Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You

by John Burke

Burke celebrates what happens next, if you are ready to go. He comments that people “can’t imagine Heaven, so they don’t live for it.”

C. S. Lewis once said, “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. . . . Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”9

When we base our worth or identity on what we do or what was done to us, we will struggle with fear of failure, feel the need to prove ourselves, or manipulate others who get in the way of our success. We will become self-consumed. That’s because God never created us to get our identity from what we do or what others did to us, but from who we are to God.

God made you for himself—not to prove your glory, but to be his glory. His pride and joy. His beloved son or daughter. What he wants you to do is learn to be secure in his love, in who he made you to be, and from that place of security, you can do what he created you to do. And first and foremost, this is to love those you uniquely can love.

No one else has the right or ability to say what you’re worth except the One who created you. He alone knows your name. In the book of Revelation Jesus says, “To everyone who is victorious . . . I will give to each one a white stone, and on the stone will be engraved a new name that no one understands except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17 NLT, italics mine). The promise of Heaven is that one day, you will truly know who you were created to be. To God, you are already one of a kind. No one else can have the unique relationship with God that he created you to have. Imagine in Heaven when you finally realize how special you are to the most important Being in the universe!

How do we know our unique purpose? It always starts with loving and seeking God, then following his lead to love the people closest to us, and then using the gifts and passions he’s put in us to serve humanity. You don’t need to worry about not fulfilling your purpose; if you seek God and his will, you will live it. But we can’t forget, it’s all about love.

I’ve come to believe that every form of love we experience on earth, no matter how intense, is merely a drop in the ocean of love God created you and me to experience. We can’t get enough of love because ours always falls short of what we crave. The Old Testament prophets tell us that God created all people for a unique, loving relationship with him, and even though humanity turns away from God to taste the bitter fruit of the knowledge of evil, God’s love has pursued us relentlessly.

As my friend Michael Warden explains, “Like an eagle is made to soar the heights, we were made for God’s love. Love is our native atmosphere. Yet in a fallen world, we have been separated from love. What we experience as ‘normal life’ is anything but. We are eagles chained to the earth, longing to soar.”

The central theme of the Bible is that God wants a relationship of love with you and every person created. Loving relationship motivates God. But love requires several things—freedom, risk, and choice. That means God chose to subject himself to the same emotional relational roller-coaster ride love subjects every person to—the possibility of rejection and heartbreak.

Nothing is lost when Heaven is your destination.4

“I can breathe!” I said, astonished. I spoke to the angel underwater, in clear tones without the words sounding bubbly. “You are standing in the River of Life. It is of the Spirit of God. It washes away the scars of sin. . . . You shall never thirst with this water. It flows from the Spirit of the Living God, feeding the Trees of Life.”