“The New Testament proclaims that at some unforeseeable time in the future, God will bring down the final curtain on history, and there will come a Day on which all our days and all the judgments upon us and all our judgments upon each other will themselves be judged. The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully.”
But this doesn’t mean that we get off scot-free. Buechner characterizes the love of Christ as follows:
“Christ’s love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ’s love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy.” — Fredrick Buechner, Wishful Thinking.
The list of things that diminish our joy includes a lot of things to which we’ve grown quite attached. We will have to part with, or at least be parted from them, but what Christ has to offer us in turn is far better. He offers us the unadulterated joy of the kingdom.