Many Christians are living into a shrunken, incomplete gospel that leads to sin management. To be sure, our relationship with God was severed by sin. But our sin problem is only a part of the issue. In this episode of the Things Above podcast, James Bryan Smith looks at our sin problem and offers, perhaps more importantly, that we also have a life problem and a longing problem. Even if we never sinned, we would still need God’s grace – God’s action in our lives. Our life problem, Jim believes, can be found in the words of the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:1-7. While we are physically alive, we are spiritually dead without Christ, according to Paul. This leads us to our longing problem, which was articulated in the book “Donald Grant,” written by author and theologian George MacDonald.

The main character, Donald Grant, encounters a woman who was having disturbing dreams of damnation. She was ultimately concerned about avoiding hell. Afterwards, Grant wonders, “When our longing after a living God is met with the offer of an escape from hell, how is the creature to live? It is God we want, not heaven. God, not an imputed righteousness. Love, not endurance for the sake of another.” This reminds Jim of those billboards located alongside the highways of America that ask, “If you died tonight, where would you go?” Jim recalls Dallas Willard asking a different, if not more significant, question: “If you wake up tomorrow, how would you live?” The goal of the Christian life is not hell avoidance. It is an interactive, loving and life-giving relationship with God.

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