Chapter 6 Heaven Has Our Heart’s Desire
Chapter 6
Heaven Has Our Heart’s Desire
Let your imagination run wild for a moment. Jesus has gone on to prepare a place for us, and each of us is to have a big mansion—no down payment or mortgage to worry about, thankfully—on a golden avenue overlooking acres of fields and flowers. Wow!
Or for you, not “wow.”
Perhaps, “Well,…that’s nice.”
When it comes to a glass house on a golden street, you may be tempted to throw a stone through the glass—out of sheer gumption, to see if celestial plate glass cracks. Or maybe you’re simply feeling awkward and uncomfortable in God’s glittering, golden throne room. For that matter, you’re still hung up in this tangle of earthly imagery whenever you picture heaven. You see yourself seated at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb where, presumably, there’s no need for air-conditioning or central heating in the banquet hall. But where do you draw the line in dispensing with the paraphernalia of earth when picturing heaven? If the banquet is to be eaten decently, surely we will need knives and forks. Pots and pans to cook stuff in. Mixers must be somewhere in the background. And who does the dishes? People in hell?1
I can understand if these images don’t make you yearn for your heavenly dwelling. It’s not that you’re absorbed by the things of earth; it’s just that heaven doesn’t feel like home. Yet the images painted in the Bible represent something designed to grip your heart, possess your soul, and call forth a powerful homesickness that makes you want to hurry up and unlock the front door of that mansion of yours.
Wouldn’t it be nice to feel nostalgic for heaven that way?
Take a minute to consider a time when you were actually homesick. Not for heaven, but for your earthly home. Remember the aching? The sense of feeling like a stranger in your surroundings?
Boy, I remember it. I felt like my guts were being ripped out. I bawled when I was a little girl and had to stay at Aunt Dorothy’s while my mother had a gallbladder operation. Then there was church camp. I was miserable. And that Thanksgiving when I first moved to California (of course, everyone first feels like a misfit in California).
My most recent bout with homesickness was in Bucharest, Romania. It was the middle of the night and I knew I was an alien as soon as I wheeled into the musty hotel lobby. A single dangling light bulb cast long shadows over dusty sofas and lamps leftover from the fifties. Prostitutes hid in a dark corner puffing cigarettes. From somewhere behind the desk, a radio featured Elvis Presley wailing “I Wanna Be Your Teddy Bear.” There were bullet holes in the concrete wall. Moths and exhaust fumes filtered in through the open door, and somebody was screaming at a neighbor down the street.
I was tired, hungry, and dirty. There were no ramps for my wheelchair. I didn’t fit in the bathroom. I didn’t feel at home in the restaurant where they served tough meat swimming in oil and garlic. Everything about the place—the language, the culture, and especially the pillow on my mattress—made me long for Calabasas, California. It was awful. I know you’ve felt the same.
Why did Calabasas grip my heart? Was it the sidewalk ramps and curb-cuts? Radio stations playing better tunes than Elvis hits? Superior restaurants? Why do I feel I fit in California and not in Romania?
Because home is where your heart is.
This powerful truth needs to be elevated for a moment above the cross-stitched plaques on which we usually read it. Because if “home is where the heart is,” then home must be more than the street address where you live. When you get homesick, your heart may tug for your own mattress and pillow, but this doesn’t account for that gut-wrenching ache. What makes home is not a place, but who lives there. You feel at home when your heart is nestled near the one you love.
But sometimes, when you least expect it, even the people who make up home aren’t enough. Sometimes when you’re all tucked in with your own pillow and blanket, with the voice of the one you love close by, another kind of homesickness—a deeper kind—sneaks up on you.
Still Not Satisfied
Fragrant pine branches and the softness of falling snow. Cinnamonspiced tea and vanilla candles. It was home at its 1957 best. Especially with a Christmas Eve visit from Uncle George and Aunt Kitty who, when she leaned down to give me a big hug, let me bury my nose in her fox stole scented with Evening in Paris perfume. Together, with the rest of the family in the candlelit living room, we sat on the couch and listened to Bing Crosby Christmas music on the radio. It was a quiet time. It was home.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was broadsided with homesickness. Good grief, there I was in the coziest of houses snug on the couch between people I loved, yet mantled with homesickness—a nostalgia for a bigger kind of home. I didn’t catch on at first, but I was in the middle of another one of those heavenly longings. It may have been winter and far away from that Kansas wheat field we visited the summer before, but it was the same.
The next morning that sensitive longing retired in the presence of mundane things, and I became my ordinary self. It was Christmas Day. I shelved my fascination with the strange longing and rushed headlong into my pile of presents. I ripped open the paper of one gift and asked, “Is there more?” And then another gift, asking, “How many left?” and then after the final present, whined, “Is that all there is?” What was I looking for? Why wasn’t I satisfied?
Throughout the day, I knew I was free to play with my toys, but occasionally I would leave my gifts, go upstairs to my room and lean on the windowsill to gaze outside. What was I pining after? What did I want?
What Do We Want?
When it comes to heaven, we are all children opening a thousand beautiful Christmas presents and asking after each one, “Is that all there is?”
In fact, when it comes to heaven, why don’t you make a Christmas list—all the best joys, gifts, and presents that you imagine heaven will offer. Ask your heart the question: What do you want? There’s no restrictions on the list. The sky’s the limit. Would it be beauty or wealth? Fame? Driving a Ferrari?
Now imagine getting it all. How soon do you think you would grow restless? How soon before you would say, “Is that all there is?”
Try another list, a deeper one. Endless talks with Beethoven about scoring music or long chats with Mary Cassatt discussing French Impressionism. Strategizing football plays with Tom Landry. How about a fit, healthy body for all you who have disabilities? Running? Dancing? Cooking with Julia Child? Playing guitar with Eric Clapton? A good conscience, freedom, peace of mind? It might be a few more thousand years before these would bore you, but eventually even they would become ho-hum.
Peggy Lee was on to something back in the seventies when she serenaded us, asking, “Is that all there is, my friend? Then let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all…there is.”2 The song scared me then, and it scares me now. Is there nothing that will ultimately satisfy our hearts? Peter Kreeft suggests:
Can you imagine any heaven that would not eventually be a bore? If not, does that mean that every good thing must come to an end, even heaven? After eighty or ninety years most people are ready to die; will we feel the same after eighty or ninety centuries of heaven?…If we don’t want boredom in heaven, what do we want? If heaven is real, what real desire does it satisfy? We want a heaven without death and without boredom. But we cannot imagine such a heaven. How can we desire something we cannot imagine?3
We cannot conjure up heaven in our minds because our desires go deeper than what our minds can imagine.
Thankfully, our hearts are always a beat ahead of our minds and bodies. Proverbs 4:23 is not off base when it says the heart goes deeper than the mind: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” True, it also says the heart is desperately wicked, but that still demonstrates that it is the seat of deep passions. Important things happen in the heart. Out of it “flow the issues of life.” We may have one foot here and the other in the hereafter, but our heart is often that part of us which tugs and pulls at that one foot stuck in the mud of earth, saying, “Get off of the earthly images, would you? Look, here’s your other foot anyway. Up here is what you’re longing for.”
Really? Does our heart have the answer?
Does our heart have something to say in response to this haunting echo?
Can we trust our heart to really know what it wants?
When people approached Jesus with a need, it’s curious that He often responded, “What do you want?” I’ve always thought this was an odd thing to say since, first, He could read their minds, and second, their need was often obvious—like Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, for one. But Jesus has His reasons for asking. He urges us to explore our heart’s list of wants because He knows that we desire something deeper than getting a few surface needs satisfied.
And when it comes to heaven, He knows we desire something more fundamental than pleasure, prosperity, or power. Our heart thinks it’s desperate to get back to the Garden, or, if not there, then someplace where our innocence and identity are sequestered. Says C. S. Lewis:
Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation…at last to be summoned inside would be both glory and honor and also the healing of that old ache.4
Healing That Old Ache
When it comes to attempting to heal that old ache, the human heart has had lots of experience. It is restless and raging, trying this and dabbling in that, hoping to find fulfillment, to possess something that will give us innocence, identity, and…heaven. Our poor bruised heart, though, does not really want to possess heaven so much as to be possessed by it. It desires not so much pleasure, for pleasure can be exhausted. After we experience it, it’s over. Our heart wants something glorious that lasts. For forever? Yes, if it were possible.
What the heart desires is ecstasy.
Ecstasy is that marvelous euphoria in which we totally forget ourselves, and yet find ourselves. The dictionary describes it as a state of being overpowered by joy, which causes you to step outside yourself, and a subscript explains that in Greek ecstasy means to “stand outside oneself.” But a powerful experience like this can’t be defined by a dictionary. To appreciate its meaning, ecstasy has to be experienced.
It is rapturous delight. Intense joy. Pure passion. When it comes to heaven, we want to be overpowered and caught up in something grand and wonderful outside ourselves. We want to be swept and wrapped up in a joy that weaves itself through every nerve and fiber. A joy that makes time stand still. We want to lose all sense of time and, therefore, disappointment. Like Elijah in his chariot, we want to be captured and carried away.
This is what our heart wants. This would be heaven without boredom.
I’m convinced the ecstasy of heaven is not to be found in the halls of a hallowed habitat tucked behind a galaxy where birds chirp and organs play with heavy tremolo and angels bounce from cloud to cloud. An earthly image like this falls flat. It’s not even a biblical symbol; it’s a syrupy, superficial image.
No, when I allow my Spirit-inspired heart to take over, I get a different picture. Last night I experienced a taste of heaven when I wheeled out to my backyard to look at the full moon. It shone perfectly round and pale white through a sheer curtain of high, thin clouds. A sprinkle of blue stars peeked through the haze, and someone down the street was playing a Chopin melody on a piano. A warm breeze touched me. A half-forgotten poem came to mind as I strained to see the stars: “They were tiny peepholes in a great black wall with the party lights of heaven streaming through.”
For a split second I was in ecstasy. My heart broke for joy and then…it was gone. Whenever we stumble upon ecstasy, our heart knows beyond a doubt that this is it. It’s a glorious healing of that old ache, even if but for a short moment. Lovers who speak of being “in love” feel it most often. They stumble into love, lose themselves, and then find themselves overwhelmed by something gloriously larger that possesses them. And it’s ecstatic.
You know what it’s like. You know how it feels. Your heart grows faint and your breathing grows short just picturing the soft eyes and tender smile of the one you adore. Just being in the same room together is a thrill. You ply him with questions just to hear the sound of his voice. And the thought of a kiss? An embrace? You all but melt.
This kind of love, romantic love, is as close as many people get to the healing of that ache. Trouble is, most people forget that romantic love, like all the other loves—agape, phileo, or eros—is meant to point us to a greater, more fulfilling joy that enraptures. People cherish the glory they see in their lover, and they forget that the glory is not in the one they love, so much as shining through him or her. Most people are blind when it comes to this. They don’t realize that all the glory comes from beyond the one being cherished, like a light reflecting in a mirror. They make the mistake of idolizing the one by whom they are smitten, rather than reading the cues that keep whispering, “It’s not me…it’s not in my eyes…I’m only a reminder of something, Someone else. Quick, who do I remind you of? Here’s a hint: I’m made in the image of God.”
Most people never take this broad and glorious hint. They forget that the human soul was made to enjoy some object never given, but only alluded to. They forget and so they place in the hands of the one they love the incredible burden of keeping the cup of joy overflowing; they heap on the lover’s shoulders the weight of sustaining ecstasy that only God can carry. The result? They are bitterly crushed when romance fades and the one they adore fails to be God, falling short of keeping them enraptured. And so, on to the next lover. And the next god. And the next.5
With Christians it is different. We are rightfully coaxed in 1 Peter 1:22 and 4:8 and elsewhere to, “above all, love each other deeply…from the heart.” And for good reasons. In the first place, Christians get the hint, recognize the cues, and understand that the person we love is stamped with the image of God. We have the “homing detector,” the flight instruments to help us see that the converging points in eternity do not meet in the face of the one we love, but pass through to meet in the face of God. To love each other deeply is to acknowledge that the divine glory that we see in the eyes of another is a reflection from beyond. This makes Christian love all the sweeter and each friend is an open invitation to see Jesus in him or her. As the song goes:
I see Jesus in your eyes and it makes me love Him,
I feel Jesus in your touch and I know He cares,
I hear Jesus in your voice and it makes me listen.6
What’s more, the love Christians share lasts much longer than any old romance. It lasts longer than a lifetime.
Second, we have a built-in warning system that sounds an alarm if we start to idolize the one we love. It blares, “Wrong coordinates! The points converge not in this face, but in God’s! Get back on track!” God wants us to learn that human love is a signpost pointing to divine love. We are to learn where love’s focus should be, and not be like a puppy dog who wags his tail and sniffs your finger when you are trying to point him to his food. Christians can and should properly read the signs. The one we love is a gift from God and, as a gift, points us to the Giver who is the One and only One who can provide an overflowing cup of joy, if not occasional ecstasy. This warning system keeps love, whether for our husband, wife, or friend, rightly focused and constantly refreshed.
Third, and most important, when we Christians love each other deeply, we catch a glimpse of that particular facet of God’s love that is being cut, honed, and shaped in the life of the one we deeply love. We savor a foretaste of their true identity reserved in heaven, we inhale the fragrance of the heavenly person they are becoming. We see a particular aspect of heaven in them, we rejoice, and God receives glory—the mirror reflects His image back to Himself, and, once again, we are reminded that one day in eternity He shall indeed “be all and in all.”
C. S. Lewis was intimately acquainted with the way humans mirror a higher, more heavenly glory when he wrote, “Remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…”7
For me, this is one of those unseen divine realities. When I look into the eyes of a brother in Christ whom I love or a sister whom I cherish, I can almost see the spiritual being they are right behind their pupils. I also can’t help but see their future divine fulfillment: “Christ in you the hope of glory.” So you know what I do? In my mind, I get out my brush, mix some flesh tones, and I paint their face. I choose a certain color for the eyes, or I angle my brush for the slant of the cheek. Often I get so engrossed in the face, I forget what’s being said. It’s interesting that I don’t pick the hands or the body. The face is where matter is subdued by the mind; it is where the eyes show up the lamp that’s lit in the soul. And, my, is that person beautiful! I just have to paint him! I hear the heavenly echo in his voice, the haunting in his eyes, and I just have to portray it. As I said in the first chapter, it is painters who most often try to capture the echo of heavenly music. And when I see that timeless look in someone’s eyes, I head for that art easel in my imagination.
Within our heart we find a shadow of heaven, especially as we “love one another deeply,” for love is an unconscious desire for heaven. We now know what we want. We know the answer to our heart’s longing.
In the Heart of God
What you do find in your heart and what you see reflected in the ones you love, is God. He and He alone provides the healing of that old ache. That’s why heaven has to be more than a place.
Much, much more.
It must be a Person.
If you need a bit more convincing, then take this test St. Augustine gave his students centuries ago. Imagine God appeared to you and said, “You want heaven? I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll give you anything and everything you ask. Nothing will be a sin; nothing will be forbidden; and nothing will be impossible for you. You will never be bored and you will never die. Only…you shall never see my face.”8
Brrrr! Do you feel that chill in your soul? Your heart and mind recoil in unison on this one. Your primordial desire is that you want God more than anything else in the world. Like St. Augustine said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”9
Yes, your heart’s home is in the heart of God. He has placed within you a yearning for Himself, a desire to know Him and understand what He is like. Every soul feels the void and the emptiness until it connects with its Maker.
Like tides on a crescent sea-beach,
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in—
Come from the mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod—
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.10
Pleasures and treasures on earth may be sought after and not found, but only God comes with the guarantee that He will be found. “‘You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and will bring you back from captivity’” (Jeremiah 29:13–14). Hurrah, no more exile! No more strangers in a strange land! God assures us “I will be found by you.”
More specifically, He will be found in Jesus Christ. God illumines our heart and mind when we sincerely search for the Truth and reveals Jesus, the photo image of the Father who dwells in unapproachable light. Jesus is the source of the haunting echo and the heavenly song. Jesus is God wearing a human face. He is real and not abstract. He invites us to do what we cannot do with the Incomprehensible—He invites us to drink and eat of Him, and “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
All my life long I had panted
For a drink, from some clear spring,
That I hoped would quench the burning
Of the thirst I felt within.
Hallelujah! I have found Him
Whom my soul so long has craved!
Jesus satisfies my longings—
Through His blood I now am saved.11
“That God can be known by the soul in tender personal experience while remaining infinitely aloof from the curious eyes of reason constitutes a paradox best described as ‘Darkness to the intellect but sunshine to the heart.’”12 Jesus is sunshine to our heart. Not just to our logic, but our heart. Praise God, we know the answer to our heart’s longing. It’s Jesus!
The disciples of Jesus, at first, weren’t so sure that this Man in their midst would fulfill their deepest longings, so “Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’ Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’” (John 14:8–9).
Our longings are satisfied in Him for “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). We can know God—our Father who art in heaven—if we know Jesus. And knowing Him, as we would desire to know a Lover, is ecstasy. His invitation to “enter into the joy of the Lord” is like stepping into a raft and being carried helplessly along a surging current, spilling over and splashing with joy. Please note that the joy of the Lord does not enter into us, but we, into it. We are enveloped by something larger, something greater than ourselves, a heavenly “in-loveness” in which we can do nothing but laugh and enjoy the ride. Jesus smiles, stretches out His hand and welcomes us into His raft with the invitation, “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39).
When you enter into the Lord’s joy, ecstasy spills not only into laughter, but into song. A song, like poetry, is more the language of the heart than mere prose. This is why the old hymn writers who were ecstatic about God always sang about heaven. I bet Charles Wesley was enraptured when he penned the fourth stanza to “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”:
Finish then Thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see Thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in Thee:
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heav’n we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love and praise!
Tears have streamed down my cheeks in church when I’ve sung that last line: Heaven is a place, and also a Person in whom I am lost in wonder, love, and praise. My heart insists that I sing when heaven courses through my veins.
Face-to-Face
Remember when I shared that lovers always focus on the face of the one they adore? And in that face they find ecstasy, albeit fleeting? Here’s a pop quiz for all you romantics: in whose face do we find ecstasy lasting? Take a broad and glorious hint from Psalm 27:4, 8: “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord…My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, Lord, I will seek.” And if you need another reminder, listen to Psalm 105:4: “Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always.” The points of eternity converge in the face of our Savior. Little wonder I not only want to paint in my mind the faces of friends I love, but also the face of Jesus.
Since you got the answer to that question, this next one is easy: What are the correct coordinates for focusing your faith? The faith of which I have been speaking up until now is only the lens, the spectacles through which “the eyes of the heart may be enlightened” (Ephesians 1:18). The faith I’ve been describing is only a way of seeing and, therefore, believing something. But this isn’t the whole story.
The correct coordinates on which to focus the eyes of the heart are Hebrews 12:2: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” Jesus is the Unseen Divine Reality. Everything shall find its future divine fulfillment in Him. “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ,” says 2 Corinthians 1:20. This means every promise. The Author and Perfecter has conceived every unseen divine purpose and has planned its fulfillment to be a part of the wonder of heaven, “so that in everything he might have supremacy” (Colossians 1:18).
Everything from Pikes Peak to my backyard washed in the glow of a full moon—every bit of beauty here is but a shadow of something far more beautiful there, and “we know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:22). The creation is groaning, longing to be clothed with the beauty its Designer originally intended.
Not only this dusty little planet will find fulfillment but, God willing, the teenager in the white-sequined dress will too. The Iranian gas station guys. And the little Asian girl in the Hair and Nail Shoppe, for “we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons” (Romans 8:23). He will give us much more than the innocence we were groping for back in the Garden; He has imputed to us His righteousness. Our future divine fulfillment is alluded to in I John, for one day “we shall see Him and be like Him.” Completely.
To pursue heaven is to pursue Him. To pursue Him is to find heaven.
It’s that simple. If you wholeheartedly pursue Jesus, you can’t help but be heaven-minded and sigh with Psalm 73:25: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And being with you, I desire nothing on earth.”
Some will say, though, “Wait a minute, there are a lot of other things on earth I desire. Besides, I already know Jesus, I’m saved—have been for fifteen years—but I’m still not gripped by heavenly glories above. I’m still not homesick for heaven.”
Set Your Hearts on Things Above
There’s a solution. It may take effort, it will require commitment, but it can be solved: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1).
This verse is a command. We may think this command isn’t as necessary as other mandates in Scripture, but it is. When you consider that the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord with all your heart and mind, it follows that we should set our entire being (that’s what it means when it says “heart and mind”) on things above.
My heart is the seat of all kinds of appetites and affections. Isn’t yours? Our heart is hungry, not for food, but for a whole range of wrong coordinates. Sometimes the hunger in our heart gets us into trouble, and we wish we could curb the appetites. You’ll be surprised, though, to learn who gives us these desires: “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 8:2–3).
The Lord is the one who causes us to hunger. He is the one who has put within our heart those yearnings. At first, this seems odd. Doesn’t God know the “hungries” often get us into trouble?
God has good reasons for placing within us a heart that has such burgeoning appetites. He does so in order to test us and humble us, to see what is in our innermost being, to see whether or not we would follow Him. According to Deuteronomy, He places in our sight a whole range of things that could get us off track, but His purpose is never to tempt, only to test to see if we will zero in on the right coordinates. Will you succumb to the handsome face of your best friend’s husband or will you choose heaven? Will you covet that third Penn International 50W fishing reel or will you desire heaven? Will you max out four credit cards on new wallpaper, carpet, and furnishings or will you invest in heaven?
To hunger is to be human, but to satiate yourself on God is to send your heart ahead to heaven. Feed on Him in your heart, and you will be yanking that foot out of the mud of earth and stepping closer to eternity.
I admit it’s a constant struggle to set your heart on things above. Always and always we want more. And where we place our citizenship, whether in heaven or on earth, is revealed by those things we passionately desire. If we desire dull, sensual things of earth, our souls reflect that dullness; if our desires rise to find fulfillment in the exalted, in the noble, pure, and praiseworthy, then and only then do we find satisfaction, rich and pleasurable.
The great in the kingdom of heaven will simply be those who set their heart on Christ and loved Him more. The great will be those who, having received a “You’re off course!” warning from the heart’s homing detector, simply got back on track.
That’s the way I want to live. When I read, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4), I want to focus on Jesus, not my heart’s list of desires. Yes, I realize that curbing the appetites of my heart will heighten my loneliness on earth, but I’m convinced I am destined for unlimited pleasure at the deepest level in heaven. I also know that nothing now quite meets the standards of my yearning heart and this quiet but throbbing ache drives me to anticipate heavenly glories above.
For me, true contentment on earth means asking less of this life because more is coming in the next.
Godly contentment is great gain. Heavenly gain. Because God has created the appetites in your heart, it stands to reason that He must be the consummation of that hunger. Yes, heaven will galvanize your heart if you focus your faith not on a place of glittery mansions, but on a Person, Jesus, who makes heaven a home.
Set Your Minds on Things Above
Colossians 3:1 is really a double command. We are not only to set our hearts on things above where Christ is seated, but “set [our] minds on things above,” as well. That’s hard. Our hearts hold a shadow of heaven, but not our minds. I can prove it.
Take last week. After Bible study a few of the girls hung around and started talking as we sipped coffee. You’d think we would have discussed the apostle’s encouragement to set our hearts and minds on things above, right? Wrong. Instead, we discussed the advantages of the new clean-and-easy, stand-up toothpaste tube with the convenient cap that flips up or unscrews for ease of use and cleaning. We discussed the sale at the May Company, whether or not Excedrin PM is just a marketing ploy to get more people on sleeping pills, and the latest reports of what the First Lady has been up to.
There’s nothing wrong or immoral with these thoughts, but it’s no surprise God said to Isaiah, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways…As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). Somehow, I don’t think God stays up at night wondering why they don’t standardize electric plugs worldwide.
God’s thoughts are higher than ours. And the gap needs to be bridged. My thoughts need to rise to the heavenlies where Christ is seated. This means more than just thinking nice Girl Scout thoughts that are clean and reverent. “Set your minds on things above” means just that: thinking about things above.
This struck me not long ago when, during a visit to Italy, we explored Rome’s Basilica. At the front of the cavernous cathedral, resplendent in Italian marble, mosaics, and statuary, was not the altar I expected to see. Instead, there was a large throne. It was fashioned from dark gold wood and surrounded by gilded clouds and bolts of lightning. Sun streamed through the windows above, washing the entire area in warm and beautiful tones. It sounds gaudy, but actually, it was rather inspiring. It was a pleasant surprise, albeit a feeble representation of the real throne of glory in heaven.
After I returned home, I thought about the throne in the Basilica as I laid in bed one night. It was nothing like the throne depicted in Daniel 7:9: “The Ancient of Days took his seat…His throne was flaming with fire, and…thousands upon thousands attended him.” I tried to picture the real thing and it became a wonderful exercise in setting my mind on things above. The earthly imagery of a throne engulfed in flames, to my mind, sounded a bit like Star Wars, so I focused on the verse that says, “He sits on the throne of our praises.”
I decided to think about just that: A throne made of people’s praises. Each joint and leg represented “Thou art worthy” or “You are holy” or “Your name is wonderful” and many more. I pictured God’s delight in reclining on such praises. Not your garden-variety delight, but joy-filled laughter for “the One enthroned in heaven laughs” (Psalm 2:4). Before long, I found myself laughing too, lighthearted and raised with Christ in the heavenlies; then, falling prostrate and praising Him for granting me access to the inner sanctum as well as the honor of building Him a throne of praise.
Is this all too heavenly minded? No way. When my mind chews on Scripture, as well as its symbols of heaven, faith has something to grow on. That time of contemplation helped yank my foot further out of the mud of earth, making my heart airier and my mind purer.
To set our minds on Christ means not only the contemplation of the divine in heaven, but the divine on earth. Think about Jesus and Him alone. Contemplate Philippians 4:8 and think about “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable” about Christ. Picture Jesus blessing the little children and remark to Him in prayer how gracious or kind you think He is, how tender of Him to take a baby out of the arms of its mother, rock it gently, and kiss its cheek. Think about Him tousling the hair of a little boy or taking in His hands the face of a child and blessing her. How noble, how lovely of Jesus. Think about Him reaching out to heal the bleeding hurt of a woman with a hemorrhage. How tender, how compassionate of Jesus. Think about Him turning a face of steel toward religious phonies and squaring off against sin. How holy and awesome of Jesus. And how changed you are after thinking such thoughts.
This is where love really builds between you and God. Because remember, He is also thinking about you. Psalm 139:17–18 says, “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.” The Son makes the Father’s thoughts available by stooping to make Himself comprehensible to our pea-sized brains. In the Bible, Jesus has given us His thoughts and we have “the mind of Christ” when we lay hold of Him and His ideas. Then and only then can we be drawn up to heaven.
Heaven and God…God and Heaven
To think about heaven is to think about Jesus. To pursue heaven with your heart is to pursue Him.
I’m not taking literary license. I’m not being lazy with Bible interpretations. Heaven and God are intimately entwined, and the pursuit of one is the pursuit of the other. Matthew 23:22 says, “He who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it.” If you swear by heaven, you are swearing by God. Heaven is the place where God so much is, that you can refer to one or the other and virtually mean both.
Whenever Scripture refers to the kingdom of heaven, it means the kingdom of God. John MacArthur explains:
It’s just another way to express God. In the period between the Old and New Testament, the Jews never used the name of God…because they thought it was too holy to come through their lips. One of the things they substituted for the name of God was heaven. Instead of saying, ‘I worship God,’ they would say, ‘I worship heaven.’ Instead of saying, ‘Call upon the name of God,’ they would say, ‘Call upon the name of heaven.’ To enter the kingdom of heaven is to enter the kingdom of God.13
The King of heaven wants us to see this tight connection between the Place and the Person. When our heart melts into God’s and when our mind is thinking on Him, Place and Person no longer seem separated. “God [has] raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6). Amazing! When we understand our position in Christ, we begin to grasp our position in the heavenly realms. We are already seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. I’m not talking about astral projection or anything spooky. We’re not actually in heaven the place, yet. But we are in the heavenly realms in that it’s a sphere in which we live under God’s rule and His Spirit’s blessing. We are under the dominion of the King of heaven, and that places us in His realm. The King has come as well as His kingdom. The King is in our midst, and His kingdom is within us. All signs point to there and here. All signs lead to Him because all signs come from Him.
Use your eyes of faith here. This is another one of those unseen divine realities. “You have already come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven” (Hebrews 12:22–23). Why all the verbs in the present tense? Well, as I said in an earlier chapter, it may have something to do with the different kind of time in which heaven exists, or the next and new dimension of mansions and golden streets. More likely, God simply wants to get your mind racing and your heart beating with a present-tense excitement, a right-around-the-corner anticipation of heaven. Isn’t that the way strangers on foreign soil are supposed to feel about their homeland?
Live in the present tense of heaven and you will smell the heavenly fragrance of the person you will become. Your life will have intensity and depth. You will sit close to self-scrutiny, understanding that by your words and actions you are doing earth a world of good. Your heaven-inspired faith will give you joy and peace, without parade or noise.
Most of all, you will begin to feel at home. You will begin to see “our Father who art in heaven” not as the Incomprehensible, but as Jesus sees Him: Abba-Father. Daddy.
Home is where Daddy is.
Let’s Go Home
I like earth. But my heart pumps for heaven.
Calabasas, California, is nice, but it pales in the light of the heavenly realms. Home is pretty good here, but my homing instincts often have me pulling up a chair on the front porch of my mansion to shade my eyes and scan “a land that stretches afar.” I have a glorious homesickness for heaven, a penetrating and piercing ache. I’m a stranger in a strange land, a displaced person with a fervent and passionate pain that is, oh, so satisfying. The groans are a blessing. What a sweetness to feel homesick for heaven for “a longing fulfilled is sweet to the soul” (Proverbs 13:19).
Never was this symbolized more clearly than at one of our recent JAF Ministries’ retreats I helped lead for families of disabled children. After a week of wheelchair hikes, Bible studies, and arts and crafts, I listened as the microphone was passed from family to family, each tearfully sharing how wonderful the time had been. Some talked of meeting new friends. Others, of the games, music, and hikes. A few said how they wished the week could go on and on.
Then little red-haired, freckle-faced Jeff raised his hand. He had Down syndrome and had won the hearts of many adults at the retreat. People had been captivated by his winsome smile and joyful spirit. Everyone leaned forward to hear his words. Jeff grabbed the mike and kept it short and sweet as he bellowed: “Let’s go home!” He smiled, bowed, and handed back the microphone. All the families roared with laughter.
His mother told me later that, even though Jeff thoroughly immersed himself in the week’s festivities, he missed his daddy back home.
I identify with Jeff. The good things in this world are pleasant enough, but would we really wish for it to go on as it is? I don’t think so. The nice things in this life are merely omens of even greater, more glorious things yet to come. God would not have us mistake this world for a permanent dwelling. It was C. S. Lewis who said something about not mistaking pleasant inns for home on our journey to heaven. I’m with him and I’m with Jeff. It’s a good life, but I am looking forward to going home.
I miss my home.
I miss God.