Heaven Bound

Greetings to all my dear friends and supporters! I recently had the high privilege of preaching at a new church plant in the town of Nagua. The Pastor there, Rosario Reyes, is a good friend of mine, and I had the honour of being best man in his wedding some years back. God had put a message on my heart about heaven that night, and so it was that word that I shared. It was a message about the Christian’s heavenly citizenship. Paul writes in Philippians 3:20 that “our citizenship is in heaven, from where also we await our Saviour, Jesus Christ”. If we endure faithfully until the end, we have a better city, a heavenly city that awaits us. As Christians we do not belong to this earth. Infinite glory and wonders are just around the corner of this life, the likes of which cannot be imagined or described. One can almost see the strain in John’s writings as he struggles to find the most extravagant terms possible to describe heaven and the New Jerusalem in Revelation. What makes heaven so great, so spectacular, and so desirous? The very presence of God. There is nothing more wonderful than experiencing the presence of God, and it is in heaven that we shall fully experience this. Jonathan Edwards describes this so beautifully: if the pleasures of God in this life are like a drop of water, there they shall be as the ocean, and if here they are a beam of light, there they shall be like the sun.

Jesus has gone away to prepare a home for us, and this should drive us to live a heaven-bound life, not concerned with the momentary pleasures or pains of this life. I worry that many Christians are too concerned and preoccupied with the day to day occurrences of this life, that we forget the fact that we are, thanks to the washing of the blood of the Lamb, merely pilgrims on our way to the glory land. This is the message that we preach here in the Dominican Republic, that through Jesus Christ, and faith in Him, we become citizens of that glorious place that we can truly call home. After I preached the message, we had a wonderful time of prayer with those who responded to the Word of God. God was glorified! May we all ask the Holy Spirit to remind us of our heavenly citizenship and may we walk each day in light of our eternal destination. In the words of Paul, “One day we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He really is.”