God is the goal of the gospel

“In your personal opinion, what do you understand it takes for a person to get to heaven?”

This key question has stuck with me since I first heard it training as a youth in Bobby Welch’s FAITH evangelism method. I remember going door-to-door with the church that equipped me to evangelize, and by God’s grace, I saw numerous people come to faith and brought into the life of the church.

While this method was effective in inviting people to consider how to get to heaven, I came under a conviction that we were unintentionally withholding a crucial element of the gospel. Sure, the FAITH method and other evangelism tools like it shared the truth that Christ died for our sins according to Scriptures, that He was buried, and raised on the third day. But its target question stopped short of telling the whole gospel, withholding an incredible promise—the resurrection of the dead unto eternal life with God in a new heaven and a new earth.

I experienced a significant shift in how I evangelize and train others in evangelism about 15 years ago while pastoring in Trenton. Our aim in sharing the gospel was to ensure that when people died, they would go to heaven. We would ask people, “Do you know where you are going to go when you die?” Certainly, this is an important question, but is it the goal of the gospel that people who die go to heaven?

I wrestled with that question and became convinced that, without realizing it, we pushed God aside as the goal of the gospel. As a result, there were unintended consequences that impacted the church.

We were no longer comforted by the hope of resurrection.

Believe it or not, many Christians do not know or understand the hope that we have of resurrection. In 2020, I attended a relative’s funeral where the pastor stood up and said death was a door that led to the next part of this person’s journey.

If the gospel was simply about knowing where we are going when we die, why would we need any hope of the resurrection? Paul could’ve just told the Thessalonian believers to comfort one another with the reality that their loved ones are enjoying an eternal disembodied existence in heaven with God. Or he could’ve said those loved ones already received their immortal bodies upon death and told them to find solace in the idea that death guides the dead to their final resting place.

But Paul never says that. Yes, he does say, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” However, that state was only to be temporary. He would go on to say in that same letter that he wanted to share in the sufferings of Jesus, including His death, so that he might share in His resurrection from the dead. Why? Because death is not a friend, not a doorway, or anything else positive and good.

To be clear, death is an enemy—the last enemy to be vanquished and placed beneath the feet of our resurrected king. When death is dead, no one will shed a tear, and until the resurrection, we find ourselves in an intermediate state, awaiting the day when Christ’s foot will once again step upon the earth. It will be on that day that we will all shoot up from the ground like bluebonnets in spring and receive our new bodies, enjoying the new creation where it will be said, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man!”

When heaven is the goal of the gospel, we fall short of seeing God’s ultimate plan. But when God is the goal of the gospel, we are filled with a hope that extends beyond death, for upon the resurrection of the dead, death will work backward.

We forgot heaven has already come.

What makes heaven beautiful is the full, unfiltered presence of God. One day, we will see Him as He is. There will be no sin, no unholiness that will pollute our experience of God and His presence. We will enjoy Him as our first parents did in the garden.

In the meantime, God has gifted us with a foretaste of heaven, sealing every believer with the promised Holy Spirit. The heavens were torn open, God descended, and heaven came with Him. As the Spirit of God abides in every follower of Jesus, we carry with us a burning reality of heaven. And when believers join together as the church under the lordship of Christ every Sunday to worship the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we get to enjoy a foretaste of heaven divine as God inhabits the praise of His people.

We forgot to live the reconciled life now.

Paul told the Corinthian church we are ambassadors of reconciliation calling on the lost to be reconciled and restored into a right relationship with God. The beauty in that message is that we can enjoy a redeemed relationship with God now. We don’t have to wait until death.

When heaven is the goal of the gospel, we focus on a destination. But when God is the goal of the gospel, we focus on a relationship that can be lived out now unto eternity. It is the glorious truth that God is already with us—in the midst of all the sin, death, and brokenness—that causes me to long in greater degree for the day when I will be with Him in a world where everything sad becomes untrue.

George Eldon Ladd’s The Gospel of the Kingdom played a great part in shaping my understanding of the gospel. Also, I have appreciated evangelism tools like Two Ways to Live and Three Circles as they keep God has the hope of the gospel.

Don’t get me wrong, as someone who has preached more funerals and experienced much death, I long for heaven. But it is not the streets of gold, the mansions, or the saints that stir my longing. I long for God to create a world where nothing again will separate us from Him or His presence. God is the gospel, He is heaven, and He is our eternal home.