Our sermon last Sunday exhorted us, as Jacob and Joseph did, to faithfully and hopefully set our sights from this present world to our eternal home in heaven. Yet, I rarely hear any of talk of heaven in typical Christian conversation.
This article(1) offers three reasons why we don’t think of heaven as much as we should. It will span two Sunday editorials. The first two reasons will be covered this week, and we will read of the final reason and some practical applications next week. May it grow our hope of heaven and our comfort on earth!
Pastor Luwin Wong
I used to think about heaven from time to time, but it didn’t regularly affect my everyday life. That all changed when my oldest son, Cam, suddenly and unexpectedly died in Christ in November 2013. After my child went to live with the Lord, heaven became a profound influence on my day-to-day perspective. It changed my life.
Heaven was previously something I intellectually knew about. After Cam’s death, eternity became a driver for action, a filter through which I gauge my perspective, and a comfort—not just for major tragedy but for the ordinary disappointments of life.
Heightened heavenly mindedness has given me greater contentment, provided strength to persevere in suffering, and inspired me to focus on mission and evangelism. The pain of my son’s death isn’t something I would’ve chosen, and I won’t completely outrun it in this fallen world. But the heavenward shift the Lord brought has been one of the greatest blessings of my life.
Why doesn’t heaven affect most modern Christians as much as it could? Here are three reasons, along with some direction on how we can grow in heavenly mindedness.
1. We see heaven as an exclusively future state.
Before my son died, I only thought about heaven as the place I’ll go when I die—what theologians call the “intermediate state”—and as the new heaven and earth Jesus will bring at the end of this age.
But there’s more to heaven than these future states. The New Testament, particularly Paul’s letters and the Gospels, characterize Christ’s first coming as the arrival of heaven on earth in the present. The Old Testament pointed to the end-times “day of the LORD” and the age to come as its heavenly expectation (Joel 2:1–11; Zephaniah 1:14–18). The day of the Lord marked God’s coming to earth to purify the world of evil and bring justice to his enemies. The age to come, the period when heaven inhabits the earth, would follow the day of the Lord.
Heightened heavenly mindedness has given me greater contentment, provided strength to persevere in suffering, and inspired me to focus on mission and evangelism.
Paul’s letters identify Christ’s first coming as a partial installment of the day of the Lord. In 2 Corinthians 6:2, Paul writes, “For he says, ‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’ Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (emphasis mine). Since the divine visitation first occurred when God came in the incarnate Jesus, the age to come has been initiated. Heaven dwells on the earth. This doesn’t mean the “present evil age” has concluded (Galatians 1:4); that will end with Christ’s second coming. Nevertheless, heaven is here.
When a person puts his faith in Jesus, there’s a shift in his spiritual location. In Colossians 1:13, Paul says believers now dwell in the heavenly realm: “[God] has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.” When Paul says “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), he’s speaking in present terms. While we still physically live in sinful flesh and on this fallen earth, we also dwell spiritually in the kingdom of heaven.
Even now, we have present access to the “spiritual blessings in the heavenly places” through our union with Christ (Ephesians 1:3). Certainly our sin and the struggles of this present evil age still create difficulty and pain. At the same time, the rich spiritual blessings of heaven bring deep, rich joy to our day-to-day lives.
2. We have uninformed and unbiblical ideas about heaven.
When I began to research heaven, I was astonished to find that “heavenly visitation” books constitute the majority of recent literature on the afterlife. I’ve observed a number of people turn to books like these, where a person relates a near-death experience, after the death of a loved one. Many modern Christians see such books as authoritative theological accounts of what heaven will be like.
I’d discourage people from investing time with heavenly visitation books when the Scriptures provide the absolute truth on what we can expect in the life to come. The truth revealed in the Bible (and in books that explain what the Bible tells us about heaven) far exceeds people’s subjective accounts.
Randy Alcorn’s Heaven, Joni Eareckson Tada’s Heaven: Your Real Home from a Higher Perspective, and my book Heavenward: How Eternity Can Change Your Life on Earth are all good resources to help you build a solidly biblical perspective on heaven. A quality commentary like Vern Poythress’s The Returning King will make the book of Revelation less intimidating and enhance your knowledge of the afterlife.
Heaven can only affect our lives if we base our views on the truth. Having a biblically centered, personal theology of heaven grounds our mindset about eternity in verifiable substance.
(1) Cole, Cameron. (2024, August 4). 3 Reasons Heaven Doesn’t Affect Us as Much as It Should. The Gospel Coalition https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/heaven-doesnt-affect/
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