Led Zeppelin wrote and performed a beautiful song called “Stairway To Heaven”. The lyrics begins with “…and she’s buying a stairway to heaven” then ends with the same words. I do not profess to be an expert in the story behind the music but I do appreciate the symbolism in that we all use steps to advance into a higher level. Perhaps, it is just getting up a flight of stairs to another level of a house or store. It could be a simple routine we do each and every day but I like to also use the step analogy as our journey in faith. I believe in work. If a person does not work then there should not be a reward. Most of us work for a pay check. If we do not, I believe we better have a very good reason why. The work ethic is fundamental to our way of life. In my opinion, there are too many people living off the blood, sweat and tears of others. So my basic belief hear is that we all work for pay. If no pay, no work and visa versa. As a professional for many years in my career, I learned that sometimes the amount spent in work yielded very little pay because I was building an investment with the belief that eventually the money would come. You might call that sweat equity. My respect towards the medical profession for example has gone up tremendously watching my Dr. daughter pay a huge price in sweat equity knowing the payoff will be further down the road. Now, there are some who work just enough to avoid being fired to earn a small living from someone who will pay just enough to keep them from quitting. I call that employee-employer mentality.
We take steps in our career to hopefully advance to the point where our work equals to our pay and then strive to compound our expertise to yield less work for more pay. There are many ways in which we can make our pay turn into investments that pay off huge dividends. I will stop here and say read more about how you can improve your chances of success in the future. Just go to any site or self help book on the shelf and learn more. It is never too late to become a student of investments for your future.
We work for pay but we pray for faith. What is the difference in faith versus work? From Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, “Faith is a belief, trust and loyalty to a person or thing. Christians find their security and hope in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and say “amen” to that unique relationship to God in the Holy Spirit through love and obedience as expressed in lives of discipleship and service.” In Romans 4, Abraham was made righteous not because of his actions of work on the basis of an employer’s grace but rather on faith credited as righteousness not by work but by his faith in God who makes the ungodly righteous. I consider Abraham at the top of the stairway to heaven because of his great faith.
Imagine steps leading to a door to heaven. Most of us wander around the house trying to figure out how to get into the house. Do we work to earn a ticket into the great door or do we submit to another way that may be somewhat different to our human nature? As a young Engineer, I was trained to perform my task a certain way to get favorable results. Deviations could lead to disaster. When I first began to question my own mortality having witnessed a few deaths, I began to wander is their a hereafter? I was walking around that door that seemed so far up. Try as I may I could not reach the entrance. Within the Wesleyan heritage and the Methodists to whom he founded, Grace can be defined as “the love and mercy given to us by God because God wants us to have it, not because of anything we have done to earn it.” In other words, we cannot work to earn His Grace. John Wesley described God’s grace as threefold. First is prevenient grace which in my words is the grace that we did not even know existed. The story of Nicodemus in John 3 to me is about our own journeys where we are stuck in one paradigm and need to shift into a new understanding. Nicodemus was a Jewish leader, a teacher of the law, who was searching for a new understanding through Jesus. He said how can an adult be born again? I encourage you to read more to find out what he discovered. Nicodemus was given a gift of God’s prevenient grace which is the grace that comes before our understanding. Like Nicodemus, so was I standing at the house looking up at the door. I took a leap of faith and made that first step towards the door. We do not know much more about Nicodemus after learning more about being born again but I suspect he went on to the next step of grace Wesley called justifying grace where we become aware of our fruits of the spirit or born again spirit. The first step was all about God’s pull because of his love for us where the second step is discovery of our newness. We may stay on this step of justifying grace for a long time before truly recognizing our gifts of grace to serve a higher calling. We then can take the third step to sanctifying grace where we are used to lead others to the stairway to heaven. Our time is well spent at this level before we enter the door ourselves. I believe none of us quite reach perfection but it is all about the journey to reach the highest level we can achieve in our very short period of time here in the flesh. After-all whatever is born of the flesh is flesh and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. May we all look forward to our spiritual lives according to His time.
T