When the cost of discipleship presses upon us heavily, we must back up and remember the goodness of the advantage we gained. May we never devalue what we’ve purchased. Being found in Christ at the resurrection is worth any sacrifice.
I am going to make two guesses about heaven. One is that the “new heavens and earth” are going to be very different from anything that we know right now. And the second is that it’s going to be very different from any of our expectations.
As Christians, we need not dread the Lord’s return, but neither should we fail to desire it. As the world gets worse, we’ve got many reasons to wish that the Lord will come sooner rather than later. Why wouldn’t we want to look at it that way?
Unlike the destruction of previous “days of the Lord,” the final one will be complete and irrevocable. “Both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up.” There are no more decisive words of physical termination in all of the Scriptures.
“Beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness.” To forget God’s faithfulness is exceedingly foolish.
Romantic love is not wrong, but there is a finer love that each of us can have one for another. From that love flows a true desire which says, “I want above all for you to have what you need, even if I can’t have it along with you.”
By its nature, love is giving, and the higher the quality of the love, the more costly a sacrifice the lover is willing to make as a gift. In the direst need, love would give all that one had to give, even to the extent of life itself (John 15:13).
The fact that we’re going to have to give up all of our loves in this world doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy them deeply. And having already lost some of our cherished relationships, if they were virtuous we should never say we wish we’d never had them.
In contrast to what we’ll enjoy in eternity, all things here are transitory. Not one of these enjoyments is ours to keep permanently. Job spoke for all of us when he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there.”
My heart aches with an emptiness that nearly kills me. But the rightful King is reigning, and one day this darkness will be sent back to the hell from whence it came. Dark night once had me in its grip, but it has me no more. The dawn is breaking.
