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by Charlie Wolcott

What is the requirement to get into heaven? There’s really just one: be holy and perfect as God is holy and perfect. That’s it. No special arrangements, no impossible journey to complete, no special blood line, no special ability, nothing. Just be holy as God is holy and you are in. However, there is something in the fine print that everyone knows: no one except God can do that.

One of the accusations I have seen skeptics make against Christianity is that the standard for “getting in” is too high that no one can make it, and therefore God is setting us up for failure. So instead, they complain about the standards, not willing to address the fact that they don’t cut it. In baseball, every pitcher is judged on his ability to get a ball over a 19 square inch target, and whoever cannot hit that target isn’t qualified to be a pitcher. The rules don’t change because a bunch of people who want to play ball cannot hit that target. The same concept is true with Christianity. Just because no one can hit the target of perfection and holiness, that doesn’t mean the standards are unfair or unjust. God makes the rules. He is the Creator. If we took the time to study how holy God is and what our sin truly is, we’d understand why God must set the bar so high.

Yet, God commands us to be holy as He is holy. How can He do that, knowing we are still in bodies corrupted by sin? The answer is simple: we aren’t meant to even try. This is one of the greatest things about the Gospel, and yet one of the most difficult things for any of us to put into practice. We don’t cut it, nor were we ever meant to try. What makes the Gospel work is not man reaching a standard to get to God. Even if anyone could do it, he’d be so proud of his accomplishment that it would wipe out all of it in his pride. What makes the Gospel work is Jesus Christ living out His life in and through us.

Yet while God gets all the credit for getting the work done, there are still commands we must follow that enable God to do His work. Something completely missing from most churches today is a doctrine of separation. I cannot spell this any simpler than this: We cannot claim to be a Christian and look like the world, talk like the world, live like the world, and think like the world. There MUST be separation. Most people don’t like this idea. Why? Because the more you show yourself to be “other than” in this world, suddenly you become a target. Peer-pressure doesn’t go away after you graduate from the school yard playground; it only gets worse, and God calls every Christian to stand out like a sore thumb. In fact, the church is meant to be the conscience of the society, which means we are to be a nuisance to this world. Now, don’t hear what I am not saying. I am not saying we are to be annoying. But we are also not to capitulate to the world’s thinking and world’s progression away from God. We are to be a light in the darkness, but when people prefer the light to be off because of their evil deeds, they will do everything they can to shut the light off. We are to light the world and save souls, and we cannot save souls if we are too much like the world.

I write fiction as well as blog posts. In my time around writing circles, one of the great myths of storytelling is the “monomyth” made famous by Joseph Campbell and his study The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this study, Campbell examined all the great stories that withstood the test of time and found many commonalities. One of the is the nature of the hero. The great hero of each story is an outsider. He doesn’t fit nor belong. Think of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars or Neo in The Matrix. While in the world, they definitely were not of it. They stood out.

Another character in these stories is the anima, often known as the “Damsel in Distress.” This is the Hero’s equal but opposite gender. Think of Princess Leia or Trinity. The anima has a problem: she is the best of the best the world that needs to be rescued has to offer and she can’t do it. She can’t make it, nor can she rescue her people. She is too associated to the system that needs to be rescued. She needs the hero, who is outside the system, to do it for her.

All of man’s religions is little different the anima of a story trying to save their own from within their own system. It does not and cannot work. It takes someone outside the system, who is Jesus Christ, to save us. Then when He does save us, He sends us back into the world to fill the role of the hero and save people. Now we aren’t the HERO, but in each of our own lives, we are the hero (small letters on purpose), the protagonist. If we are to complete the “Hero’s Journey,” we must be outsiders, holy, separate from this world.

How do we do this? Here are some Scriptures to get started:

Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” [emphasis mine].

Romans 12:2: “Do not conform to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

We cannot think, act, or operate as the world does. Next week, I’ll dig deeper into this with some practical solutions and warnings on what not to do.

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