Weekly Sermon Illustration: Eternal Life


Next Sunday we will celebrate the Second Sunday in Lent. Here is this week's reading from the gospel of John:

John 3:13-17



The following is Buechner's article on Eternal Life, first published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words.


WHEN YOU ARE WITH SOMEBODY you love, you have little if any sense of the passage of time, and you also have, in the fullest sense of the phrase, a good time.

When you are with God, you have something like the same experience. The biblical term for the experience is eternal life. Another is heaven.

What does it mean to be "with God"? It doesn't mean you have to be thinking about being with God, or feeling religious, or sitting in church, or saying your prayers, though it might mean any or all of these. It doesn't even mean you have to believe in God.


Being "with it" may not be the same as being with God, but it comes close.


Saint Paul uses the phrase eternal life to describe the end and goal of the process of salvation. Elsewhere he writes the same thing in a remarkable sentence in which he says that the whole purpose of God's slogging around through the muck of history and of our own individual histories is somehow to prod us, jolly us, worry us, cajole us, and, if need be, bludgeon us into reaching "maturity ... the measure of the full stature of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13).
