“Before the mountains were born

or you brought forth the earth and the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

You turn men back to dust,

saying, ‘Return to dust, O sons of men.’

For a thousand years in your sight

are like a day that has just gone by,

or like a watch in the night.

You sweep men away in the sleep of death;

they are like the new grass of the morning-

though in the morning it springs up new,

by evening it is dry and withered.

All our days pass away under your wrath;

The length of our days is seventy years-

or eighty, if we have the strength;

yet their span is but trouble and sorrow,

for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” ^[1]

The eminent physicist Carl Sagan took the wind out of a lot of sails when he declared, �Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.� ^[i]� One could legitimately ask, �So where does that leave me?�� �What am I to do with that information?�

Is this all there is?

A popular song from yesteryear captures the gnawing emptiness of human life detached from ultimate meaning:

“I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire. I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face as he gathered me up in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement. I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames. And when it was all over I said to myself, “Is that all there is to a fire”

And when I was 12 years old, my father took me to a circus, the greatest show on earth. There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears. And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads. And so I sat there watching the marvelous spectacle. I had the feeling that something was missing. I don’t know what, but when it was over, I said to myself, “is that all there is to a circus?”

Then I fell in love, head over heels in love, with the most wonderful boy in the world. We would take long walks by the river or just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes. We were so very much in love. Then one day he went away and I thought I’d die, but I didn’t, and when I didn’t I said to myself, “is that all there is to love?”

I know what you must be saying to yourselves, if that’s the way she feels about it why doesn’t she just end it all? Oh, no, not me. I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment, for I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you, when that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself�

If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.� If that’s all there is.”^[ii]______Peggy Lee, Capital Records 1969

It usually takes thirty or forty years of living for people to realize that this life offers limited lasting satisfaction, and almost no hope of an afterlife.� As the song implies, when I am too young to know better, all I think I need is a circus, love, parties, and life will be full.� We�ve all heard of the overindulged children of movie stars or music moguls dying of drug overdoses while still in their teens or early twenties.� All that potential, all that vitality snuffed out because of sheer boredom, lack of meaning, and the desperate need to mask the pain.

Denial works�for a while

In a world apart from God, one of the most powerful spiritual �anesthetics� employed by secular man is that of steadfast denial that there is a God, a higher power, other than himself.� Dallas Willard in his book, �Renovation Of The Heart� writes,

�Denial of reality, [that is, the way the universe actually is with God as its source], is a capacity inseparable from the human will as we know it, and has its greatest power when it operates without being recognized as such�The will or spirit cannot�psychologically cannot�sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case.� Therefore it must deny, evade, and delude itself.�^[iii]� At its root is the delusion that we can be our own god.� �The human capacity for self-deception is as boundless as it is fathomless,� Willard adds.

Now and then, a few courageous souls articulate what is really going on inside them.� Consider this bleak assessment of life by a famous celebrity, Woody Allen:

“My relationship with death remains the same. I am very strongly against it�Everyone needs their own little fictions to cope with the harshness of life.� I do feel that it’s a grim, pitiful, nightmarish, meaningless experience. The only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself, and I’m not the first person to say this or the most articulate person on it. It was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, and it was said by Eugene O’Neill. One must have one’s delusions to live. You look at life too honestly and clearly, life does become unbearable, because it’s a pretty grim enterprise, you must admit.” ^[iv]

Who am I?

Does it even matter?� Who cares?� What possible difference does it make?

In his book, �What�s So Great About Christianity?� Dinesh D�Souza writes,

�The Reverend Randy Alcorn, founder of Eternal Perspective Ministries in Oregon, sometimes presents his audiences with two creation stories and asks them whether it matters which one is true.� In the secular account, �You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three and a half billion years ago.� You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance, and natural forces.� You are a mere grab bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance.� You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe.� You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind from a microbe, virus, or amoeba.� You have no essence beyond your body, and at death you will cease to exist entirely.� In short you came from nothing and are going nowhere.��

�In the Christian view by contrast, �you are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God.� You are created in His image, with capacities to think, feel, and worship that set you above all other life forms.� You differ from the animals not simply in degree but in kind.� Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind.� Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that He has a perfect plan for your life.� In addition, god gave the life of His only son that you might spend eternity with Him.� If you are willing to accept the gift of salvation, you can become a child of God.��

He concludes, �Now imagine two groups of people�let�s call them the secular tribe and the religious tribe�who subscribe to these two worldviews.� Which of the two tribes is most likely to survive, prosper, and multiply?� The religious tribe is made up of people who have an animating sense of purpose.� The secular tribe is made up of people who are not sure why they exist at all.� The religious tribe is composed of individuals who view their every thought and action as consequential.� The secular tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all.�^[v]

If, as evolution suggests, that our sole purpose is to survive and multiply, what explains the following story and the hundreds of others just like it?

�On Dec. 6, 1942, 10 German soldiers marched into Rek�wka, a Polish village 90 miles south of Warsaw. They�d received a tip from some locals that two families, the Skoczylas and Kosior�ws, were sheltering Jews. When the Germans apprehended the families in their shared house, all but four of its inhabitants were at home. The soldiers spotted a trapdoor in the kitchen, which opened to a small, but empty, hiding place. They demanded that the families reveal the whereabouts of the stowaways, but nobody would talk. The soldiers took them to the barn behind the house, locked them inside and burned them alive. When two of the boys tried to escape, they were shot in the back.�

�My family helped Jews, but did not expect anything in return,� said Mr. Skoczylas [a descendant]. �They did not think about the danger involved or the possible consequences.� Such an act of self-sacrifice might seem stunning today, but others did the same.�Sir Nicholas Winton�saved 669 children by sending them by train from Prague to London before the borders closed in 1939, but his story came to light only when a family friend leaked it to the BBC in 1988. Later that year, he was featured�on an episode�of BBC�s �That�s Life!� When the show�s host asked the studio audience, �Is there anyone here who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?� everyone rose. He died earlier this month at age 106, and there are a reported 6,000 descendants of the children he saved.� [vi]

Where, pray tell, is the so-called �Darwinian survival value� in doing such things?� Surely there is more, much more to us than meets the eye.

The Bible declares that we humans are the crowning achievement of God’s creative plan, and quite literally, the reason for it.� We are created in His very image and likeness, however marred by sin that we may be.� In honor of our dignity as humans, God forces nothing upon us.� He wants us to come to Him voluntarily, willingly, indeed �seekingly.�� He leaves the choice to us, just as He did in the Garden of Eden those many millennia ago.� But in these matters, there is no room for complacency, or ignorance.

Grasping the bigger picture

Suppose you were to go to a house party in any typical neighborhood in America, and randomly asked people there the following questions, �who are you?� �what are you?� �where do you come from?� �why are you here?� �where are you going?� and �how do you plan to get there?�� It is very likely the conversation would go something like this, �who am I?� I�m Don,� �what am I? I�m a plumber,� �where am I from? I�m from Cleveland,� �why am I here? I�m here because Joe invited me,� �where am I going? To get a drink,� �How will you get there? Through the living room.�� Sounds silly, but bear with me.

Suppose you then said, �No, no, I mean in the bigger picture of things, beyond the day-to-day routines of your life, what would you say?�� More than likely, the conversation would end right there.� Most people wouldn�t have a clue how to answer such impertinent questions, mostly because they haven�t given the matter five minutes of thought in their whole lives.

So let�s take a minute and consider these questions from a biblical perspective, and see what a difference it might make in understanding yourself as God sees you.

What am I?

Dallas Willard summarized it brilliantly when he said, �You are a never-ceasing spiritual being�essentially creative will, un-bodily personal power, housed temporarily in a physical body.�

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin tells us, �We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.�� [vii]� How different that is from the prevailing postmodern worldview that we are no more than the sum of our parts, and when our parts run out, so do we.� Forever.

More than the sum of your parts

Today�s seemingly insatiable hunger for the transcendent is being satisfied by a steady stream of movies and books about UFO�s, alien civilizations, spiritual powers, magic, the occult, and interstellar time travel.� Could this be a reflection of an innate yearning for meaning, value, and purpose in the face of postmodernism�s smothering insistence that human beings have no more ultimate meaning than mold in a shower stall?

Are we to believe that our universe, all 10²⁴ stars and 170 billion galaxies that stretch out 47 billion light-years in all directions is a mindless accident?^[viii]� Are human beings really the product of arbitrary chance and blind biochemical reactions?� Is it reasonable to conclude, as Lee Strobel observes, �that nothing produces everything, that non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, non-reason produces reason?� ^[ix]

Something deep within screams �no!� Thinking people the world over react with indignation and outrage at the notion of ultimate meaninglessness and have come to suspect they may have been sold a bill-of-goods.� The effects of this have been profound and far-reaching, especially among the young and impressionable.

Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Professor Roger W. Sperry, a psychologist at the California Institute of Technology, observed:

�Before science, man used to think himself a free agent possessing free will. Science gives us, instead, causal determinism wherein every act is seen to follow inevitably from preceding patterns of brain excitation. Where we used to see purpose and meaning in human behavior, science now shows us a complex bio-physical machine composed entirely of material elements, all of which obey inexorably the universal laws of physics and chemistry. . . .�

�I find that my own conceptual working model of the brain leads to inferences that are in direct disagreement with many of the foregoing; especially I must take issue with that whole general materialistic-reductionist conception of human nature and mind that seems to emerge from the currently prevailing objective analytic approach in the brain-behavior sciences.�

�When we are led to favor the implications of modern materialism in opposition to older, more idealistic values in these and related matters, I suspect that science may have sold society and itself a somewhat questionable bill of goods.�

�It may have, indeed.�

Monistic vs Dualistic world view

That materialist-reductionist model truncates you and me down to an assembly of parts emerging ever so briefly from the biological chain of the teeming human swamp, only to disappear forever back into the decaying matter from which we came.� This bleak assessment is challenged by Lee Edward Travis in a book called �Mysterious Matter of Mind:�

�A dominating assumption held by psychologists today is that the human being is body and nothing more and what is real can be perceived only by the sense organs or by a physical instrument. Based on this assumption, persons are essentially totally defined by the physical parts that constitute them and to know them one must ultimately understand their anatomy and their physiology. They can be reduced completely to physics and chemistry, and there is nothing left over.�

�The ordinary person does not share this assumption. Such people believe that there is something else, that there is a conscious mind that takes control, possibly even of one’s whole life, and to a large degree determines one’s destiny. It is true, they think, that genetics plays a large role in one’s development and that chance enters into the picture. But mainly they believe that consciousness faithfully attends them as long as they live and reluctantly leaves at their death to live on forever in another world. Scientists and philosophers have too quickly dismissed the testimony of the common person about his or her experience.�

�One could say either that the brain produces the mind as an epiphenomenon, the melody that floats from the harp, or that the mind programs the brain, using it as a faithful servant in the complicated job of living�such double-consciousness experiences are an argument for independent mind action, for a dualism of object and subject and for a separateness of brain and mind.�

Sir John Carew Eccles, was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse.� Dr. Arthur C. Custance, a Canadian anthropologist, scientist and author specializing on science and Christianity writes,

�Eccles became fully persuaded after his lifelong work in neurophysiology that mind was not an emergent out of the brain but somehow an independent programmer of it. �The mind acts on the brain in a purposeful, manipulating, and actively creative way.�

Finally, Dr. Custance draws attention to the congruity between the revelation of Scripture and the conclusions of these two modern scientists, �Both the Old and the New Testaments proclaim the union of the mind and the body as essential to the existence of the whole person. The Bible sees a form of severance between the mind and the body at death that will be neither undone nor remedied until the body is resurrected and united with the mind. For the whole person as portrayed in the Bible the mind and the body belong together, always with the former as master and the latter as servant. Behaviorism is not a psychology of man but only of man’s object self. �Man has a computer, not is a computer.� [x]

One prominent scientific commentator shared,

�Beyond understanding things like the origin of the universe, understanding the origin of the very consciousness that allows us to understand the origin of the universe is rightly regarded as the most important question in science. We are quite certainly a long way from even attempting to answer it, but neuroscience is a young and vibrant discipline full of exciting possibilities. The physics question about the brain which we want to answer is: Is there more or less direct evidence of the principles of quantum mechanics operating in the workings of the brain at multiple levels, from neurons to behavior. In one sense this question is asking what it exactly is that connects the micro world to the macro world, a line of investigation going back to the beginnings of science.� [xi]

Where do I come from?

We are always tempted to think of our origins in geographic terms, the location where we first emerged from the womb.� But is that really where I come from?� How random, how capricious that seems.� Such views have driven world wars, racial discrimination, class distinctions and a host of other evils, all based on where we were born and the identity of our parents.� The bible leaves no room for such parochial discriminations.

�Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother�s womb.
I thank you, High God�you�re breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration�what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I�d even lived one day.� [2]

Every human being, regardless of their place of birth, social status, race, religion, or creed have been personally formed by the hands of God in their mother�s womb.� Your bones are inventoried, the number of hairs on your head are numbered, your history is laid out, your future is already complete to God.� In another scripture God says, �He chose us in him before the creation of the world�� [3]� It could be said, �We�re old friends!�

Meister Eckhart, German theologian, philosopher and mystic wrote, �The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.�� So, where am I from?� From the laughter of the Trinity, conceived in the mind of God before the earth was created, and in the fullness of time, was formed by the hands of God in my mother�s womb and placed on earth to fulfill my ultimate destiny.

And what destiny is that?

Why am I here?

�At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord.�

___Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In his book, �The Purpose Driven Life,� Rick Warren writes,

�It�s not about you.� The purpose of your life is greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness.� It�s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions.� If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God.� You were born by his purpose and for his purpose�Your relationship to God on earth will determine your relationship to him in eternity�This life is preparation for the next.� [xii]

If the Bible is anything it is about a conflict of intentions�first between God and Satan, then between Satan and man, and finally between man and God.� We are faced with the tragic specter of the all-powerful God, who flung the planets into orbit with the simple statement of intent, �let there be�.� in a head-on collision with creatures that He deeply loved.� It wasn�t until Jesus Christ appeared on the scene that the words �Thy will be done,� ushered in a new era of realignment between man�s intentions and God�s intentions.� As C. S. Lewis put it so effectively in The Great Divorce,

�There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, �Thy will be done,� and those to whom God says, �Thy will be done.� All that are in hell choose the latter. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and consciously desires joy will ever miss it.�

The issue between God and man is an old one.� In creating man in His image and likeness, God imparted many of His own characteristics to this new creation, giving Adam dominion over the world and the authority to exercise his free will.� In effect Adam, Eve and their eventual offspring came into possession of little kingdoms of their own.� Regrettably both eventually set the intentions of their little �kingdoms� against the intentions of God.� The story of the bible is how God set about dealing with the resulting global catastrophe at great personal cost.

After all is said and done, the Bible is a love story of a great, good, and loving God rescuing his red-handed rebel children from self-induced calamity.� But they still have a choice and they need their �owners-manual,� the word of God, to make the right one.� Otherwise, how can I know I�m on the right track?

What kind of person am I becoming?

C. S. Lewis wrote,

�It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – These are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.�^[xiii]

Like it or not, we are all in a spiritual formation program.� Either we are moving toward becoming �a creature which, if you see it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship�� or alternatively, �a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.�� There are no other choices for man before God according to scripture, yet many insist there is a third way, which ought to count as well.� The �nice� option.

�Nice� won�t cut it.� Sorry.

Who wouldn�t agree that being nice is a good thing?� But is being nice, really nice, really nice your whole life, enough to reap a spiritual harvest in the afterlife?� This seems to be a highly reasonable and logical path that smooths relationships and makes everything more tolerable.� Right?� Several problems immediately present themselves:

How do you define �nice?�� First, the qualitative side.� One person�s �nice� may not be another�s, especially when considering widely disparate cultures, creeds, and religions.� There is no universal �nice� code that applies to everyone.� �Nice� is a highly subjective concept that is impossible to measure objectively in order to rank people and grant a final �score� to determine who loses and who wins.

How much �nice� is enough?� Then there is the quantitative issue of how much is enough to achieve the desired goal of satisfying some objective standard.� Trouble is, there is no achievable objective standard by which all human behavior can be ranked and scored.� Oh sure, we have the Ten Commandments.� But then, have you ever met anyone who has perfectly met its requirements for their entire lives?� How about for one year?� One week? One day? One hour? One minute?� And even if they could obey the �Big Ten� to the letter but stumbled just once, what do they do with the disturbing verse in scripture that hangs like a �Sword of Damocles� over their head, �For whoever keeps the whole�law and yet�stumbles in one point, he has become�guilty of all.� [4]� Now that�s a problem even for the nicest of the nice.� Remember, Jesus raised the bar even for the religious leaders of his day when he declared the intent to sin to be as serious as the act of sin, �You have heard that it was said, �You shall not commit adultery�;�but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman�with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.� [5]

How could I be sure I�m �nice� enough to get into heaven?� Imagine if you told twenty two perfectly sane men to go onto a field of grass with no lines, no goal posts, no rules, no referees and no scoreboard and told them to play football.� But isn�t trying to behave nicely in order to gain some kind of eternal credit the same thing?� Talk about a moving target.� To make any sense, a game has to have objective standards, how much more so for a system that would determine the eternal destinies of tens of billions of people?

So what happens if I stop being �nice� even for a short while, will that mean I�m done for?� Can anyone be �nice� all the time?� What about lapses?� Do I lose all previous �credits� and have to start over?� What if I remain �not nice� for a while and then die?� What then? �The uncertainties in this �option� are simply untenable, yet millions try to meet its demands every day.

God is gently urging us to move on from settling for �nice� as a means of getting by in life, and to graduate to our ultimate calling as members of God�s kingdom based on Christ�s merits–not ours.� This calls for a painfully challenging �paradigm shift� in our thinking.� C. S. Lewis put it this way, �It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird:� it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.� We are like eggs at present.� And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg.� We must be hatched or go bad.�

Finally, at the heart of the �nice� system lies the false presumption that human merit or demerit counts at all in God�s salvation program.� It calls for him to grade on some kind of curve, knowing that all men are imperfect.� That implies that he must fill his heaven with people who are to one degree or another unholy.� But didn�t Jesus say, ��you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.� [6]� Bottom line, if the requirement for us to reach heaven has anything to do with our �works,� heaven will be a lonely place indeed.

Fortunately for us, God has a much better idea than works of the Law, otherwise known as personal merit or demerit.� All the Law does is tell us how far short of God�s perfection we have come, ��because�by the works�of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; forthrough the Law�comes�the knowledge of sin.� But now apart�from the Law�the�righteousness of God has been manifested, being�witnessed by the Law and the Prophets,�even�the�righteousness of God through�faith�in Jesus Christ for�all those�who believe;� [7]

Be grateful for the �But now� part of that verse.� It contains cosmic dynamite.� More on that later in this book.

Two �species,� two destinies

Scripture boils it down to two types or species of man, �For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.� A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him.�^[8]

Is my life largely (not perfectly of course) reflecting the positive attributes of living God�s way, depending on the life of the Spirit, having affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity, compassion in the heart, basic holiness, loyal commitments, not needing to force my way in life?� Or alternatively, am I selfish, self-interested, emotions-driven, erratic, compulsive, focused on getting my own way, mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls �necessities.�

Bottom line, am I living in the Spirit and therefore exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit or living by the flesh and exhibiting its fruits?� It is a direct reflection of the nature within and can�t be faked, although people try to all the time.� Living God�s way, it�s never about you, always about the Holy Spirit, who is (or is not) having His way in your life.

The kind of person I am becoming is a direct reflection of my belief system about God.� Many of the Jewish leaders of Jesus� day saw a vengeful, demanding, critical God�a God who wasn�t good.� Jesus saw the exact opposite.� This dichotomy formed the basis for all the conflict Jesus experienced with the religious people of His day.� It has gone on all the way back to Cain and Abel just one generation after man�s creation resulting in the first murder.� It�s an old war and it is still raging.� It began with Satan�s salacious accusation of God to Adam and Eve that God�s intentions are not good, that He doesn�t have a good heart.� They bought that lie, hook line and sinker back then, and the cosmos has never been the same since.

Here is what James Richards, in his book, �Grace, the Power to Change� had to say about this:

�Jesus said, �Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.� This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: �Love others as well as you love yourself.� These two commands are pegs; everything in God�s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.� [9]

Richards continues, �Everything I believe must be interpreted in light of these two commandments.� In other words, if what I believe does not make me love God and people more, it is not true.� Likewise, if I just did these two things, I would fulfill every expectation that God has ever had for me.� Look at your belief system.� Does everything you believe make you love God and love people?� If what you believe makes you afraid of God or critical and fault-finding with others, it is not true.� If you can interpret any scripture in a way that violates this principle, then you can never see God as Jesus did.� [xiv]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Soviet gulag following World War II.� He entered prison a die-hard Communist, believing that a new social order could create new people.� But it was in prison that he discovered that the core issue was not the economic or government system. Solzhenitsyn writes,

“It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.� Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”

Why am I Here?� Quite simply to connect with my spiritual origin, God Himself, and surrender to his plan, purpose, and formation program for me.� And where might his plan be taking me?

Where am I going?

The simple answer is, �it depends.�� That is, your destiny is contingent upon choices you make in the here-and-now.� We take this up in detail in the chapters of this book to follow, but suffice to say, you are one hundred percent in charge of the selection of your destination in the afterlife.� One of the most comforting passages in the bible goes like his, �I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God�so that you may know that you have eternal life.� [10]� God does not want to leave us hanging on this supremely important matter, but he points out that his assurance is contingent, he says, �And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life,�and this life is in his Son.�Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.� [11]

So, where am I going?

If I make the right choice now, these words of Jesus assure us, �Do not let your hearts be troubled.�You believe�in God;�believe also in me.�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.�You know the way to the place where I am going.� [12]� The meaning is plain.� If we believe in Jesus, he promises to pick us up and take us to where he is, with God the Father.

There is another choice, or series of choices, that lead to a very different result�outer darkness.� Dallas Willard warns in his book, Renovation of the Heart,

�Outer darkness is for one who, everything said, wants it, whose entire orientation has slowly and firmly set itself against God and therefore against how the universe actually is.� It is for those who are disastrously in error about their own life and their place before God and man.�

So how do I get there, to whichever there I choose?

How will I get there?

As to the �not-God� choice that leads to outer darkness, nothing at all needs to be done.� It is sadly, mankind�s default position.� It has been said that coasting is a downhill process.� In matters of spiritual destinations, most people prefer to �drift� into the next life as though floating lazily down a river.� Not advisable.� Trusting in �fate� is quite simply, spiritual malpractice�

�Que sera, sera

Whatever will be, will be

The future’s not ours to see

Que sera, sera

What will be, will be� [xv]

Turns out that catchy little ballad, first made famous by Doris Day, is very bad advice indeed for those who are averse to wagering their eternal lives on hopeful speculation.� You wouldn�t buy a refrigerator, or make a financial investment on that basis, why bet your spiritual future by riding the knife edge of lifelong indecision and daydreams?� Jesus minced no words when it came to such wishful thinking�

�This [life] is war, and there is no neutral ground. If you�re not on my side, you�re the enemy; if you�re not helping, you�re making things worse.� ^[13]

And again he said, �Stand up for me against world opinion and I�ll stand up for you before my Father in heaven. If you turn tail and run, do you think I�ll cover for you?� Don�t think I�ve come to make life cozy. I�ve come to cut�make a sharp knife-cut between son and father, daughter and mother, bride and mother-in-law�cut through these cozy domestic arrangements and free you for God. Well-meaning family members can be your worst enemies. If you prefer father or mother over me, you don�t deserve me. If you prefer son or daughter over me, you don�t deserve me.� If you don�t go all the way with me, through thick and thin, you don�t deserve me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you�ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you�ll find both yourself and me.�^[14]

This is no time for passive resignation, but active searching, finding, hoping.� Neither are we talking about �blind faith,� a common misconception.� Eugene Peterson wisely observed,

�Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying.� And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time.� ^[xvi]