Eternity Here and Now
This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
John 17:3
As part of my devotional time a while ago, I read a book by John Ortberg titled, Eternity is Now in Session. The premise behind it is rooted in the verse noted above where Jesus defines eternal life with great precision, yet in a way that has been largely lost in our day.
Eternal life = Knowing God
THIS is eternal life.
Mark it well – it isn’t about the future. It’s about the present!
It’s not something far away in outer space that we can only hope to experience after we die. Though it certainly includes that!
No. What we’re offered is something much bigger and far more amazing. The gospel Jesus preached is the Good News that this eternal kind of life is available now.
Dallas Willard puts it this way: “Eternal life in the individual does not begin after death, but at the point where God touches the individual with redeeming grace and draws them into a life interactive with himself and his kingdom.”
Notice the phrase, “…a life interactive with himself…” Again, this isn’t merely about the there and then but about the here and now.
As Ortberg observes, “Somewhere along the way the power and promise of the gospel has been lost. We’ve shrunk it down by making it solely about going to heaven when we die, and in so doing, we’ve shrunk God down too.”
Living Eternal Life
But what if we took Jesus’ words seriously? What if we stopped thinking about eternal life as something we can only experience after we die? What if we stopped defining Christians in terms of having the right theology ABOUT God and instead focused on being disciples who are learning to KNOW God?
Much of the time we’ve been taught to view eternal life as a destination we’ll reach one day. We think we’re simply biding our time until we get there when the real enjoyment will begin. But what if we’re missing out along the way?
The Good News – the gospel – is simply this: the Kingdom of God has now, through Jesus, become available for ordinary human beings to live in.
It’s here. Now. And you can live in it if you want.
Here's why that’s so important. Disciples who live in the present reality of the Kingdom increasingly lean into the glorious power of the Kingdom. And the capacity to live that sort of “eternal life” is amazingly attractive to a lost and broken world.
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