Your Best Life...Later!

Just got back from the dentist. Actually, it was the clean-your-teeth lady. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Rinse. Spit. Repeat. I wouldn't mind it so much if she wasn't so rough. Plus, I think I saw a tremor. In her hand. So the lady with a tremor in her hand comes at me with a very small pointy metal tool. I'm glad to come home with both my eyes.

As I lay on the very comfortable dentist chair (I want one for home - to replace the Barcalounger) with this professionally-trained-but-otherwise-total-stranger's hands in my open-but-otherwise-quite-personal-and-private-mouth, I got to thinking. I thought about how great it will be, Some Day, to never experience this *or any* unpleasantness (for which I actually paid $75) or pain again. "Ohhh, heaven!" I thought, "Think of a world where you get to eat all the sweets you want and never have any consequences for ignoring oral hygiene! Ah, that will be the day!"

There is a gigantic flaw in this kind of thinking however. It's this: the point of 'glory land' is not merely that God will grant us freedom from pain, as real as that is. And, the point of heaven is not just that there will be all kinds of things that we like there (for me, massively sugary sweets... of course I can't defend that one biblically, but I can hope...).

Let me be rather serious here.

The Big Deal about heaven, the Point of it all, the one joy-filling, praise-inducing, pick-your-jaw-up-off-the-floor Central Reality of it all will be that Jesus is there. The side benefits of being in His presence will be freedom from pain and sadness and death and fear as well as lots of delights that He has planned for us in a real, tangible world that we call 'heaven.' But the main attraction will be Jesus Christ, risen, glorified and triumphant!

And our souls will have met the fulfillment of their every longing and desire.

We should think about heaven more. It would kindle the fire in our imaginations about how we might enjoy Him more now AND it would fire our imaginations for how we might spread the Good News about Him...so as many people as possible can one day experience His Presence!

And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!" Revelation 5:13