Become a saint, your eternal life depends upon it.

   We think of a saint as a rare person who just exudes with holiness.  There are a few problems with that picture.  First, a saint does not need to exude with holiness.  Indeed, many of the saints did not.  They lived in a relationship with Jesus, but that does not mean everyone knew the depth of their relationship that brought them to Heaven.  The other is the ‘rare’ piece.

   Becoming a saint is everyone’s calling.  Yours, mine, and your neighbors down the street.  But our idea of a saint might be mistaken.  A saint is someone who gets to Heaven.  Yes, the one’s we recognize as saints (canonized) like St. Anthony, St. Joseph, and St. Maximillian Kolbe are in Heaven.  But so are a lot of others that are not canonized.  They reached Heaven, which is the Goal.

   If you get to Heaven, you are a saint.  And if you do not become a saint, you go to Hell.  It sounds a little scary to think of it that way, but going to Hell should scare us.  To live eternity estranged from God is a terrible tragedy.  We must detach ourselves from our sins.  So many of us have some sin that we are unwilling to let go of.  If we die like that, we go to Hell.  Not because God will not let us in to Heaven, but because “nothing unclean will enter [Heaven]” – [Revelations 21:27] and that sin is unclean.  If we are unwilling to let go of it, we cannot enter Paradise.

   All of you saints in Heaven, named and unnamed, pray for me that I might let go of all sins, so that I might enter into eternal Paradise with God in your company exulting God’s greatness forever.