Welcometo my first blog here on conversantlife. How does one even begin a blog of this sort? Posting a first blog often seems to set thetone of the whole course of one's blog. To be quite honest, this makes me a bit nervous, partially because I aman extreme perfectionist, and partially because people may then see me as beinga certain way and then I may have to actually live up to those standards.

At any rate, here we go, but first my slightly apprehensive disclaimer that I hope that my blog will continually be evolving, much like my own self and thought. I hope that my participation in this site will be a learning experience, and I view it as a bit of an experiment. So here we go with some recent thoughts I have been having as I do some reading.

As pastors, and even Christians, we sometimes wonder about the motives of others. Sometimes we begin to wonder whether others simply follow Christ to escape from hell and receive a "reward." Some jokingly call this sort of mentality "fire insurance," meaning that by following, one can escape the horrible fires of hell.

However, I ran across a quote from C.S. Lewis not long ago when I was reading that I thought addressed this issue very well. Lewis speaks of how we often worry about people viewing heaven as a bribe, instead of living out an embodied kingdom of God here and now. It is as if people try to take heaven by force, and are selfish about it. However, Lewis addresses this by saying:

"It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object."

C.S. Lewis here points out that we need not worry about people's motives for only the pure in heart are the ones who are able to truly desire what is true and good. Those desiring the end result without truly following the life laid out by the revolutionary man named Jesus do not have a self-sacrificing life in mind, but a selfish end-result in mind. They do not truly desire what Heaven entails, but merely an earthly reflection of their own self-imagined paradise.

What if we took heaven out of the equation all together? What if we simply didn’t use this as any sort of a motivating factor in our ideas about conversion? What would happen to our presentation of the gospel? Perhaps some things would change in the way it is lived out.

Phil