In writing about Live Well, as most of my reader know or surmise, the foundation of that aspiration is the Christian God. I believe deeply, and without reservation, that if each person came to know Him, the world would indeed be a better place.
I am aware, of course, that both my hope is not likely and that many do not see knowing God as a goal for their life. But, as good people, they do want other things. Some want financial prosperity. Some noble souls want peace. A few want to avoid pain. Others want to simply avoid death. There are other goals like power, domination, privacy, secrecy or joy.
C.S. Lewis addresses this in his book Reflections on the Psalms when he writes about the fact that the Psalms do not really focus much on heaven or even the afterlife. For Lewis, the problem with most of us is that we focus on too many other things. For Christians, the focus can often be on Heaven. Or, it’s contrary…living to avoid the pain of Hell. In either case, its a focus on the afterlife, and then how to live in order to get the best afterlife possible.
Lewis writes, however, “It is surely, therefore, very possible that when God began to reveal HImself to men, to show them that He and nothing else is the true goal and the satisfaction of their need, and that He has a claim upon them simply by being what He is, quite apart from anything He can bestow or deny, it might have been absolutely necessary that this revelation should not begging with any hint of future Beatitude or Perdition.” (emphasis added)
This concept becomes highlighted in this season. You often hear people talking or singing about peace. And if not peace, then about possessions. On the former, as I have written before, God’s peace and our peace are actually vastly different things. Christian speakers about wealth, the “prosperity gospel” crowd equally misses the point about what Jesus meant in talking about “abundant life.” They easily ignore Paul’s teaching while in chains and recovering from his most recent whipping.
As Lewis explains, though we replace desire for God with desires for peace or prosperity, God will often reduce both in order to turn us back to the chief good–God Himself. “Century after century, by blows which seem to us merciless, by defeat, deportation, and massacre, it was hammered into the Jews that earthly prosperity is not in fact the certain, or even the probable, reward of seeing God. Every hope was disappointed. The lesson taught in the Book of Job was grimly illustrated in practice. Such experience would surely have destroyed a religion which had no other centre than the hope of peace and plenty…but the astonishing thing is that the religion is not destroyed.”
Thousands of years later, God still calls to each of us to the greatest goal…Himself. This Christmas season, that’s a gift worth giving and receiving.