and sang back in 2007, to the people of the third congregation I served as pastor on our last Sunday together:

Someday, I'm going to see you again
I'm not the one to say when
But I'm sure,
I'm going to see you again 

Someday, when we no longer grow old
We'll walk on streets made of gold
And it's then
I'm bound to see you again 

The hardest part of living each day
Is learning to say goodbye
Each sad farewell reminds us that we
Aren't in control of this life 

But someday, I'm going to see you again
I'm not the one to say when
But I'm sure,
I'm going to see you again
I'm going to see you again
Together forever again

Thank God that all who trust in Christ will one day not only be united with Him for eternity, but also with all "who have loved His appearing." Then, we'll kiss goodbyes goodbye.

Beautiful moments

Talking with someone after Bible class today, a beautiful black butterfly with bright red markings lighted on a nearby flower.

By the time I got my phone out to snap a picture, he began fluttering around, never lighting long enough or being close enough for me to get a picture.

Beautiful moments come in this life. Then they're gone. It's a comfort to know that in eternity with Christ, we will have one beautiful moment filled with universes of joy that never ends.

And we will never have to lament the passing of that moment.

My Father's House by Audio Adrenaline

This goes back to nearly the beginning of Audio Adrenaline's recording career. The video is hokie. But the song is still great.

Jesus promises: "My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am." (John 14:2-3)

First and Last Pictures of Lincoln's Presidency and Thoughts on Worry

The first & last portrait photos of Lincoln as President: May 1860 & Feb 1865. pic.twitter.com/BmTmanTNPL
— ClassicPics (@History_Pics) November 20, 2014

The toll of his worry and care can clearly be observed by comparing these two pictures, one taken at the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, the other taken just two months before his assassination.

Worry and care do the same thing to all of us, which is why Jesus told us not to worry.

He undoubtedly told us this because to not worry is so foreign to human nature. We needed to be warned against it.

Worry is uniquely human. Creatures capable of anticipating the future, we use that capability in a way that expresses the fundamental sinful impulse of wanting to "be like God," to call the shots and control the future.

How many of the things that we want to control, are we able to control?

And more importantly, how many of those things should we control?

In the book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has his fictional senior tempter talk about different kinds of "time": the past, the present, the future, and eternity. (And how hell tries to leverage our confusion about these modes of "time" to destroy our having relationships with God.)

For we human beings, the past is done, something over which we have no control. We can repent for the sins of our past. But to spend time ruing that past, is a waste of energy for something that cannot be changed. If the devil cannot tempt us to new sin or away from repentance and God's forgiveness for past sins, he loves to weigh us down with shame or regret, not just for sins, but innocent actions of our past.

The future is as insusceptible to our control to the past. We can make plans. Some may even succeed. But we have no guarantees that they will be fulfilled or be fulfilled as we want. This world is imperfect. We are imperfect. Our plans are imperfect. And the follower of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is called to believe that God is in the final control of everything, despite our plans.

Both past and future are unreal. The past no longer exists. The future has yet to exist.

Yet, people often spend more time in these two unreal places, ruing and worrying, than they do in the two places that are real, where things can be changed.

Those two places are, first of all, the present, when we can decide what actions we will undertake, what thoughts we will think, what words we will say.

And the second is eternity, the place where God always dwells in what Lewis in another of his books, Mere Christianity, describes as "the eternal now." By His resurrection, Christ has secured a place for all who turn from sin and believe in Him, in that certain eternity.

Focusing on those two real places--the present and eternity--will mitigate our worry.

Focusing on what we can and should do in the present empowers us for living fully in the unfolding moments of our earthly lives.

Focusing on eternity assures us that even if we mess up, as we inevitably to, even when this world does its worst to us, those who trust in Christ, have a connection to a loving, sustaining God and to a perfect kingdom in which our tears will be dried and we will live in eternal certainty.

Eternity with Christ...

...will be better than the best that we experience or can imagine in this life.

That's a comforting, empowering thought.

But when I was an atheist, I thought that the Christians' hope of resurrection life with God beyond the grave meant that they were anesthetized while living in this life--disengaged, heedless of the injustices faced by others, fatalistic.

That's exactly what Karl Marx, another atheist and writer of The Communist Manifesto, thought. He famously wrote, "Religion [by which he meant the Christian faith into which he had been baptized and which prevailed in the Europe of his day] is the opiate of the people."

He got it precisely wrong. There undoubtedly are Christians so focused on heaven that the idea of loving God and loving neighbor, the very things the crucified and risen Jesus set us free to do, is far from their minds and agendas. For Christians like these, Jesus is a private fix, a ticket to eternity.

But for those who seek to take Jesus and His preeminence over their whole lives, the certainty of eternity in God's perfect kingdom for all who believe in Christ, is the freedom to live, to love the unlovable, to speak up for the powerless, to pursue the promise of our lives on earth, to share the gifts of God granted to us with others.

God, forgive for failing to live more mindfully of eternity because in doing so, I fail to live fully here. In Jesus' Name. Amen

Living in An Unfair World

On Sunday, I presented a sermon on Matthew 20:1-16, in which I said that God isn't fair, but gracious. If God were fair, judging us according to what we deserve, none of us would merit His forgiveness.

Or the opportunity to know God's love given in Christ.

Or the chance to spend eternity with God.

We could never be part of God's kingdom.

That's why, Jesus shows in the parable contained in those verses, we should never begrudge the forgiveness and patience God gives to others. He grades the lives of repentant believers in Christ on the same grace curve He employs with all repentant believers in Christ. Only Jesus Christ makes it possible for the human race to experience the unfairness of God's grace and favor and eternity.

But there's another sense in which God may seem unfair and, to tell you the truth, after nearly thirty-five years as a Christian and almost thirty years as a pastor, I can't explain it away. Only try to deal with it.

I'm talking about the seeming unfairness God allows to be visited on those who experience horrible tragedy, despite their faithfulness to Him. Despite their prayers. Despite their desire to live for God and to put God first in their lives.

Their loved ones die too early. Or suffer over long years of pain.

Their grown children turn from parents, God, and the values they've been taught from birth, seeming to mock the words of Proverbs 22:6. ("Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.")


Their marriages become battle zones or somber theaters of quiet sadness and resignation and some Christians in these circumstances feel themselves "trapped" by promises made to God and their mates, although their mates have proven to be far from the loving, committed people they promised they would be.

Their friendships die under the weight of life's numerous obligations and accelerated mobility.

Their careers abruptly end as corporations downsize, relocate, or seek ways to cut their costs.

I don't know why God, Who I have seen intervene in many circumstances that were, from every rational, empirical perspective, completely hopeless, doesn't choose to intervene in more situations. It doesn't seem fair.

I don't have any answers. And it would be presumptuous for me to think that I do.

When Job, in the Old Testament, challenged God to tell him why he, a man whose faith and virtue God Himself had bragged about, had lost all his children, all his property, and all his livestock (and heard his wife advise him to throw in the towel: "Just curse God and die."), God ended up telling Him, in essence: "It is what it is. You wouldn't understand it if I explained it to you."

God didn't deny the unfairness to which Job was subjected. And the unfairness seems to continue. And it can't be explained.

But I am comforted (sometimes) by the following thoughts. Maybe they'll help you too.

First: When we trust in Jesus Christ, we never experience unfairness alone. (Though it can seem that way.)

No one has suffered greater unfairness than Jesus Christ. True God and true man, Jesus was sinless. Yet He suffered and endured a horrible death. He did it voluntarily so that a perfect human being could bear the guilt of us all, killing the power of death over all who turn from their own sins and believe in Him.

Through that act of love and empathy, we can be certain, God gets unfairness. He's been on the receiving end. And this is the God Who promises, "I will be with you always."

Second: It's OK to get mad at God for the unfairness of things. The supposedly patient Job was so angry at the unfairness to which he'd been subjected that he challenged God to a kind of trial in which both would present their cases. Though God ultimately put Job "in his place," He didn't withhold His love or grace from Job for being angry.

You never get mad at a God you don't believe is there. Anger at God is never displayed by an atheist (at least not consciously). Only people who believe in God get mad at God.

God is a good listener. And as long as you're talking to God, even if your words and sentiments are filled with anger at Him. you're giving Him access to your life, an invitation to bring you His peace in the midst of your storms. Romans 8:26-27 says: "...we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints [saints are what the Bible calls repentant believers in Christ] according to the will of God."

Third: When we suffer life's unfairness, we find ourselves equipped to listen to, pray for, and befriend other people, Christians and others, who have experienced that same unfairness. We can, if we allow God's Spirit to soften our hearts, become the empathetic hand and voice of Christ for those whose hurts we more clearly understand because we ourselves have "been there."

A friend of mine has suffered many losses, losses so unfair that I have complained to God about it more than once. She doesn't claim to have made sense of any of it or to not sometimes feeling God has been unfair. But she makes a point of reaching out to others suffering at the hands of life's unfairness. It's become a ministry from God for her and she doesn't really understand how powerful it is.

Fourth: This world is and will remain unfair to all people until the day Christ returns. It's part of the landscape of earthly experience. The universe groans under the weight of sin, death, and darkness. That's why good news of any kind--a kid volunteering at a homeless shelter, a billionaire spending millions to educate young people, a priest starting a community garden that feeds poor people and gives others a sense of purpose--comes as such a surprise to us. We live in a bad news world.

In our bones, we know that we can never count on this world to be fair or to make sense. Especially for those who know the gracious, loving God of the world Who has come to us in Christ. We know that all have been made for more and that only in eternity will we experience all for which we were made.

When our time on earth is done, we can count on God to treat all who have endured in following Christ to the ultimate unfairness: A life of perfect peace, joy, and purpose lived with God and all the saints for all eternity.

That truth, that secure promise, ultimately, is the only thing that enables me to plunge into each day with hope and purpose while living in this unfair world.

To weep for the death of anyone or anything...

...in the only world we yet know is only right.

We have loved and been loved here. To grieve the loss of that which is lost is to intrinsically understand, whatever faith we profess or do not profess, that deaths and ends were never meant to come to us in this once-perfect Eden.

The New International Version's translation of Ecclesiastes 3:11 contains this line: "...He has also set eternity in the human heart." We, the people we have loved and known, the people we have never met, and the creation in which we live were all made for eternity. But death and endings have invaded this place, invaded us, through human sin.

So, it's right for us to mourn and sorrow over what is lost, even those of us who are assured that by God's grace through faith in Christ, the One Who died and rose again, we will step beyond the portals of death, step into eternal sunshine, where loss never happens, where every greeting is hello and not goodbye. There, God will dry our tears and call us further in and further up into the eternity for which we were made.

I love C.S. Lewis' portrayal of grief and eternity in a scene from my favorite of his Narnia books.

The Joy and Resolve We Get in This Life From the Life to Come

Please read today's installment of Our Daily Bread. It's built around nine verses of the New Testament book of Hebrews' eleventh chapter, sometimes referred to as the "faith hall of fame."

It reminds us that Christians are citizens of a better country. Knowing this helps us see what happens in this life in a realistic way: The world and its "rewards" are of less interest to believers, yet we can care about this world and stand with Christ and for what is right without fear, knowing that we belong to God for eternity!

Death, whether the death of our old ambitions that clash with the will of God or our physical death, is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian!

Far worse a fate for a Christian than death would be for us to cling to the favor, success, ease, or even physical life that this world offers and lose out on eternity with God because of our failure to faithfully follow Jesus wherever He leads!

This is what Jesus is talking about when He asks, "For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" (Matthew 16:26)

It's what Paul was talking about when he looked back on the prestige, honor, and ease he had given up to follow Christ and looked ahead to the virtual certainty of martyrdom for believing in Jesus and said:

...whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:7-11)

Of course, this kind of joyful faith cannot come to those for whom the Bible is nothing but fairy tales or the invention of human beings.

A colleague recently reminded a group of us about this key issue recently. "The crisis in the Church today," she told us, "is that people need to decide where they are on the historicity of the Gospel."

By that, she meant that we have to decide if we truly believe the New Testament's proclamation of Jesus or not.

A willingness to believe that Jesus is Who Scripture claims He is--God and human born of a virgin, the Savior of the world, the only means of reconciliation between God and humanity, crucified, risen, ascended, and alive today--is the only way that a saving faith, a faith that rolls with the punches, and a faith that looks with confidence to eternity, can come to us.

Christians who believe, in the words of an old hymn, "I am but a stranger here, heaven is my home," have an enduring faith that cannot be stopped or overcome by a disbelieving world!

'True Blood' and Thoughts on Eternity

Alan Ball, creator of True Blood, the new vampire series on HBO, was interviewed today by Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air. One thing he said interested me. Vampires, you know, supposedly have eternal life. Ball said, and I hope that I’m quoting him accurately: “If you have eternal life, each day becomes less important. Everything you have, you lose.”

Maybe Ball has identified part of why people don’t follow Jesus Christ. Christ promises eternal life, a state of timelessness lived in the presence of God, to all who follow Him. But in a timebound world, which inevitably limits our imaginations, we may not want to take Him up on the offer. That's because it’s easier to keep score, to quantify friends, relationships, possessions, income in a realm limited by time. In a timebound world, we have things we don’t want to lose.

Eternity renders those things irrelevant. It pushes us and our desperate attempts to conquer, to manage, to be in control away from the centers of our perceptions and daily life. Everything you have, you lose.

But in losing all the things that we use to describe "really living," at least by the lights of this world, we gain everything. We are no longer defined or controlled by the things we have, own, control, or label. In taking Christ’s offer of eternity, we are made simply ourselves, children of God, created in God's image, free to live in the now moments of this world and in the eternal now as the people God, our designer and redeemer, made us to be.

That’s scary. It entails ceding control and leaving behind our usual means of measuring the value of our lives, whether it's others or we ourselves do the measuring.

It’s also liberating. An unquantified and unquantifiable life is a blank slate on which we are free to live as fully human beings in the place where our deepest, purest desires and God’s design, both of the universe and of ourselves individually, meet.

This is what Jesus Christ offers us when He tells us to believe in Him and follow. He makes each day of this life more important, not less so, because through Christ, we gain the confidence that no risk we take is ultimately fatal and we learn that in us, eternity with all its patience and assurance, not only invades today, but also has its start today.

This isn't easy. Every day, I come face to face with ways in which I don't believe, the ways in which I allow my horizons to be limited by a time-and-space-trapped world. But in those moments when I put down my dukes and let eternity slip past my defenses, there is joy and hope. And I feel sorry for and pray for people like Alan Ball.

Where Do We Go When We Die?

Twice in the past two days I've been asked, “What happens to the follower of Jesus who dies? Do we go into some sort of sleepy holding pattern or do we go immediately to heaven with God?”

First, it should be said that people who entrust their lives to Jesus Christ can face death and what lies beyond with confidence.

The first-century preacher Paul writes in the New Testament portion of the Bible: “...we know that if the earthly tent we live in [our bodies] is destroyed, we have a building from God...eternal in the heavens.” [Second Corinthians 5:1]

From Jesus Himself, we have the assurance that all who believe in Him won’t forever be erased or go to hell, but live with God forever, something He tells us in the Bible’s most famous passage, John 3:16.

Jesus-Followers know that whatever lies ahead, they belong to Jesus Christ. period.

But the Bible seems to say two different things about what happens to followers of Christ when they die.

There are numerous passages that intimate believers fall asleep, awaiting what the Bible calls “the day of the Lord,” when Jesus returns and brings them back to life again.

In the Old Testament, for example, the book of Daniel says, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake; some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” [Daniel 12:2]

In a New Testament account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we’re told that Jesus knows that his friend, Lazarus, has died and says of it that Lazarus has “fallen asleep.” [John 11:11]

Paul, in another place in the New Testament, spoke of the more than 500 believers who had seen the risen Jesus, and then noted that while most were still living, some had “fallen asleep.” [First Corinthians 15:6]

On the other hand, there are passages of the Bible which intimate that the Christian’s transfer to heaven follows death immediately.

For example, there are the words Jesus spoke to one of the criminals executed on a cross at the same time as He was. The criminal turns from sin and pleads with Jesus, Who hardly had the look of a king at this point, “Jesus, remember me when you come into Your kingdom.” Jesus replies, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Pardise.” [Luke 23:39-43]

So, what are we to make of these seemingly conflicting teachings? An important principle to apply in understanding the Bible is this: When confronted with such apparent conflicts, we should avoid the easy-outs of harmonizing or of choosing one teaching over another.

Christians believe that the entire Bible was inspired by God. [Second Timothy 3:16] Nothing is there accidentally.

Beyond that, particularly as it relates to the New Testament’s witness for Jesus, the Bible is a far more historically-reliable document, written closer to the events it describes, than almost any other historical writings we have from the ancient world. The whole Bible deserves a fair hearing from fair-minded people.

So, I would say that these seemingly conflicting perspectives on what happens to the Christian who dies are both true.

I believe that these two teachings--death as sleep, on the one hand, and immediate transfer to eternity with the God we know in Christ, on the other--are really two perspectives of the same experience, two sides of a single coin.

From the earthly perspective, the believer has fallen asleep. They’ll remain that way, dead, as Jesus’ dead body remained from Good Friday through the first Easter Sunday morning, until Jesus returns and rouses them to life again.

But from the perspective of eternity, which is a state of timelessness, what C.S. Lewis called “the eternal now,” believers who have died already are in heaven, already in God’s presence.

This is what I believe. I could be wrong. But no matter the actual facts, believers in Jesus know, as Paul writes, that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” [Romans 14:8