Romans 6:22-23
22. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.
23. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
If I live my life in sin, my life will only end in death. If, however, I live my life in service to God, then the result of my life will be eternal life.
Sin has its natural consequences. When I turn away from others in order to serve only myself, I will not know true happiness. My selfish calculations may produce physical pleasures or material wealth, like the productions of some mechanism -- 1 plus 1 equals 2, pull that lever and watch this flip. But, life as a self-centered machine will only result in the deadening of my deeper humanity. The pleasures will be fleeting and the human relationships will not last. The material wealth can be lost or taken away and the holding tightly onto it will make me overly stressed. And, as I only lived for this earthly life, when this earthly life is over, I will agonize at its ending. These are the wages that I can expect from the system into which I placed myself, a cog in a machine.
Selfless love also has its consequences. If I choose not to go about coldly calculating "what's in it for me", but, rather, think of the other, love the other and give of myself freely... then I enter into deep relationship and not mechanics. Giving without expecting anything in return is the highest human grace. Like mercy -- which is not deserved, but freely given, or else it would not be mercy. To do what is right because it is right and pleasing to God without striving for any recompense or reward -- that is a profoundly human ability. The seeds we sow grow into holiness, not tangible or marketable, but deep and true and lasting. Joy that completely satisfies is to love one's neighbor as oneself and to love the Lord our God with all that we have and all that we are.
What we receive from this kind of life does not come in wages. Rather, what we receive is gift. The gracious generosity of God pouring unto us blessings of the Divine, for no other reason than God is Love -- blessings that cannot be articulated, formulated, manipulated, or calculated. Sheer gift -- not because we deserve it, but because we have opened ourselves to receive what is pouring unto us always. And when our earthly lives are over, because we have known something of the divine, the eternal, we will experience the eternal. And what that is actually like cannot be figured out or rationally proven. It can only be believed. We do not try to live holiness in order to receive a reward of everlasting bliss -- for if that is our calculation, surely we will fail. The only way that divine bliss, eternal life, can be received is through faith. It's through not knowing. It's through total surrender to God, come what may. This is the life of Christ, this is Jesus Christ, and this is what it is to be Christian.
If we knew the certainty of Heaven, then Heaven would not exist. For Heaven is gift and Mystery and does not come when equations line up. We leap. And... if we are wrong and there is no Heaven, we will not agonize, we will be satisfied, for we will have given our lives freely, in true love and true joy. We are not slaves. We are gift.
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