Just as a baby in the womb of its mother is perfectly designed to thrive in a whole new environment, so people living in this world are designed to live in a whole new eternal environment.
Just as a baby in the womb of its mother is made to breathe the air its mother is breathing, so every person living in this world is made to breathe the “oxygen of heaven”.
Just as a baby’s body in the womb is already assimilating the oxygen from the whole new world it will soon enter, just outside it’s mother’s body, so human beings assimilate the life-giving resources of heaven. We are made to depend on power and resources outside of us.
For the baby to thrive once it is born into the whole new world of its mother, something is required of it: the baby must take its first breath and keep on taking in (now, breathing-in) the oxygen in the whole new world all around it.
Though that first gasping breath is an involuntary response, it is required of every individual for survival in the new world.
Just as the ability to breathe is developed and required of the baby if it is to thrive in the new world into which it is born, so a vital capacity must be developed in every human in this world if we are going to thrive in the next world:
We must engage our will to choose Christ and his kingdom—to “inhale” the grace of heaven. We can be here and now assimilating heaven’s resources. We are equipped to do this. It is part of our “Imago Dei genome”. This is what Jesus means when he says: “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
The term repent here is the Greek word, metanoia which means beyond: (meta) thinking: (noieo), or “thinking beyond”; to let your thinking beyond this point be different than your thinking before this point. In other words, change your thinking, change your mind.
To engage one’s will to “breathe in the grace of God” is to be open to new thinking about God. A. W. Tozer wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
God designed into us a will as part of his image. We are to engage our will to open our hearts, minds, bodies, relationships, emotions and soul to the authority and governance of a very good God. (Matthew 6:33).
The first thing a baby does that it never did before is breathe. From that moment on the first thing it always does is breathe. Every moment of every day of its life, first comes breathing.
In a newborn, it is an involuntary response unique to that individual baby. The baby must begin to do this whole new endeavor it has never done before; it must breathe. Every healthy newborn “knows” it must breathe. The midwife or the doctor or the mother cannot breathe for it.
So it is with us. We consent to God and his presence, his lordship over our whole being. Only you can do this. And even though you have never done it before, you can do this. Just breathe. Just go with your innate knowledge that God is and God is good. It is not coincidental that of all leaders of world religions the only person who ever declared, “You must be born again”, is Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the only one who said, “Don’t worry about your life…Seek first my kingdom (benevolent governance) and my righteousness (total gracious right-standing with God {a sheer gift from Jesus to us]} and all these things (the stuff we all tend to want or worry about) will be given to you”.
Just as a baby must be able to breathe to be born and thrive in its new world so we can be born into and thrive in Christ’s gracious love and his awesome kingdom. We can here and now choose the God we know is real.
It is also no coincidence that the Apostle Paul wrote:
19 My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you,… Galatians 4:19 (NIV). New parents eagerly anticipate the birth of their child. This life is to be spent eagerly anticipating the moment when Jesus stands before us and looks right at you…. We are like the wise servants who kept their lamps full of oil and wicks trimmed and lit, always anticipating that moment when the owners of the house would return.
From the moment the egg in your mother met the sperm of your father you became an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s full world. (That’s a mouthful. Stop and just take that in. This truth can transform your life.)
Every human being is an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s full world. Every. Single. One of us. Whether we know it or not.
It is clear from the Bible that God’s intention is for you to live forever with him and in fellowship with others, all of us collaborating with God himself to rule over his cosmic creation forever. So this entire life is “training for reigning,” God is a willing creator and he made us in his image, so we are also willing creators.
Think of it; from the time we are infants we are always doing things; interacting with our physical and social environment. What the God of the Bible is proposing in Jesus his Son is this: That we willingly create with him. That we willingly consent to his governance here and now so he can form us into the kind of persons he can empower to do what we want now and forever (because what we want is what God wants).
Right now your “wanter” is probably broken. It’s been used to seek and find all the wrong things in the wrong places. Even very “good” people can find themselves in this conundrum. God understands. This is everybody. No one is unique in this. Don’t worry about it, just turn to (the invisible but real) Christ right now, and tell him that you want to start out with him right here and now where you are. You want to be born into his world, breathe in the atmosphere of his heaven and be with him relating, working with him, resting with him, living with him and his people forever.
Start to take in the “oxygen of heaven” Jesus offers you right now. Just as a baby is designed to assimilate the oxygen from a world it knows nothing about—the world of its mother—so you are made to breathe the oxygen of heaven—a place you don’t know but will begin to discover as the most amazing experience you were created for.