Facing reality

The other day I was chatting with my daughters about a friend of ours who has cancer and who has been told by the doctors that her time remaining is short. She is dying. I looked at my seven-year old who heard that information with as much interest as if I had just described a political debate, and asked her, "Do you know that you're dying?" Her eyes focused and she screwed up her face with that "Dad, don't be such a dork" look that your kids sometimes get. You'd have thought I told her we were flying to Neptune tomorrow. I explained to her the certainty of death leaving taxes for another time.

Some might consider me cruel or at best macabre for telling my seven-year old little girl such a thing. "Why, she'll have nightmares!" I don't think so. You see, my little girl has the same confidence that my dying friend, Nancy Anderson, has.  Read what Nancy posted on her CaringBridge Journal recently:

I am confident that I will go to heaven.  This has nothing to do with me being a good person.  Lately a lot of people have given me an abundance of love and affirmation about the value of my life and the positive impact I have had.  This is important to me, and it encourages me.  God created us to live significant, impactful lives. But when it comes to goodness, there is no meaningful scale. Basically there is God and there is us.  He is good.  We are made in his image, but we are marred by the brokenness of sin.  He is in a completely different dimension when it comes to goodness.  I love the verse in 2 Corinthians 5:21 which says, “God made him [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 

I love the analogy that trying to reach God through my own goodness is like trying to swim from here to Hawaii. Some really great swimmers might make it several miles, while others would have to bail much earlier, but no one is going to make it to Hawaii. In the same way, my only hope of heaven is that I have a Savior who will take me there.

Some folks rail upon Christians for being exclusive. We are not. We simply declare what God has declared to us in his word.  Jesus said with crystal clarity

I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

~ John 14:6

An audacious claim. It is either absolutely true or it is absolutely false. Shortly after John documented his account of Christ's life in what we have come to know as John's Gospel, he wrote a letter. Therein he makes more audacious claims:

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life--and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us--what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.

~ 1 John 1:1-3

Those words jump out. John is testifying as though he were in a courtroom as a witness. He is speaking of what he had seen and declaring what was manifested (made known) to him. Again, either his testimony is true, or he is daft.


I can hear you say, "There have been a lot of folks that have said they are speaking for God." That's true. But John was with Christ. He heard, saw, and touched him, and John states that Jesus is the payment for our sins, our rebellion against and hostility toward God (2:2). But John goes even further. He makes plain that if you don't believe him, it's not him you disbelieve but God.

The one who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that that God has given concerning His Son.  And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.

~ 1 John 5:10-11

The audacity continues in the next verse. "Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life."


How serious is this? Nancy is dying, but so are you. She just happens to know that her death is close at hand. For her, death is not something to fear because she knows with certainty that she will live forever in the glorious presence of God, not because of what she has done but because she believes that what happened to Jesus Christ on a cross 2000 years ago credits to her. It's that same confidence my daughter has.


It's the same confidence you can have, too. Consider it.