“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him.”
1Corinthians 2:9
How would you spend the perfect week if time and money were no issue?
In this fantasy without limits, your body is healthy and full of vitality and your relationships are intimate and rewarding. Let your imagination soar and see yourself experiencing the most amazing things. Don’t hold back. The sky is the limit!
In my daydream, I go back to my favorite village in Tuscany where I speak fluent Italian – something I never truly mastered though I lived in the Italian canton of Switzerland for two years. My entire family lives nearby and we share delicious meals, visit beautiful places, and embrace the people and culture in ways that we become valued members of the community.
Now, let’s get really crazy and extend this whimsy by turning our perfect week into five, ten, fifteen or more years. Gee, since we can do absolutely anything…let’s make it last forever. Oh, the joy!
You know what? The very best you can imagine will never come close to what God has prepared for you if you love him and have received Christ as your personal Savior. Heaven will be more mind-blowingly magnificent that you can ever conceive.
In his book, Ninety Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper shares that he did not talk about his personal experience in heaven for years. He had been pronounced dead by numerous people after being hit head on by a semi-truck. He miraculously awoke 90 minutes later as a Christian friend prayed and sang over him from the back seat of his mangled car. For years in painful recovery, he struggled with why God would bring him back from such an beautiful place. He was angry and figured most people (except for his closest family and friends) would think his beautiful memories of those spectacular 90 minutes were all in his imagination – some kind of a near death experience in his mind only.
As he describes in his book, there was no way he could have been alive without bleeding to death. His death had stopped the bleeding and when he was “brought back”, he was under the immediate care of medics. After much prodding by friends, Don finally exposed his “sacred secret”. Yet as he tried to write about his experience, he kept saying over and over how human words could not describe the sights, sounds and feelings he encountered in heaven. When he was finally able to read the Bible again and read about heaven, he totally understood what was being described.
In his second book, Heaven is Real…Lessons on Earthly Joy, Don writes the following: “In the past when I read passages about heaven, I didn’t know if they were literal or symbolic. It didn’t matter to me on earth. But now that I have been there, I can report, those verses in Revelation refer to literal streets of gold. Every person I saw in my brief trip to heaven was totally healthy. I can tell people about heaven – a joyously perfect eternity, and about God’s grace, but until they experience those things for themselves, they have to grasp them by faith. But one day, I remind them, heaven will become a reality.”
Yes, God has prepared an indescribable life for us in eternity. One of endless adventures and experiences. Until the day that he chooses to take us there, we must live and walk by faith. As we do, what greater mission could we pursue than to invest our lives in sharing the hope of heaven with those we know and love so they will one day see those streets of gold as well?
PRAYER
Glorious Father, I can hardly imagine what heaven must be like. Perhaps if I thought about it more often, I would not be so consumed with the challenges and difficulties of life here on earth. Please help me live with an eternal perspective knowing that the best is yet to come. You must want us to think about that since you take the time in your word to tell us about it. Thank you for loving us so much that you would encourage us with hope eternal. In Jesus name I pray.
REFLECTON
Take time each week to imagine the magnificence of heaven. Read books such as Randy Alcorn’s HEiAVEN and get excited! Your time on this earth is like a speck of sand in the ocean of time. It’s worth your effort to day dream about your ultimate destination.
