the race and the rescue

imagine if God said to you that there would be a running race in two weeks. a 100m race and the loser would go to hell and the winner would go to heaven. can you imagine how dramatically that would affect your life for those two weeks? you'd only eat healthily, you'd run in any weather and train as hard as possible in the time-frame.

if. you. lose.
you. go. to. hell.

and don't you wish in a small way that things were that urgent? or felt that urgent. because we are dealing with things of that magnitude, but it all feels a little vague at times.

the daily faith in the promises of God and the mortification of sin (the parts we play on top of the grace and cross of Christ) are the way we gain heaven and avoid hell, but it's not long before we tire of doing them. like salvation is too easy to be bothered with or something.

and i thought to myself that following Jesus is tough and it's relentless and sin's always at my door and my mind and values and priorities and perspective are always wandering. and i thought 'i can't handle this, i can't keep doing this my whole life and keep failing my whole life'.

and i thought - yes, knowing Jesus is amazing sweet joy.
but really, what's going on here is that God is saving real people from real evil and real destruction. and our whole lives here are not a game and we're not entitled to any comfort or respite, but every day is a day to hold on tightly to the rescue God has provided.
i don't know where the idea came from that we need to be happy and comfortable for Jesus to be worthwhile. i think maybe people have been selling the gospel wrongly. if God said He would forgive us and take us to be with Him forever, but in the mean time we'd be in agony for eighty years or however long we have, that would be infinitely worthwhile!

we are in an evil darkness being saved from an eternal hell.
why don't we have more of a war-time mindset?
i suppose the devil is the enemy or urgency.

and maybe Aldous Huxley had it right in Brave New World Revisited, when he noted that the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

when i think these things it makes me pray to feel the magnitude of the reality i'm a part of.