How Do You Get To Heaven?

This is how we are sure that we have come to know Him: by keeping His commands. The one who says, "I have come to know Him," without keeping His commands, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps His word, truly in him the love of God is perfected. This is how we know we are in Him: the one who says he remains in Him should walk just as He walked. – 1 John 2:3-6

Do we know God? Do we want to know God?

The approach is the same in every realm whether spiritual or physical. We must come under the discipline of that which we wish to know. That’s why they are called disciplines: we must make ourselves obedient to them. A doctor must keep the commands of his discipline, so we say they practice medicine. Simply knowing the doctrine without putting it into practice does the patient no good. But when one practices what he believes is correct, he knows the truth of it – seeing it is indeed as he believed.

In the natural world of theory and practice, we know there is room for a growth of understanding. We may find that the theory, though useful, is not entirely correct, or we did not understand some aspect of it. The practitioner refines his understanding in application – whether setting a bone or a fence post. This is true to an extent in the spiritual world as well.

We may tend to think that mystical revelation is enough, and it is true that God’s instructions are perfect from His side. We know this for we know that Jesus put them into practice, tested and verified the truth with His own life, death, and resurrection. We know it from the lives of saints, from those who have gone before us and some who walk with us even now. Yet until I am willing to become a practitioner rather than a professor only, I cannot know how the truth works in me, for me, and through me.

God is inextricably in the truth of His word, and His word cannot be known apart from Him – that is, if we will know His word by doing it, we cannot help but know Him. To know the Scripture as Jesus knew it, we must put it into practice in our lives. To know the Scripture as Jesus knew it is to know the Father and the Son. To do the truth is to see the Truth.

What are the commands of God? Jesus said there were two – to love the Lord and to love one another. Paul agrees saying love is the fulfillment of the law. We love our fellow man by doing right by him. We love God by doing right period, by doing what He says.

“To walk as Jesus walked” – not, obviously, to be a long-haired, sandal-wearing, itinerant preacher as I’m pretty sure Jesus would go for cowboy boots if He were here today. To walk as Jesus walked is not about our appearance, our background, the clothes we wear, our speech patterns, or what we do for a living. Jesus walked a path of complete self-sacrifice. He walked a life of prayer – always, as we said the other day, conversant with the Father. Praying and giving up self isn’t going to make the stupid people around us suddenly not be stupid. Walking as Jesus did is not going to put a sane person in the White House next week or make Kim Jong Il suddenly look at his nuclear arsenal, slap his little chia head and say, “Nukes? What was I thinking? I could have had a V-8!” It is not going to restore a job, make the kids behave, magically clean the house, or cause the wife to lose her voice or the husband to start paying rapturous attention to everything the wife utters.

No, all it will change is me.

How do you get to heaven? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, practice.