Copyright by Shea Oakley<\/p>\n
All rights reserved<\/p>\n
I have sometimes imagined a hole through which I must pass in order to ultimately arrive in the Kingdom of God. This \u201cpassageway to Heaven\u201d, I have discovered, has a tendency to shift in size in my mind\u2019s eye as I live out my days on Earth. As I have walked on in my Christian life of the past 25 years it has sometimes seemed wide-open to me. Far more often, though, the size of this opening that always lies ahead has appeared small, sometimes very small. At times it has given the appearance of being almost completely closed to me. Perhaps you too have sensed such a hole in your own spiritual life. If so you may have wondered, as I have, what causes its inconstancy.<\/p>\n
The recurring theme of the Bible is the absolute inability of any human being to attain to Heaven by self-effort. We are told repeatedly in chapter after chapter and verse after verse that any attempt to gain the salvation of our souls through pulling ourselves up by our own proverbial \u201cbootstraps\u201d is the essence of futility. We cannot comply with the law of God. In and of ourselves we always<\/em> fall short of it. In fact we fall so short of it that Isaiah 64:6 tells us our righteousness \u201cis as filthy rags.\u201d The only hope we have is saving faith in Jesus Christ, itself a gift of God, and a function of His \u201cunmerited favor\u201d better known as grace. The Christian is to enter the kingdom through the atoning blood of Christ only; not by anything we can summon up within ourselves apart from His work on the cross on our behalf.<\/p>\n We know this as biblical Christians\u2026.and yet we do not.<\/p>\n It is a constant temptation to try to live the Christian life by our own effort. We pray for grace to become more intimate with Christ and then promptly go to work to achieve that intimacy. It is enough to sometimes make us wonder if we even want what we pray for! The flesh must be crucified, not enlisted in our attempts to \u201cbe holy\u201d, but enlist it we do and figuring out exactly how to crucify it instead eludes us and this sometimes many years into our professed Christian walk. At times we may succeed in \u201cletting go and letting God\u201d, hopefully with greater and greater frequency as time goes by. Still the \u201cold man\u201d remains and he is all about \u201cearning salvation\u201d, a term which is perhaps the greatest oxymoron ever conceived by fallen human beings.<\/p>\n This struggle between the flesh and the spirit, between offered works and received grace is, in my opinion, the cause of the perceived ever-changing size of that opening into Heaven. When we are trying to work our way to God the opening seems to shrink, but when we grow blessedly tired of working, and open ourselves to His saving grace in sanctification, it widens and, through that widened portal we bask in the light of Heaven.<\/p>\n Few things are more frustrating to us then working for nothing. Few things are more disturbing to our souls than losing sight of Heaven and the God who dwells there. To avoid both these things we must learn to trust Him and Him alone for our eternal well-being and that is simply not easy for us. Our pride militates against it and so does our insecurity. But if we ever hope to pass through that maddeningly variable opening we must sincerely trust that Christ and Christ alone has propped it open for us and keeps it open for us. It is only the grace made real and available by His shed blood that allows this to happen and we must embrace that grace, and Jesus Himself, as the ultimate gift of God\u2019s love if we are ever to make it through.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved I have sometimes imagined a hole through which I must pass in order to ultimately arrive in the Kingdom of God. This \u201cpassageway to Heaven\u201d, I have discovered, has a tendency to shift in size in my mind\u2019s eye as I live out my days on Earth. As… <\/p>\n