The sweet spot

Dystonia update: I’ve found that if I walk on my treadmill I can keep my head still enough to at least voice text to my computer and hope someday, Lord willing, to even be able to type.

Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to a wonderful sermon series about the Book of Matthew by Skip Heitzig, senior pastor at Calvary Church in New Mexico. Heitzig preached the series in 2011 and took 37 hours to cover Matthew. In the message on Chapter 20, he segued over to talk about the Bema Seat judgment.

During my 34-year Christian walk, I’ve heard a lot of olly-olly-oxen-free preaching and evangelism: One simply professes faith in Christ and in return receives a free ticket to paradise, fire insurance included.

However, the Apostle Paul teaches something different: When we arrive in heaven, there are rewards … and consequences. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10).

This is known as the Bema Seat judgment—Christ’s evaluation of our lives and service as believers. As I think of the Bema Seat, and the awesome weight of my Lord reviewing my life—an event I passionately hope will be a private audience, no spectators allowed—it can seem quite far off.

I remember in my 30s a retirement adviser—an insurance professional not much older than I was—trying to sell me a very expensive whole life policy. The young salesman presented me with some mathematical projections about how much things would cost decades on, when I was in my 60s, 70s, and 80s. The numbers were so astronomical as to seem outlandish. A sales tactic, I was sure. Well, now I’m 62 and those numbers were pretty much spot-on.

The Bema Seat judgment can feel that way. So far off as to seem fantastical, a sales tactic to get us to behave. Something we ought to be thinking about but don’t because life is moving at the speed of … well, life. And yet in just the way the insurance salesman reminded me my loved ones might need that life insurance as soon as the next time I tried to cross a busy street, that same busy street might land me before the Bema Seat.

That got me thinking: What if I kept the Bema Seat before me, every day in every moment? That is not to say that I would live like a cloistered nun or like John the Baptist, whose diet, and let’s face it, wardrobe, I could not abide. (See? I just lost Bema badges for vanity and ingratitude!) But perhaps by always keeping my Lord’s gentle face in mind, I might spend my time, which is really His time, more wisely.

Reading and reflection has me lately summing up the Bema Seat standard in a single word: love.

Love is the verb twice used in the greatest commandments. Paul tells us love is greater than faith or hope. God’s singular reason for sending His Son to die in my place is love. It stands to reason that acts of love done “while in the body” would be most desirable to lay at the feet of Jesus.

And yet, “There is nothing I am less good at than love,” Eugene Peterson writes in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, which I’m still reading. “I am far better at responding to my instincts and ambitions to get ahead and make my mark than I am at figuring out how to love another.”

There is not enough paper in all the world to list the things that I am better at than love. However, I recently learned a wonderful prayer from my friends Robert and Michelle Ule, who are prayer warriors and subscribers to this magazine.

Whether faced with a repellent co-worker or rebellious child, an excellent prayer is “Jesus, love this person through me.” We cannot be perfect, but Jesus is. The Ules also pointed out to me that there is a sweet spot we Christians can occupy—the same spot Jesus occupied as He practiced love on earth: We don’t condone sin, but we don’t condemn ­sinners either. (See Christ’s dealing with the young woman caught in adultery.)

I think many of us Christians are experts at condem­nation, and less good at the gentle art of not condoning. If the conservative reaction to November’s election is any indication, I think American conservatives, many of whom are ­professing Christians, have almost completely abandoned the attempt to exist in the tension between condoning and condemning.

Going forward, I plan to try my best to till the ground in between. As we enter into the season in which God so loved the world that He sent His only Son in the form of a babe, meditating on what it really means to love—deeply, sacrificially, and at all times—seems a worthy endeavor.