As mentioned in our online sermon this weekend (Sermon Sunday 28th June), there do appear to be risks associated with dwelling on heaven. There’s the risk of treating heaven like a spiritual life-boat in order to ‘escape this doomed and sinking world’, for example. The incarnation alone would seem to put pay to that attitude. Jesus jumped in (not out) of our world.
“My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” John 17:15
He deliberately leaves his church in it to fulfil God’s gospel and kingdom purposes. He asks us to pray ‘thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” Matthew 6
But it is also true that if we lose a vision of “what God has prepared for those who love him…” (1 Cor 2:9) we also lose our identity, and we start to settle down here, rather than striving for our true home, or being prepared for its arrival.
But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,’ (Phil 3:20)
C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, makes the following comments:
“A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.
It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is.
If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
The Apostles themselves, who set out on foot for the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.
It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”C. S. Lewis
John Piper, Christian author and pastor tends to agree:
“Yes, I know. It is possible to be so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly use. My problem is: I’ve never met one of those people. And I suspect, if I met one, the problem would not be that his mind is full of the glories of heaven, but that his mind is empty, and his mouth is full of platitudes.
I suspect that for every professing believer who is useless in this world because of other-worldliness, there are a hundred who are useless because of this-worldliness.”John Piper
So to walk with God means to hope in the promises of God. We trust that heaven is on the way. When you have that in view, you don’t need a more comfortable ‘now’ to bring you joy. Living in the light of eternity shapes our choices and reshapes our priorities. We start living for the things that count and the things that last while we wait for the promise of heaven to become reality.
– Phil.
