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November 18, 2019 - April 7, 2020
it. We have a hunger for things above, but our skill for filling that hunger has atrophied. We’re like a lapcat—still with the instinct for catching mice, but lacking the reflexes—whose pampered existence has made it slow and lazy, inept at stalking, clumsy at pouncing. It rarely catches its prey, if even it stirs to notice the prey in its midst. We’re like that with heaven: We long for it, but we’ve lost the tautness and alertness, the agility and quickness, to satisfy the longing. We’ve grown lethargic. We’ve become so earthly-minded we’re of no heavenly good.
Heavenly-mindedness is sanity. It is the best regimen for keeping our hearts whole, our minds clear. It allows us to enjoy earth’s pleasures without debauchery. It allows us to endure life’s agonies without despair. It allows us to see things from the widest possible perspective and in the truest possible proportions.
It is Unseen Things that render the things we do see—both the beauty and the ugliness, the grandeur and the barrenness, never enough, and yet never too much.
Some groaning is holy speech, another kind of speaking in tongues.
The instinct for heaven is just that: homesickness, ancient as night, urgent as daybreak.
The longing in us for the Parent is so deep, so desperate, that deprived of Him, any stranger will do.
Here is the surprise: God made us this way. He made us to yearn—to always be hungry for something we can’t get, to always be missing something we can’t find, to always be disappointed with what we receive, to always have an insatiable emptiness that no thing can fill and an untamable restlessness that no discovery can still. Yearning itself is healthy—a kind of compass inside us, pointing to True North.
life does not justify living. Eternity does.
To be heavenly-minded means that we grasp heaven not through the faculties of sight, but through something deeper: by the Spirit and by faith. Daniel Brown, author and pastor, gives a helpful analogy. He could show us, he says, a photograph of his friends, and you’d literally see what they look like. And yet you’d still know almost nothing about them: their quirks, their virtues, the way they move, the timbre and inflection of their voices, their ways with others. A mere physical representation of people is perhaps the least interesting and least informative thing about them. The deeper things
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We know the Spirit, and so know Jesus and so know the Father, primarily in one way: by studying, accepting, and obeying the Word of God.
Like an ancient glassblower sculpting molten glass into useful and beautiful wares with just His breath, God’s Holy Spirit breathed into each word of Scripture, shaping it with fire and wind to one overarching purpose: so you would know God and know Jesus. To read the Bible and miss this is to misread it.
Knowing the Bible is not eternal life; eternal life is knowing the only true God and knowing Jesus Christ. But you will only know Christ if you know—and accept and obey—His Word.
We can taste heaven now. It’s God’s intent that we should. But it requires knowing Jesus through His Word in such a way that we become more and more like Him, with His joy, His love, His holiness, His oneness in us, flowing through us.
Faith is more than what we live by. It is the medium through which we know and are known by God.
faith is something and that faith does something.
The dignity of standing still will never win the prize; we must run for it.
Faith calls us to action.
Faith is nothing if there is nothing beyond earth. It is nothing if this world is enough. Ultimately, faith is hope in the city that Jesus’ blood secured for us, that He is preparing for us, and where He is now seated at the right hand of God awaiting us—the place where on that day and on all days after we will see Him face-to-face. Faith without deeds is dead, but faith without heaven is dead too.
I will make you free and I will make you holy.”
Alienation from God is not just about how we act. It’s about how we think. It’s in our minds. This means that the key to understanding our freedom in Christ—that we are no longer alienated from God, but are now reconciled to Him through Christ and have been made holy in His sight, without blemish or accusation—is also in our minds. Make no mistake: Christ’s redemptive work is a reality that happened out there, in place and time. His reconciling us to God, His presenting us holy and unblemished before God, is a reality, independent of whether we understand it fully or not. But its power to
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in God’s economy the person we become, not the person we have been, is the person we truly are.
You may be a citizen of heaven, but right now you’re a resident of earth, and the rent still needs paying.
Their god is their stomach, and with a god like that, the only heresy or blasphemy is the delay of gratification.
If the reason to be heavenly-minded is that we’re dead already, the reason not to be earthly-minded is that it kills us.
Many of us attempt, often desperately and at great cost, to be outwardly renewed day by day, while inwardly we waste away.
We pour out time and money and energy to look beautiful, to have pleasure, to feel good about ourselves, to avoid suffering. Every year we spend billions of dollars on diets and gyms and cosmetics and surgeries and prescriptions and leisure crafts and getaways—all in a vain attempt to reverse our outward wasting. Yet the wasting relentlessly presses on, blithely and cruelly indifferent to our defenses. All the while, we wither on the inside, lonely, empty, afraid.
it: There is nothing that you experience—good or bad—in this world that either has more substance or is longer in duration than the glory of heaven. Everything on earth is fleeting. It passes, swiftly. It dries up, shrivels up, blows away. It is born in time, ages in time, dies in time. No matter how sturdy or enduring it appears at the moment, from conception it is seeded with decay.
Trouble works out in us the character of Jesus Christ—the one who Himself learned obedience through what He suffered (see Hebrews 5:8).
Few things have the power to fashion in us utter trust in God and deep conformity to the character of Jesus Christ like suffering does. Few things build our faith and refine our faith like it does.
“Don’t let an event as important as death take you by surprise.”
live life so that death comes as a completion, not merely an ending.
Being aware of death makes us more aware of life. It keeps our appetites healthy, our wonderment sharp. It winnows clutter from our life. From the perspective of death, we learn to order our lives differently.
news of our mortality helps us see things in their right proportion, their real shape, their true meaning. Shattering defeats, spectacular triumphs—neither is quite what it seems when viewed from the graveyard. And the often staggering but mostly hidden value of ordinary things—food, light, warmth, love—shines through. We receive these small wonders again as gifts and holy surprises.
Death has a unique power—greater than worship or prayer or the joyfulness of homecoming—to set us trembling and hungry in the presence of God.
the God of heaven and earth came looking for you and me, scouring every dungeon and prison and slave market to find us while we were still His enemy, came to rescue us, to pay our ransom by His own sacrifice, to adopt us as sons and daughters and appoint us as heralds—
Jesus has gone now to prepare a place for you; He’s left you here to prepare for Him, by doing the works He sent you to do.
