So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable.
Always work enthusiastically for the Lord,
for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.
1 Corinthians 15:58

Read: Matthew 25:31-46, 1 Corinthians 15:35-58
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 2 Part 12

Relate: The last scene in the Interpreter’s house is a vision. A man, woken from sleep in terror, describes a dream he has just had. He has seen the heavens roll back and the last trump sound and the dead rising from their graves. He has seen a judge seated on a cloud, and the books opened, and the saved gathered on one side and the lost cast away on the other. And he woke up shaking, because in his dream he saw enough of what was real and final and inevitable to understand that how he lived his life before that day was not a trivial matter. Bunyan places this dream at the end of the Interpreter’s house for a reason. Everything that has come before, the dusty room, the fire, the iron cage, the palace, has been building toward this reminder that history is moving toward a conclusion. That the conclusion has eternal weight. 

We live in a culture that has become extraordinarily skilled at insulating itself from this awareness. We have distractions enough to keep eternity at bay for most of any given day. Don’t believe me? How many hours have you spent on your phone today? What did you do with that time? If you did not answer those past two questions with “far too many” and “I have no idea” you are doing much better than I am.

React: We do not talk about judgment in polite company. We prefer the language of journey and growth and becoming, which are all real things. As an author I once liked famously says, “Journey before destination.” That is how we like to live our lives. But if we forget the fact that there truly is a destination, we risk becoming dangerously unmoored and floating free of the anchor of accountability. The dreamer’s vision is that anchor. It is dropped firmly into the floor of Christian’s conscience before he goes any further.

What the dream does not produce is paralysis. It produces urgency. The dreamer woke up shaking, yes. But the shaking was the beginning of motion, not the end of it. When we genuinely reckon with the reality that our lives are moving toward a moment of accounting, the right response is not despair. It is exactly what Christian is already doing, moving, as fast as he can, toward the gate, toward the narrow way, toward the house of the Interpreter, toward everything that the One who is seated on the cloud has prepared for those who love him. The dream is terrifying. The dream is also a gift. Any vision that makes the path toward God feel more urgent is not cruelty. It is mercy in a particularly bracing form.

Respond:

Dear God,