This Life Only

If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.

Being baptized into Christ Jesus is a “both/and” condition, for you have His blessing in this life as He carries you through all troubles in love, and in the life to come as He carries you into the bosom of the Father where eternal joys are found.

Following his conversion, the Apostle Paul lived day by day with his eye on the goal of eternal life. It was this hope that drove him forward in such devotion that he underwent severe suffering at the hands of men, and yet endured with love and grace, being at peace with all men.

The separation between life in this world and life in the world to come can be a difficult thing; in fact it is impossible without the grace of God in Christ Jesus. It is your nature to be drawn toward the things of this world as if they are permanent; as if they are the source of true joy and satisfaction.

Only as the Gospel of your dear Lord Jesus Christ rings into your ears - how He suffered and died and rose again for your sin and the sin of the world – does the prospect of enduring this life patiently and looking forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come have any appeal.

This appeal is to your new nature as Christ Jesus abides in you, urging you to flee from sin and seek asylum in His merits and righteousness, which can never be taken away. This righteousness avails before God your Father in heaven to the extent both body and soul are preserved for eternity.

The full nature and extent of your salvation is not merely a pie-in-the-sky platitudinous undertaking, but a reality that draws you bodily from earth below to heaven above, because it is your bodily Christ – your risen and living Christ in the Flesh - Who feeds you with His own body and blood in the sacrament of the altar, Who is ever-so-patiently refining and forgiving.

Because the joys of this life are often overwhelming, it may at times seem as if you would rather stay here forever. But those joys are only a small foretaste of the true joy that awaits you. You are not counted among those who are most to be pitied, but among those who are most blessed. You will be delivered from all evil as you abide in Christ.
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