I sometimes wonder what will remain of me after death.
Take away my possessions, my body, my accomplishments, my routines, and everything else that belongs to this physical life. What is left?
I am.
Not merely my consciousness, because consciousness can disappear for a time. Every night we sleep. We lose awareness, yet we do not cease to exist. And if there is such a thing as sleep after death until the return of Christ, the passage of time would not matter to the person experiencing it. One moment we close our eyes in death; the next moment we are with the Lord.
Eternity does not have to operate according to our clocks.
What remains is the soul—the person who is there to experience God.
And that is how I imagine eternity: not as the disappearance of myself, but as the fulfillment of myself in the presence of God. I expect that somehow I will still recognize the person I was on earth. Personality will not simply vanish. But I also expect transformation.
Whatever was incomplete will be completed.
Whatever was wounded will be healed.
Whatever hunger remained will finally be satisfied.
Because God Himself will fulfill what we have spent our lives trying to satisfy with everything else.
The Longing Beneath Our Desires
I have come to think that many of our earthly desires are attempts to fill the emptiness created by our separation from God.
We seek money.
Security.
Pleasure.
Recognition.
Control.
Relationships.
Achievement.
Comfort.
None of those things are necessarily evil. But none of them can carry the weight we place upon them.
There is a yearning inside us that only God can fill.
Everything else is longing.
We keep trying to satisfy a spiritual hunger with physical things, emotional experiences, accomplishments, other people, or even our own thoughts. They may satisfy us temporarily, but eventually the hunger returns.
There is a reason.
We were made for relationship with God.
“Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.”
Psalm 16:11, KJV
If God simply overwhelmed us with His presence from the beginning, however, there would be something missing.
Choice.
Love requires freedom.
Relationship requires the possibility of rejection.
If there were no alternative to God, there would be no meaningful decision to depend upon Him.
And that leads me to how I increasingly understand this life.
This Life Is the Choosing Ground
Earthly life is fundamentally our choosing ground.
Again and again, God places the same basic choice before us:
God or self.
Dependence or independence.
His desires or mine.
His wisdom or mine.
His will or mine.
It appears in thousands of different forms, but underneath them I think the choice is remarkably consistent.
Do I trust God, or do I trust myself?
God presents Himself to us. He offers salvation, relationship, and ultimately eternity in His presence. But He does not force Himself upon us.
We choose.
And we continue choosing.
Not once.
Every day.
Every hour.
Sometimes every few minutes.
That does not mean salvation is earned through a lifetime of perfect decisions. We all fail. I certainly do.
It means the direction of the heart matters.
When I fail, God remains there. His love has not disappeared. I can recognize what I have done, turn back toward Him, and say, “Father, I was wrong.”
He receives me again.
That is repentance as I have increasingly come to understand it.
It is not merely feeling guilty.
It is recognizing that without His presence, I wander.
I need Him again today.
And tomorrow.
And the day after that.
Who Are You Talking To?
There is one very practical question that reveals something about our relationship with God:
Who are you talking to inside your own mind?
Is your entire internal dialogue a conversation with yourself?
Or is God part of it?
That question has become increasingly important to me.
When I speak with God throughout the day, something changes. I am no longer trapped entirely inside my own thoughts.
I can thank Him.
Ask Him.
Listen.
Complain.
Apologize.
Wonder.
Share something that made me laugh.
Ask what I should do next.
Sometimes there are words. Sometimes there is simply an awareness of His presence.
But He is there.
And when that happens, life becomes relational rather than solitary.
God’s side of that relationship is love.
He communicates through everything we experience. Circumstances, Scripture, other people, conscience, joy, pain, success, failure—all of life becomes something we can bring into the relationship.
That does not mean every event is easy to interpret.
It does mean nothing has to be wasted.
Every choice can move us nearer to Him or create distance.
The Heart Knows When It Wants to Hide
Conscience often reveals that movement.
When something is good, there is usually no fear in bringing it before God.
We want to share it.
When something is wrong, we often want to hide.
That instinct is ancient.
After Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they hid themselves from His presence.
We still do the same thing.
The details change, but the movement of the heart remains recognizable.
When I begin hiding parts of my life from God, something has gone wrong.
Because ultimately the problem is not merely behavior.
It is the heart.
Without God, our own desires become corrupted.
We begin making ourselves the center.
What do I want?
What will make me comfortable?
What will protect me?
What will make me important?
What will give me control?
That last one may be among the most powerful.
Why We Resist What We Need
Why do we keep reaching for substitutes when the relationship we really need is available?
Because we want control.
God requires surrender.
We would often prefer God to assist us in the life we have designed rather than surrender the design to Him.
But the One who created us knows what we actually need.
Surrender means accepting that even when we do not understand.
“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”
Proverbs 3:5, KJV
That verse becomes considerably harder when we actually practice it.
Trust is easy when God’s path agrees with ours.
Surrender begins when it does not.
There are circumstances I cannot explain.
Things I would not have chosen.
Questions I cannot answer.
Places where I simply do not know what God is doing.
Surrender says: I still trust You.
But surrender is not passive resignation.
We cannot simply stop living.
There is always another choice ahead of us, even when we choose with our eyes closed.
We still get out of bed.
We still speak.
We still help someone.
We still forgive.
We still decide what to pursue and what to leave behind.
We still ask, “Father, what now?”
We are here for God’s purpose.
And I have increasingly come to believe that His greatest purpose for us is simpler than we often make it.
Our Greatest Purpose
Our greatest purpose is to walk with God.
Everything else comes afterward.
We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to discover our calling.
What am I supposed to accomplish?
What work should I do?
What ministry should I have?
What difference am I supposed to make?
Those can be worthwhile questions.
But perhaps the first question is much simpler:
Will this bring me closer to God or create distance from Him?
If something draws us nearer to Him, pursue it.
If something creates distance, be willing to leave it.
That principle does not answer every difficult decision automatically. But it changes the way we approach them.
The goal is not simply a successful life.
The goal is relationship.
Jesus said:
“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”
John 15:5, KJV
Notice the order.
Abide first.
Fruit follows.
God Is Holiness
We often think of holiness primarily as behavior.
Do this.
Do not do that.
Resist this temptation.
Practice this virtue.
But when I was asked what holiness ultimately is, my answer became very simple:
God is holiness.
That changes the emphasis.
Holiness is not something I manufacture through sufficient discipline.
I move toward holiness by moving toward Him.
Relationship changes the heart.
The deeper the relationship becomes, the greater the change.
That does not eliminate discipline or obedience. It changes their source.
Instead of spending our entire lives forcing ourselves to behave like people who love God, we increasingly become people who actually desire what brings us nearer to Him.
The heart changes.
That may be one of the greatest differences between religion and relationship.
Religion can sometimes become an attempt to control behavior from the outside.
Relationship changes desire from within.
The Greatest Obstacles
If relationship with God is the center, then perhaps the greatest obstacles are not the obvious ones.
They are self-reliance and pride.
Both are godless because both say, in one form or another:
I can do this myself.
I know what I need.
I know where I am going.
I will decide what is best.
I will control the outcome.
And God patiently waits.
Not because He has abandoned us.
Because He allows us to choose.
I have lived enough life to know that I am not nearly as capable of directing myself as I once imagined.
My understanding is limited.
My desires can mislead me.
My certainty can be wrong.
My plans can collapse.
But God remains.
So perhaps the deepest spiritual question is not whether I understand everything correctly.
Perhaps it is not even whether I successfully avoid every failure.
Maybe the question is much simpler:
Who am I depending on?
Myself?
Or God?
This life is the choosing ground.
And the choice does not happen only once.
It happens today.
In the next thought.
The next conversation.
The next disappointment.
The next temptation.
The next decision we do not understand.
The next moment when we can either retreat into ourselves or turn toward Him.
And perhaps that is why experiencing God is already the best part of this life.
We do not have to wait for eternity to begin knowing Him.
Eternity will bring the fullness.
But the relationship begins now.
Everything else is longing.