What do "octo-mom", the weather balloon family in Colorado, the State Dinner crashers in Washington D.C. and the Tiger Woods drama all have in common? They are all just the latest examples of how miserable life can become when one follows selfishness to it's natural conclusion. For anyone who doubts the reality of hell, all you have to do is look closely at the personal hell we take ourselves to if we pursue the idolatry of self all the way through.
Does anyone doubt that Tiger Woods, arguably the most successful and popular athlete in the world a couple of weeks ago knows a little something about where your sinful heart can lead you and what a hell you can create? Follow that path on out into eternity without the presence of even His general grace and the human mind cannot even conceive the misery that results from that depravity.
But when we read stories like we have over the past few weeks, our hearts should cry out, "There, except for the grace of God, go I!" The capacity for all kinds of evil resides in every human heart. It is the flesh that all of us struggle with. And at the heart of it is "overdesire". The tendency to make idols or gods out of those things that can never give us life is at the root of all of our fallenness. It is so pervasive and so much a part of the fabric of our lives we don't even notice it. I know I don't!
Peter Kreeft has said that hell is not just a place of eternal punishment, but something much worse, a place where there is eternal dying- a place where one makes an "eternal ash of himself". It is a place where we indulge our idolatrous hearts - to a miserable, hateful, self indulged infatuation with our own selfish wants and desires. Contrary to what we might think, the opposite of love is not hate, but selfishness.
Adolphe Tanquerey writes, “The enemy of the love of God, of charity, is the love of self. Pride is an inordinate love of self, which causes us to consider ourselves, explicitly or implicitly, as our first beginning and last end. It is a species of idolatry, for we make gods of ourselves….”
Heaven is a place where people are giving themselves away- offering their lives in praise and cointinually taking the focus off of self- and that is where we find heaven in our own lives today. Jesus taught us that to find life we must lose it- to find true joy our lives should be given away. If one does not know giving he does not know love. Charles Swindoll once said, "I have never met a happy getter. I have met a lot of happy givers, but never a happy getter".
So as we come now to the third week of advent we are reminded that the most important and meaningful things that have come into our lives have come as a result of sacrifice and giving. And conversely we are reminded that the more we are drawn into our own selfish desires, the more miserable life becomes.
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