"...This [working for the kingdom of God in this present life] brings us back to I Corinthians 15:58 once more; what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are—strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself—accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings and for that matter one's fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God's recreation of this wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God's people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God's new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there."I think if we considered that our actions matter for longer than this lifetime, we'd be more serious and intentional with the way we lived, and yet, at the same time, more joyful and free, believing that nothing we do in the name of love, for Jesus' sake and honor, will be wasted. It really is starting to be a quite radical concept for me, the resurrection. I haven't ever spent much time considering what it could and should mean for us, but as I've been reading Surprised by Hope, I'm really starting to see why the Apostle Paul said, "If Jesus did not rise from the dead, we should be pitied." The height of foolishness, something so ... un-natural. Supernatural. Death, for us, is the most sure thing about life. More than anything we could speculate about what our lives with contain or look like, we know they will end with death. Bodily resurrection flies in the face of the surest thing we know about the human experience.
And yet, if Jesus rose from the dead, that means something. That shatters something we thought to be true, to be final. Maybe death isn't the end? And, better than floating off to some spiritual haze of puffy clouds, babies with angel wings and halos, we will be resurrected, too, to new life. Maybe we aren't going to sit in a boring church service, singing hymns, for all eternity. Maybe we will be given new transformed physical bodies, just like the one that the Bible describes Jesus having, and maybe we will be reigning with Jesus over the new creation, God's re-creation, when He makes everything as it was meant to be. Redemption. Maybe it's true, that we will be learning, growing, exploring, naming, creating, loving, discovering and taking care of the new heaven and new earth, with physical bodies that have been glorified and transformed, never to decay or die, because sin, and disease and death have been conquered and destroyed, not simply passed through.
When I start imagining this way, I get really excited for the life after death... and for life before death.
And this idea gives me great hope, courage and motivation to love people even when it doesn't seem like it'll do anything. What can one vote do? What can a $25 donation to a charity do to help the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti? What good does a 5 minute conversation with someone who looks a bit lonely do? God sees our hearts and knows our intentions and, by the grace of God and the redeeming power of the resurrection, these seemingly insignificant actions will somehow affect the life to come; they won't be wasted. So let's love each other in the name of Jesus Christ and for the sake of the coming Kingdom, especially those around us who are hungry, lonely, scared, homeless, unwanted, awkward, insecure, broken and unloved... even if it doesn't seem to have any immediate affect that we can see—the hope of the resurrection is that these actions will matter and somehow be realized fully when God re-creates and makes this good, but broken and hurting, world whole and beautiful again.
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