Former Country Star and Daughter Explain What It Takes to Get to Heaven
By Movieguide® Contributor
Country singer turned pastor Granger Smith recently answered some tough questions on his podcast with a very special guest: his daughter London.
The almost 13-year-old shared her thoughts alongside her father.
One listener asked if it’s possible to go to heaven if you’re cremated, which opened up a dialogue about heaven with the father and daughter.
“You’re not burning your soul,” London said. “If you believe in Jesus, you’re going to heaven, and if you like trust in Him and stuff, you’re going to go to heaven…their soul isn’t going down into the ground even if you bury them.”
Smith explained the concern that arises from this type of question.
“You could take that sentence and take out the back part of the sentence and say, ‘you won’t go to heaven if blank,’ and there’s only one answer…there’s a million things you could try to fill in, but there’s only one right answer. You won’t go to heaven if you don’t believe in Jesus, if you don’t trust in Jesus for your forgiveness of sins that He accomplished at the cross with His satisfaction of God’s wrath and his substitute for your sins that you deserved,” he said.
Another question asked was why washing feet is not required in the church. Smith explained to his daughter and his audience that washing feet is not a required sacrament.
“The apostles then in the early church taught us about baptism and the Lord’s Supper,” he explained. “They did not teach us to wash feet. So that’s where we get that from.”
“If the apostles had said ‘we’re going to do three things: we’re going to baptize, we’re going to take the Lord’s Supper and we’re going to wash feet,’ we would do that today,” he continued. “There must have been something ceremonial about Jesus washing the feet that was not something that was needed to be done on a Sunday morning in 2024. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it as a really nice remembrance of what Jesus did that day with his disciples. It’s a symbolic act of ‘I serve.’”
Smith left the music industry last year because he felt called to ministry, which Movieguide® previously reported on:
“Now that this gift was given to me, at the darkest tragedy of our life, now I have a purpose to go out and share this message of what happened to me with other people who are probably going through the same thing,” he said.
Part of his decision to leave the music industry came because Smith realized he was “seeking glory, seeking applause, seeking people to exalt me, and that’s just not what we’re called to do. I could not reconcile [that and my faith] together.”
Smith was quick to stress that he was not calling on anyone else to leave the entertainment business.
“I’m not saying what anyone else should do,” he stated. “This is something that I struggled with internally because I struggled with exalting myself and seeking that praise and that was something I needed to strip through sanctification.”
He now uses his platform to encourage his followers to seek Jesus.
“We are saved by grace and not by works. But the evidence of God’s saving grace IS our works of obedience. Read the New Testament commands and do them, not because the doing saves you, but because God’s saving makes you joyfully do them,” he shared in a recent Instagram post.
Smith doesn’t have plans to return to the music world at this point.
“My life now is much more about today and when I go to sleep at night, I could think it was enough,” he told Life & Style. “As a country music singer, you could never think that. It’s always the next album or the next tour or the next single. And so now, when I’m going and doing speaking engagements, they don’t build upon each other. It was just today, and I could say today was enough.”
