Recently I heard a pastor preach a sermon that sounded distantly familiar to me, a sermon I had heard many times in my childhood.  The thesis went something like—the singular important thing about the Christian faith is that we pray the prayer to receive Jesus into our hearts so that we can spend eternity (meaning the life after this one) with him in heaven and not in hell. 

The pastor said pretty clearly that the fact that we might be good to our families or coworkers or that we might be generous with our time or money really does not matter in the grand scheme of things.  The only thing that matters is that we have prayed the prayer to receive Christ and that we know we are going to heaven when we die. He ended his sermon with a sample prayer, the prayer that gets us into heaven, the prayer that keeps us out of hell.

Many of my Christian friends would say this type of sermon sends a strong message of salvation, a needed balm in a world gone wrong. I acknowledge that praying a prayer that confesses one’s failures and recognizes one’s need for God is a starting place. But is that the end?  I’ve prayed the prayer. I’m good. I’m going to heaven. I am no longer headed to hell. Whew!  What a relief. Glad that’s over.

I wanted to stand up and shout, “Jesus did not present the good news of his kingdom this way!”   

How did the good news of God’s kingdom—God coming to be with us and to rescue us from darkness in our everyday lives and beyond—become so depressing?  How did it become only about what happens to us when we die?  How did it become about death instead of about life?  

I remember being confused by this pray-the-prayer-so-you-can-go-to-heaven preaching when I was a teenager.  Although I had heard this kind of sermon over and over again, I had parents who lived out their faith throughout the hours of each day.  I didn’t get the impression, from them at least, that faith was about praying the prayer and then going about your business without much thought of God.

In high school I recall a walk with a friend whose spiritual condition was to me uncertain. I conjured up the courage to ask her if she knew Jesus.  “Yea, I did that.” she said. “The prayer. With my dad. In my room. When I was 5.”

I remember feeling perplexed at her answer and not knowing quite what to say. I think I said something like, “Oh good. I just wanted to make sure.” But I was puzzled by her notion that knowing Jesus was a prayer she prayed –in her room—when she was 5.

When Jesus presented the news of the good life he came to offer, he told a woman who was drawing water at a well, “If you knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water” (John 4:10). He goes on, “ . . .those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again.”  He goes further, “It [the water] becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life” (14).

Her response was desperate, “Please sir, give me this water!” (15).

And he did, and the act of drinking Jesus in changed her.  She no longer had to give into her impulse to bounce from man to man to try to fill up the longing in her heart but became filled up with God-love, the kind of love that transforms you and gives you confidence. Her joy in drinking in this thirst-quenching God-water became like a fresh spring bubbling out of her so that she couldn’t help but tell everyone she knew –that God can fill your every longing, that you need never feel alone again, that he will walk with you every day.

Not once in his lengthy interaction with her did Jesus talk about her impending death. Or about getting into heaven. Or about praying the prayer. Or about not going to hell when she died.

Later Jesus told a crowd of people who kept following him around to stop being so concerned about perishable food, and to seek true bread, “The true bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33).

He said this because Jesus is Real Life; person after person on this planet, so many people I know, would say if you asked them that until they awakened to the love of Jesus, they hadn’t really lived. Perhaps that’s why Jesus’s audience responded, “Sir, give us that bread every day” (34).

Jesus offered it to them, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again.  Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (35).

What he is trying to say is—nothing can fill you. No one can complete you. Your boyfriend or girlfriend can’t. Your job can’t. Neither can your college degrees, sex, alcohol, good concerts, great movies, friends, kids, spouses, parents –nothing. Only God can satisfy your human longings. 

And God came down through me, Jesus says. I am your source of joy and happiness.  Believe what I say, and you will awaken to true love, God-love, Real Love.      

And when we awaken to this kind of love, we begin to crave knowing God more, and we change by knowing him more.  When we eat and drink God-love, it frees us so that we no longer have to be angry, or defensive, or self-protective, or desperate, or judgmental, or insecure.  When we know the goodness of God-love every day, we can flourish and become who we are meant to be. 

We can live without fear of what people think of us because we know that God thinks highly of us. We can use what we’ve been given to help others generously without expecting favors in return. We can even take all the insults that come our way because He’s with us helping us to handle the hardship, and he is qualified to help us because he faced more insults than we will ever face.

I am writing this essay several days after my church entered into the season of Lent, a time of self-examination, contemplation and lament, where we fast from favorite foods in order to feel, to a small degree, the sufferings of Jesus on his journey to the cross.  Feeling physical hunger reminds us that what we are really hungry for is God, his friendship, his direction, his presence, and even his correction. 

In the Lenten reading for today Jesus tried to explain to a group of people what he meant by saying, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus’s listeners struggled because Jesus called his own flesh “bread” and asked them to eat it. They couldn’t get past a literal cannibalistic interpretation.  They couldn’t stomach (so to speak) the suggestion of something so horrid. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52).

And then, one of the saddest lines in all of scripture, “After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him” (66).  Extremely sad, but at least they realized one thing, that life with Jesus is not a one-time prayer; it’s a walk, a journey where we follow him—now and tomorrow and the next day and the next, right on into our own individual deaths, and then into our lives after death.

Recently, I led a small group of Christian friends in a discussion where I asked them to imagine their lives without Jesus. After a moment of silence, one friend spoke up saying she would not be here—that she would have committed suicide, something she had tried before. Another said he would likely not be here either, that alcoholism would have taken him out. Another said he too may not be around –he just didn’t see the point of life and lived recklessly, caring little about himself or others. Another said she’d be paralyzed by bitterness over a hard past. I shared that I would be a total bitch.

That Jesus transforms lives in response to us letting him in is the most convincing part about the Christian faith. My personal vision of what I would be like without Jesus in my everyday life is so chilling to me that it makes me hang on to him with a vise grip.  My friend and I joke that the old hymn, “I Need Thee Every Hour” should be rewritten for her and me to say, “I Need Thee Every Five Minutes.” 

For awakening to God-love “is not just something that happens to us at the beginning of our spiritual lives.  We need the gift of awakening each day,” says John Ortberg in his latest book, Eternity is Now in Session. Ortberg points out that Jesus tells Peter to “follow me” at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, but three years later in John 21, Jesus calls him to “follow me” again “showing perhaps that in the spiritual life, we’re never really done. As long as we’re alive, the journey toward Jesus is never finished” (150).

The most attractive part of life with Jesus is not that I get to go to heaven when I die, but rather that I receive the companionship of God while I live! This daily walk with God is the water that quenches my thirst and the bread that satisfies my hunger. That I need never be alone again—today, tomorrow, and in my death sometime in the future—comforts me and changes me—every day.