Hmm, and I thought personal transformation was Jesus business.
If you only believe because of the promise of heaven then your holding onto a thread.
I don't think it's either.
Jesus doesn't promise "personal transformation" (which I suspect can mean whatever we would like it to mean), but the point of Christianity isn't "going to heaven" either.
Christianity is about a specific confession: some of the core aspects of that confession can be found in the historic Creeds (i.e. the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds), where we have come together to say "We believe...". At the center here is Jesus Christ, Who He is, What He is, and everything He said and did.
Christianity isn't about being more successful, or more moral, or various kinds of self-improvement. It's about this confession of who Jesus is, and what Jesus has done, and what that means for the world. That isn't to say that it won't change us, Christianity taken seriously will change us; not in the sense that we'll become suddenly this more superior moral sort of person--but if we take Jesus seriously it will make us deeply uncomfortable, it will demand more from us, it will call us to change the way we look at the world and those around us. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi underground Church in Germany, in his seminal work The Cost of Discipleship writes, "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die." Because to take Jesus seriously places the cross firmly center, and it will demand our own life, perhaps metaphorically, perhaps literally--but it will ultimately accept nothing other than us, whole and entire.
No, the point isn't that we get to "go to heaven", because the Christian hope isn't in dying and going to a place called "heaven", the Christian hope is that God is going to make good on His promises and rescue and heal the whole world. Our life everlasting isn't as disembodied spirits up "in heaven" (though that is what modern pop-theology often suggests), but
resurrection,
bodily resurrection, and the renewal of all creation. The point is, therefore, that God is indeed doing this, and that's what Jesus means, and that's why Christians are called to live their life in Christ, to confess Him. Confessing that our hope is found solely in Him, and that He commands our very lives to His will--to love our neighbor, to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty. To see "the least of these" as "My brothers" as Christ Himself calls them, and to see Jesus in the lowly, the hurting, the mistreated, the hungry, the poor. To understand that God is for the least, and that the kingdom of God means the least are greatest, that the last are first, that "the greatest among you is your slave".
Ultimately being a Christian is really about following Jesus. Not merely saying "Jesus", but setting our gaze ahead to Him, to follow Him, and cling to the cross. Being a Christian is not about reward, neither in this life or the next, it's about being a loser and discovering the gain that comes in losing.
-CryptoLutheran