Your Best Life Now?

Jesus said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10b). But what does that ‘abundant life’ look like?

It seems there is no shortage of people who are keen to tell us. I just finished reading a top-selling book by a well-known Christian author and preacher with a huge following. It is not the kind of thing I usually read, but the title promised so much that by following a few simple steps I could have my ‘best life now’ – money, success, health, fertility, good relationships etc.

Is this what Jesus meant by ‘abundant life’?

People are desperate to make life ‘work’. We are constantly bombarded with images of bigger, better, greater things that, if we only play our cards right, can all be ours. Even as we sink under the weight of expectations from family, peers, and even ourselves, ‘losing’ is not an option, so we are determined to scrabble hard after things that often seem just out of reach. Kiasu doesn’t even begin to describe our relentless drive for more, for better. Not to mention those ‘curveballs’ that come out of nowhere – one minute we are on track to fulfil our dreams, the next we are coping with loss of job, bereavement or illness. Our dreams go out of the window and all we can do is survive.

Where did the ‘abundant life’ become clinging on for dear life?

I was so trapped in a world of pain that I couldn’t even pray. More than once, I thought, Is this my life now? If so, I can now see why some people would prefer to die than to live in this amount of pain.

Walking through a fog of pain

Ten years ago, during surgery, my surgeon had to force my ribs apart to get at an area behind my heart. Because of my rare genetic bone condition, one of my vertebrae got squashed in the process.

In the days that followed, a fog of pain dominated my every waking thought. I felt sick to my stomach, and because nobody seemed to understand how my bone condition was affected by the operation, it took about four days to get someone’s attention enough to do something about it.

I was so trapped in a world of pain that I couldn’t even pray. More than once, I thought, Is this my life now? If so, I can now see why some people would prefer to die than to live in this amount of pain.

In the years since, I have come to realise two things about being in that level of pain. Firstly, while I could tough it out for a few hours, I needed pain medication NOW. Not at some point in the future. Eventually, my surgeon intervened, scolded his team soundly for leaving me in agony, and gave me the pain relief I so desperately needed.

But secondly, I needed to know that there will be an end to this at some point. Ten years later, and while I am not nearly in the same kind of agony I was back then, physical pain is still a big part of my life. In fact, five years ago, I started losing my ability to walk and stand and consequently, became unable to do a lot of the things my wife and I enjoy together.

You might think that life is miserable for us, but it is really not. The last five years have been the most joy-filled, happy years of my life for a long time. And in case you are wondering, it is NOT because I have some super-spiritual connection to God where He ‘rewards’ me for enduring the pain I am in (a reward for being “such a brave boy!”). Neither am I being ‘compensated’ for suffering as if I have somehow tipped the heavenly scales in my favour and now God ‘owes’ me (“Dear Sir, We are sorry you are dissatisfied with our service during your earth-experience. Heaven has therefore decided that you are entitled to our special ‘super-happy’ package we offer only to our most dedicated saints”).

Rather, the reason, I think, for the renewal of joy in my Christian life has been because the Lord has helped me to understand – and access – hope.

Hope: the least understood of Paul’s ‘Big Three’

Like many followers of Jesus, I had little real grasp of the importance of Hope as one of the apostle Paul’s ‘Big Three’, along with Faith and Love (see 1 Cor 13:13, 1 Thess 1:3 & 5:8). Love, I understood well enough, and Faith is not so hard when you have definitions like Hebrews 11:1 and the whole book of Romans to help you. But, as I suspect many of us do, I tried to get along for years as a Christian without really understanding what ‘hope’ actually is – or more accurately, what it is for.

I knew that in Scripture, ‘hope’ is not as we usually use the word, to describe a wishful or wistful thought (e.g. “I hope Dad comes home from the office in time for dinner,” or “I hope one day to own a car like that”). Rather, biblical hope is centred on the things we know for sure are ours in Christ in eternity.

And that is where I got stuck. If Hope is all about Jesus’ return or me going to heaven when I die, then, while it is good to have, I failed to see how it should affect my life much now, except as an all-cover insurance policy which buys you peace of mind but spends most of its life stuck in a drawer. I couldn’t see how looking forward to a new body (even without orthopaedic problems) in the New Creation was supposed to help me now. It was like someone saying to me, “Don’t worry, just wait a few more decades and the pain will be over.” Many people reading this article will know deep inner pain of the kind that cannot be medicated for, and yet you need pain relief now, not just at some future date.

So, again, what use is Hope to me now?

Answer: more than I can possibly say.

Abundant life – your best life now

In previous articles I have mentioned my favourite verse is 1 Peter 1:8-9. The reason it has been my guiding verse for the last few years is because it defines what Hope really means, tying the future part of Hope (the promise of eternity with Jesus) to our everyday experience now.

Though you have not seen him [Jesus], you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

In context, the apostle Peter is explaining that the suffering the believers are going through is part of the living hope (v3) of being a Christian. But although he says that the full package of heaven’s joys will be ours “at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (v7), Peter is quite certain that this joy is for us now and that joy in Jesus is supposed to be our normal experience of being a Christian.

Let me back up a bit here. What I am saying, what I am certain the biblical authors are saying, is that the abundant life is knowing Jesus intimately and walking with Him constantly now and forever.

heaven is being in the eternal presence of Jesus. If we have no taste for being in the presence of Jesus now, then heaven will turn our stomach.

Just a happy place ‘in the sky when you die’?

If you ask a hundred people in the street, “Would you like to go to heaven when you die?” most of them would likely say yes – if by ‘heaven’ we mean a nice place full of good things (especially if hell is the alternative). But if you ask those same hundred people, “Would you like to know Jesus?” you would get a very different answer. But heaven is being in the eternal presence of Jesus. If we have no taste for being in the presence of Jesus now, then heaven will turn our stomach.

We recently talked with a young woman who is a committed Christian but had a real problem with the idea of heaven. “I don’t want to live forever,” she exclaimed. “I just want to stop existing.” But as we talked, it became clear that her life had been filled with pain, and while she was grateful for all that Jesus had done for her, she thought ‘eternal life’ simply meant existing forever, and that was not a happy prospect for her. Like when I woke up from my operation, she just wanted the pain to stop and could not see far enough to see a better future.

Thankfully, she began to see that her focus was wrong. Instead, she turned her eyes to Jesus and began loving Him and enjoying Him. This was the breakthrough for me, too, when I understood that knowing Jesus was not some far-off thing to be attained by super-saints. I started spending considerable amounts of time with God, reading His word and discovered that knowing and delighting in Jesus is not just for after death. Read again Peter’s words in the NIV: “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1 Pet 1:8-9 )

“Your Best Life Now” – and not yet

Theologians and preachers are fond of using the phrase “now and not yet”, when it comes to biblical promises – and rightly so. We live in the “now and not yet” as verses like these remind us. Heaven may be “not yet”. The return of Jesus to bring in the New Heavens and the New Earth is also “not yet”. But the presence of Jesus is for now. His “inexpressible and glorious joy” starts now.

For me, the pain – physical or otherwise – is bearable because I don’t have to wait for Jesus to come back in order to enjoy Him. Even on my worst days, I know, I know this is not all my life amounts to, no matter how bad things get. When you can say, “Whatever happens, whatever life throws at me, I have Jesus and He is all I need,” that’s when you know you have true biblical Hope.

Real living is being wherever Jesus is

One night, long ago, I was driving my dad’s car in the hills of northern England, and it started snowing. Soon, the snow was so bad that many people were getting stuck and I, too, was stranded with the road ahead and behind me totally blocked by trucks that were stuck in the snow. Then the car stalled and refused to restart. I was stuck in the dark, in the cold, unable to go home or back the way I had come. I was only eighteen. Although I was in the middle of nowhere, I managed to take refuge in a small, remote truckers’ café where I and some other drivers were at least warm and dry and where I managed to call home and tell my dad I was safe.

Then, in the middle of the night, I jumped out of my skin as a face appeared out of the darkness at the window. It was my older brother! He had heard I was stuck and so drove his four-wheel-drive Land Rover over the hills and through the snow to find me and bring me home. Perhaps you can imagine my joy at seeing him!

Truth be told, the journey was far from over. We still had to drive the Land Rover through the snow for some time before we reached home. But I no longer felt the cold. Home was as much in the cab of that old Land Rover (almost) as it was in the warm welcome that I received when we finally reached our destination. I knew for certain where I was going, and I was not alone anymore.

As a Christian, I know that the journey is far from over. But Jesus has found me in the dark and rescued me. I have both the joy and anticipation of being welcomed home into our heavenly home, and I have His company and love right now. That’s Hope. That’s the abundant life.

There are preachers and teachers who will try to give us the ‘key’ to living ‘our best life now’. But unless that is rooted in the hope of being with Jesus now and for all eternity through the Gospel, then what they are offering, all the money and success and even health they might promise, is no more than a temporary stop at a sad little café in the darkness.

The difficulty comes, I think, when we want to believe that we can have our best life now in terms of material success and physical health, as well as the hope of eternal life to come. Some of us do manage to have a life of conspicuous material success and also love and follow the Lord Jesus. But most of us will never have that level of success in this life. And many of us will either make ourselves and our families miserable in the attempt to get ‘our best life now’, or else our dreams of success are ripped out from under us through circumstances beyond our control.

My friend, Ricky, went completely blind when he was 16. He soon learned to read Braille and began to read the Bible and found new life in Jesus. He is now 60 and has dedicated much of his life, along with his wife, to supporting relief projects in Asia, Africa and South America, visiting many of them personally.

I invited Ricky to join me on stage during a talk to students at Edinburgh University, where I asked him, “Ricky, if you could choose between getting your sight back and having Jesus in your life, which would you choose?”

“Without a doubt,” Ricky replied with obvious joy, “I would rather have Jesus. He is everything to me.”

If a man like that doesn’t have the abundant life, I honestly don’t know who does.

Peter Teagle has a congenital bone condition which closed the doors to overseas missionary work soon after he completed Bible college in Singapore. Instead, he and his wife were redirected back to the UK, where they have been involved in evangelism and discipleship for international students since 2001.