Food for thought

A fundamental mistake in the Western body today is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to heaven.  It aims to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people.  It creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live.  They rarely can get along with one another, much less those “outside.”  Often their most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment.  They have found ways of being “Christian” without being Christlike.  As a result they actually fall short of getting as many people as possible ready to die, because the lives of the “converted” testify against the reality of “the life that is life indeed.”  When we are counting up the results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people who will not be in heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being.

Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart