CITIZENS OF HEAVEN

“But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables Him to bring everything under His control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like His glorious body.”  (Philippians 3:20-21 NIV)

When you received Jesus as your Savior, you began to live in two homes -- earth and heaven. You were born the first time into your earthly family. Now you have been born again into the family of God. You are a citizen of both worlds.

Your new heavenly home is the biggest one. It is God’s home. It is yours because you are united to Jesus and heaven is where He lives.

But we don’t need to wait until we die to visit heaven. Prayer is the airline to our heavenly homeland. We walk heaven’s streets and view its wonders each time we fellowship with the Lord. 

-- Ben Jennings in “The Arena of Prayer” 

#5884

CREATION’S GOODNESS

"[Jesus Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in Him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through Him and for Him. [Christ] Himself is before all things, and in Him all things hold together."  (Colossians 1:15-17 NRSV)

Come, let us dwell in God’s shelter.
Let us dwell in God’s work of art.
Come, because the Earth is the Lord’s,
And God’s Earth is our temporary home.
We live in God’s World; we are not alone.
We share this life with the heavens and the earth,
With the waters and the land,
With trees and grasses,
With fish, birds, and animals,
With minerals and creatures of every form,
And with all our brothers and sisters.
God is good and everything God makes is good.
God is love and everything God makes is love’s fruit.
Let us worship God -- Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.

-- Adapted from Tatiana Valdez 

#5127

A LIFE-ALTERING PRAYER

“Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  (Matthew 6:10 NIV)

"On earth as it is in heaven." Jesus' prayer was, "Make up there come down here."  Make things down here run the way they do up there.

Jesus told us to pray, "Bring heaven down here."  We begin with our body, our mind, our appetites.  Then it spreads to the office, our family, our neighborhood, our church, our country.

God doesn't reveal Himself to us just to make us happy or to deliver us from loneliness.  He also comes to us so that we can in turn be conduits of His presence to other people.  He invites us to join Him in making things down here the way they are up there.

This news is the best news the human race has ever heard.  It is not just good news for the world around us; it is good news for us.  Psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote, "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.  What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."

This is maybe the most dangerous, exciting, life-altering prayer a human being can pray: "God make up there come down here."  Every time you pray it, your life becomes Beth-el, the place where God dwells. 

-- John Ortberg in “God Is Closer Than You Think” 

#5086

HEAVENLY MINDED

“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.” (Colossians 3:1–4 ESV)

All too often we live shallow, earthbound lives that are preoccupied with the temporal. We're caught up in the trivial pursuit of the here and now. In the midst of our hectic schedules, we give too little thought to eternal things above... We must be more heavenly minded if we are to be any earthly good.

-- Steven J. Lawson in “Heaven Help Us!”


#4709

GOD VISITED THE EARTH

“For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in [Christ], and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross.”  (Colossians 1:19-20 NIV)

The Gospel has a once-and-for-all quality. It is unique. There is nothing like it in history or in any other world religion…  God visited the earth.

That says it all! God visited the earth in Jesus Christ who lived and died and rose again for our salvation, who ascended to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to work in the hearts and community of Christian believers. That is the Gospel, the Christ-event, the foundation of our faith. It happened once and need not happen again. All that we Christians believe is based on it.

-- Rev. Dr. A. Leonard Griffith in a sermon entitled "The Faith Entrusted to Us" 


#4574

ABUNDANT LIFE HERE AND NOW

Jesus said… “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  (John 10:10 NRSV)

I believe that when Jesus Christ comes into our lives, He not only saves us for an eternity after death, He brings eternity into our lives here and now. To the degree that we allow our Lord to do so, He helps us to sleep better, eat better, talk better, love better, and laugh better. He brings a kind of continual excitement into life. The Christian life is wonderfully earthy; we don’t seek, in our beliefs, to escape from this life, but we do expect to get hold of something beyond this earth. Not simply when we die; heavens, no! We expect a quite out-of-this-world touch on our lives here. 

-- J. Ellsworth Kalas in “Life from the Upside: Seeing God at Work in the World”


#4516

OUR ETERNAL HOME

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in Me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I am.”  (John 14:1-3 NIV)

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves at home here on earth.

-- Malcolm Muggeridge

#4326

AN UNLIMITED BROADCASTING SYSTEM

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”  (Psalm 19:1-4a NIV)

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

-- George Washington Carver 



#4324

Psalm 19:1

SAYING YES TO THE SPIRIT

Many of our “tame hopes” are fulfilled on a daily basis: the hope that the sun will shine, or the pay check will arrive as planned, or that we will get sufficient nourishment for the day. Though one is disappointed once in a while, our anticipation of these “small” things, though not insignificant, is frequently realized.

By contrast, some of these same issues for people in other cultures are “wild hopes.” Many of our sisters and brothers do not receive a salary, nor do they get three meals a day, nor does the sun of freedom shine in their lives. Born to poverty or oppressed by social systems, these people find little joy and peace. If they are fortunate in avoiding violence they still must struggle with resentment and bitterness in their awareness of the consumption and materialism of the wealthy.

We must pray like Jesus that hope might be restored and that the earth might be recast. Only the gift of the Holy Spirit can empower us to trust in the future and to assume our rightful responsibility for the common good. Renewing the face of the earth is the work of the Holy Spirit through those people who say yes to being the Spirit’s agents of knowledge, love and kindness. Our hope, wild or tame, is grounded in God’s promise of presence. Herein is our joy and peace.

-- Bishop Robert F. Morneau in “Resurrection to Pentecost”

#4168

A GOOD CREATION

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."  (Genesis 1:1)

The universe is full of beautiful and amazing sights. From the galaxies revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope to amazing forms of microscopic life, from the beauty of the prairies at sunset to the majesty of snow-covered mountains, from the magnificence of lions and elephants to the soft gentleness of a puppy dog -- the world as we know it is a good creation.

One of the strongest philosophical arguments for the existence of God is called the argument of design -- that such an amazing universe with all its complexity, beauty, and intricacy must have been planned by a supreme being.

-- U.M. Bishop Scott J. Jones in The Wesleyan Way: A Faith That Matters

#3868

OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

It is hard to keep our eyes open to the things of heaven while attending to the things of earth, and vice versa. How do we sort through these competing claims?

There are days I long to escape the mundane, days I want to flee from dealing with dishes, with laundry, with phone calls, with taxes, with errands, with paperwork, with institutions, with broken systems, with all that tries my patience and wears me out. Yet at the same time I recognize that even at their most maddening, these recurring activities help ground me, keep me from tilting off the planet, root me in this world where God lives. Where God hides. Where God waits for me to look for the holy not beyond my daily life but in the very midst and sometimes mess of it.

BLESSING

May you give your devotion to the things of heaven.

May you give your attention to the things of earth.
May they find a place of meeting in you.

-- Jan Richardson in In the Sanctuary of Women


#3605

CONCERN FOR EVERY LIVING CREATURE

I believe in my heart that faith in Jesus Christ can and will lead us beyond an exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings to the broader concern for the well-being of the birds in our backyards, the fish in our rivers, and every living creature on the face of the earth.

-- John Wesley, as quoted in The Green Bible


#3319

ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

Where do you experience an authentic level of passion about things down here not running the way they are up there?  Maybe it happens when you look at people who suffer from poverty or illiteracy or abuse in families.  Maybe you find your heart stirred when you come in contact with people who have deep emotional hurts or children who have no homes or marriages that are falling apart.

Internally, most of us want to experience the feelings of God's presence; a deeper sense of peace and assurance, a stronger surge of joy, a clearer word of guidance.  Is it even possible for the practice of the presence of God to become a thinly veiled pursuit of emotional comfort?  But ironically, none of these feelings are strictly necessary for us to become agents of God's presence for other people.  All that is necessary is a single intent: "Lord, where do You want to use me to help things down here run the way they do up there?" 

-- John Ortberg in God Is Closer Than You Think

 

 

#3207

OUR EARTHLY HOME

If there is no God, there is no home. The universe is a blind and pitiless machine. Human beings appeared in it by accident. We have minds and consciousness and desires and hopes, but the forces of the universe will one day crush them all, and us along with them.  We don't belong here. The Bible, on the other hand, indicates that the reason we love the earth so much is that God made it to be our home.

The first home was called the garden of Eden. The story of the fall is, among other things, a reflection of our homesickness.

God told human beings to exercise dominion over the earth. That means it is our home but that it is really a gift. The deed is in His name. We are supposed to take care of it. Richard Foster writes, "We plant evergreens and compost garbage, we clean a room and put coasters under glasses, and in these ways we help to tidy up Eden."

-- John Ortberg in Faith & Doubt

#2972

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

No doubt we will always feel a tug between two worlds, for human beings comprise an odd combination of the two. We find ourselves stuck in the middle: angels wallowing in mud, mammals attempting to fly. Plato pictured two horses pulling in opposite directions, with our immortal parts pursuing the divine Good while beastliness strains against it. We have "eternity in our hearts," said the Teacher of Ecclesiastes, and yet bend under the "burden of the gods." We stumble from cradle to grave, tipping sometimes toward eternity and sometimes toward base earth, the humus from which we got our name.

C. S. Lewis once made the observation that the tug of two worlds in humans could be inferred from two phenomena: coarse jokes and our attitude toward death…

… These two "unnatural" reactions hint at another world. In a way unique to our species, we are not fully at home here. As a symptom of that fact, we feel stirrings toward something higher and more lasting. Although our cells may carry traces of stardust, we also bear the image of the God who made those stars.

-- Philip Yancey in Rumors of Another World

 
#2826

HEAVEN BREAKING THROUGH

All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of the seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor of precious stones, is nothing but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world.

-- William Law in Rules for Living a Holy Life, as quoted by the Green Bible Devotional by Carla Barnhill


#2619