July 21, 2010
I'm Glad You Asked
I produce a newsletter for our church for the sole purpose of helping us get better acquainted with one another. Every week I interview a member and then write a brief biography and narrative about them. Lately a few of the folks have been thinking ahead about what they might say if I were to call them for an interview. Prefacing their answers they say, “I thought you might be asking that.” When I die I won’t be a featured interview in a heavenly newsletter, but what if I was? With the good and the bad that I’ve done in life, I wonder if I would have the where-with-all to say, “I thought you might be asking that.”
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Gail;
-----Such an occasion would bode well about how you lived your life today. “...As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:12) “...For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jer 31:34) So unless there is no distance between the east and the west in heaven, and unless the Lord will neither listen in on the interview nor read the heavenly newsletter, you will have no sins to report, not even mistakes. I understand I Corinthians 3:11-15 is written about men preaching and teaching the things of Christ and about the followings they acquire. I know it means that they all build their teaching upon no foundation other than Jesus Christ and that some of what they teach might be truly correct, while some might be at least slightly flawed, and some might be completely inaccurate. But the fire revealing what they taught, whether it survives or is burned out of existence on that day, I understand as also a principle.
-----We teach with words. We teach with actions. And we teach with attitudes. The very way we live our lives builds what we believe about Christ, behavior, and character upon the foundation. So it is not just the words of teachers that build there as gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw. For our very actions, character, thoughts, and feelings represent our perceptions of the way things are as much as does the intellectual spouting of words. And they probably do even more. I have come to believe that what of our personalities and characters today truly and purely aligns with the way things actually are in heaven will continue in heaven. It will part of our personalities and characters there, having emerged with us from the fire of that day as would have gold, silver, and precious stones. That will be rewarding. Yet the wrong in some of our ways will be burned from those ways to nothing, and our totally wrong ways will be totally burned away. These will be our losses.
-----So as far as I can figure, there will be no sin or mistakes of our past life in heaven either for us to remember, or for God to remember. We will come through the fire by His grace. But so will some of our work. Some of it will be inside our selves having been done to our characters and personalities, and some of it will be inside the others in heaven whom we effected here. Therefore, if there would be anything of this life you could present for a newsletter in heaven, it would only be what you had held in true alignment with His heaven. Then if you might have the where-with-all to say, “I thought you might be asking that,” this expression could only have welled up from the gold, silver, and precious stones of your work today.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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