BP21
I remember my mother’s dying days like they happened last week instead of seven years ago.
Several days before she died, I remember pivoting my mother from the commode to the hospital bed that dominated her living room like the pre-casket before the real casket. As I was moving her, I happened to look in the mirror above her fireplace and saw a reflection of me holding a surprisingly emaciated and old woman. Her head was no longer bald–a stubble field of thin white hair had grown back after her chemo treatment had been discontinued weeks earlier.
Even though I had been watching her die over a period of several weeks, I was shocked at her appearance in that mirror. Was this really the mother I had known for eighty-seven years who had been so full of life and always had a song on her lips? In the cruel mirror, she looked like a cadaver standing upright. I wished I had never glanced into it.
Forty-eight hours later, two attendants from the mortuary were wheeling my mother’s shrouded body out of her living room. In the middle of my grief and through my tears, I happened to glance into a second mirror in as many days.
Reflected in this mirror was not a cadaver that had been ravaged by cancer but a favorite picture of my mother hanging on the opposite wall. She was dressed in a bright pants outfit and looked so alive. Her face radiated joy.
At that moment, I remembered the earlier cruel mirror that darkly chanted about her coming death and I knew without a doubt that God had gifted me the second mirror. He was informing me that, yes, my mother’s body was dead and already beginning to decay but that she, in her spirit, had entered eternity with Him.
I will not forget the beautiful gift of the two mirrors. Never. The beast and the beauty. The cadaver and the hope of eternal life. One wrecked me while the other filled me with joyful praise for Him who had conquered death. Faith in Jesus served me well even in the valley of the shadow of death.
Do you have a faith that impacts your daily life even as you contemplate your certain end in this world? Do you ever wonder how your relationship with God is deeply relevant to life? Does the rumbling and growling generated by this loud material world drown out your experience of an unseen God? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re not alone.
Designer Therapy for Life (DTFL) exists because of the truth that Jesus is most relevant to psycho-spiritual-relational life (PSR) and growth in this world. He is not some distant heavenly body in the universe of your experience that, like Halley’s Comet, travels across the expanse of your life only every 75 years or so.
However, Jesus’ Presence does not come naturally or easily in this world. You see, He parachuted into this world behind enemy lines and died so that we might have peace even as we engage in battle as a member of the resistance. And Jesus was raised so that we might have power to fight the foe.
Yes, we are living in a world at war—sometimes a war between humans—but primarily a war between the Light and the Dark.
This war means that Jesus’ Presence in this fallen world is opposed. Sensing His Presence is not natural in a world dominated by spiritual darkness. Like any other relationship with someone you love, you must intentionally practice His Presence.
The main point of this post is that Jesus is the most relevant factor in your life on earth and that you must grow a relationship with Him as you would cultivate a garden or spend time with your significant other. As part of a sacred-secular split, Jesus must not be relegated to some sublime spiritual realm that rarely overlaps with your everyday life in this world.
You must intentionally practice sowing the spiritual into your material life and cultivating your relationship with God daily. What we think about determines who we are. What we look at captures our affections. Always.
As a clinical psychologist, I have observed that the pursuit of Jesus is more relevant to our earthly experience than any other object of our affection—and the benefits of pursuing Him are out of this world. They are also for this world.
To define the objective of this post even more specifically, Jesus is the best therapy for your mental health. There are many benefits He brings to us physically as well, but today we will focus on the PSR benefits of a personal relationship with the God of the universe.
There are numerous ways in which Jesus is very beneficial for your PSR health.
- Jesus removes all your sin—all your badness–with its shame and accusing lies. He makes you clean, perfect, guiltless.
- He gives you His Holy Spirit to live within you so you’re never alone even when everything seems to be falling apart all around you.
- He adopts you into His eternal family—you always have a place where you belong. Yes, you belong.
- Because of Jesus and His word, you know why you’re here, what your purpose is, what is absolutely right and wrong, and where you’re going on the day you die.
- You are loved unconditionally by the God who is love. Yes, unconditionally. Once you’re in the family, there’s nothing you can do that will cause Him to love you less. As humans, we don’t know what that means since such a love is not natural to this world. We’ll spend a lifetime and beyond excavating the infinite gold and diamond mines of Jesus’ love.
- When you know Jesus, you don’t ever have to settle for counterfeit pleasures that last but a moment and then are followed by crushing shame and the dreaded emptiness that drives you to the next addictive connection. He will satisfy your every thirst as you look to the One who is the living water of life.
- Jesus is your beautiful defender. If you take refuge in Him, He will always be your attorney who stands between you and the prosecuting attorneys of life—the ones outside of you and the one inside of you that seeks to annihilate you. When the accusing voice says you’re unlovable and should just kill your worthless self, Jesus smiles at the prosecutor and says, I already died on behalf of my beloved daughter. I already served the sentence and paid the death penalty for my beloved son. There is no more condemnation for this one. She is mine. He is mine.
There are many other benefits Jesus brings to our mental health, but only one additional benefit will be discussed here: A relationship with Jesus means you’re going to live forever with Him. For ever. As a believer in Jesus, you are promised eternal life in His Presence.
How often do you think about this promise of eternal life that follows the death of your body? How might the promise of living forever bring you hope in the cacophony of this material world?
I suppose another question we could ask is, How does eternal life impact the way you experience this world minute by minute as opposed to, let’s say, your co-worker who has not smelled a whiff of the fragrance of heaven in his future? Does the prospect of living forever with Jesus make a substantive difference in how you do everyday life? Does it impact your psychological health?
Oh, yes.
First, eternal life means that one day you will be transformed to be like Jesus. You will experience a personal transfiguration that will alter your existence forever. You will be given a new body that will never die or ever know pain. For all we know, you will be able to fly, or possibly even teleport from one place to another in that new body!
Related to this truth of one day being given a new body is the idea that we do not need to obsess so much about our current bodies. We want to take care of our current bodies, of course, and treat them like the temples of God that they are, but if we are injured, sick, dying or aging, we do not need to have as much fear or remorse because we know that this present body is not the final version of our self.
2 Corinthians 5:1 says that “we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling.”
Second, because of the promise of eternal life, death is not to be feared because it is not the end. Rather, death is a door. Yes, we might fear how we are going to die, but we know that death itself is not the dreaded end it would be if Jesus had not told us that He is the resurrection and the life.
Can you imagine what it’s like for many, many people who live in the shadow of death, afraid that at any moment their body will die and begin to decay, and they will be gone forever? I’ve counseled nine-year-olds who have experienced nightmares about death every night and live with extreme anxiety because of it!
Adults often develop defenses against the fear of death that children are not yet capable of constructing. A man I know said that adults have the ability to develop “healthy denial” as he called it (I view it more as unhealthy); otherwise we would be anxious all the time living beneath the inexorable presence of the lengthening shadow of death.
However, when Jesus is your life and you know that your name is written in the Book of Life, you need not fear death since it is not the end but the beginning. As a believer, we also know that we are invincible until God calls us home. What an assurance of peace that sustains us even as we live under the shadow of death with everyone else in this world.
I think it’s important to know, however, that as good as adult defenses can be, as strong as their unhealthy denial is, the fear of death leaks out for every man and woman–as it should. Have you ever considered that the rampant anxiety and depression in our world for which many of us are medicated are at least partly, and sometimes majorly, due to our fear of death and separation that lurks beneath the crust of our minds and hearts?
Third, eternal life gives us hope even as we stand next to the body of a loved one and watch the casket lid shut away their face forever. What gut-wrenching agony! What breath-taking grief!
Yet, in the middle of the tears and the vice grip that closes our throat, there is a hope that sustains us. This hope sends a ray (and then another and another) of light over the distant, pitch-black horizon that whispers the truth that we will see our loved one again.
Therefore, because of eternal life, we do not grieve as those who have no hope.
Fourth, eternal life brings comfort even in our physical suffering. Romans 8:18ff says, “For I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. . . We . . . groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.”
Fifth, eternal life reminds us we’re not home yet. Jesus tells you in John 14:1, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am going you may be also.”
As believers in Jesus, you’re just passing through this world. You’re not going to build a house here. You’re just tenting your way across the span of your life until you arrive at your true home. So much for those of you who hate camping. You probably didn’t know that the day you were born on this planet, you began a lifetime of camping, of roughing it.
Hebrews 11 says about Abraham and his family, “By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.”
Sixth, the promise of living forever reminds us that life is not a circle. Didn’t we just talk about the camping trip across the mountains and plains of your life that is daily taking you closer to home?
Most of you have heard a song that refers to the circle of life. Well, don’t believe the lyrics for a second. Life is designed to be destination driven. You’re not going to spend your days wandering through this life only to suddenly disappear forever, fodder for the worms.
And you don’t have to imagine what life is about or wager all you are on a mystical dream you have about your purpose in this world. Do some of these words remind you of the lyrics of another song that is bereft of God and eternal life?
Steve Jobs of Apple fame is quoted in his biography (written not long before he died from complications of pancreatic cancer) as saying, “Sometimes, I’m 50-50 on whether there’s a God. It’s the great mystery we never quite know. But I like to believe there’s an afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn’t just disappear when you die, but somehow it endures. . . . But maybe it’s just like an on/off switch and click—and you’re gone. . . . Maybe that’s why I didn’t like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.”
God’s word tells you that you can be assured of God’s existence and of living with Him forever. 1 John 5:13 says, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.”
Life is not simply four score years and then you’re done, a quick lap around the space-time continuum and then you’re reduced to meaningless dust. No, you are an eternal creature. If death seems absolutely wrong to you, you’re right. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God “put eternity into man’s heart,” making it clear that we are designed to live forever and not settle for a dead end.
Additionally, in 2 Timothy 4:7-8 Paul defies the circle of life when he states that, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.”
Life is a race with a clearly demarcated finish line. It is more akin to a cross country race than a sprint around an oval track. Both have a finish line, but one of them is actually going somewhere.
Lastly and briefly, those who love Jesus don’t say goodbye, only “see you later.” Do you absolutely hate separations and losses? In Jesus, you will never say goodbye.
So, then, we have briefly considered here how eternal life impacts psycho-spiritual-relational health and have found it to be highly therapeutic and relevant for those who embrace Jesus.
Our lives in this world are important and they are to be lived fully, but they are not the total of our existence. In fact, they are merely a breath compared to eternity. That means we have a concrete reason to worry less while living in this earthly tent and also a means to manage depression better because no matter what comes at us in this world, we know we’re in the middle of the marathon, not crossing the finish line yet.
Another way to say it is that we are living in the preface of the book right now and chapter one doesn’t begin until we are raised to life after death.
If you’re afraid of death or anxious about never understanding your purpose in this world, believe in Jesus and practice His Presence daily–not as some wispy crutch but as bedrock truth. You can bet your life on it. Imagine that, you dreamer.
Yes, as a believer in Jesus, your life in this world will be difficult because you are in the world but not of the world. However, you will always be able to hold on to two promises. The promise for this world is summed up in Isaiah 41:10: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
A promise relevant for the next life is Revelation 21:3ff: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
So, remember, there are many real-life benefits for those who follow Jesus. One of these benefits that applies both to this world and the next is the hope of eternal life. This hope lifts the crushing weight of death and separation from your soul because you know that when you cross that finish line—maybe limping, possibly even crawling—you will raise your eyes and see Him.
You will collapse into His loving arms and know, without any doubt, that you are finally home–forever. Every tear and all your suffering in this world will vanish like a bad dream. No more goodbyes.
You will know that He has made everything new for those who love Him.
“All which happens through the whole world happens through hope. No husbandman would sow a grain of corn if he did not hope it would spring up and bring forth an ear; how much more we are helped on by hope in the eternal life” ~ Martin Luther