“Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.
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“Heaven will be continuous touch with God. The very sense of being will in itself be bliss. To those who care only for things, and not for the souls of them, for the truth, the reality of them, the prospect of inheriting light can have nothing attractive, and for their comfort, they may rest assured there is no danger of their being required to take up their inheritance at present. Perhaps they will be left to go on sucking things dry, constantly missing the loveliness of them, until they come at last to loathe the lovely husks, turned to ugliness in their false imaginations. The soul of Truth they have lost, because they never loved her. What may they not have to pass through, what purifying fires, before they can even behold her! The notions of so-called Christians concerning the state into which they suppose their friends to have entered, are such as to justify the bitterness of their lamentation over them, and the heathenish doubt whether they shall know them again. Verily it were a wonder if they did! After a year or two of such a fate, they might well be unrecognizable! The early Christians might now and then plague Paul with a foolish question, but was there ever one of them doubted he was going to find his friends again? It is a mere form of Protean unbelief. They believe, they say, that God is love; but they cannot quite believe that he does not make the love in which we are most like him either a mockery or a torture. Little would any promise of heaven be to me if I might not hope to say, ‘I am sorry; forgive me; let what I did in anger or in coldness be nothing, in the name of God and Jesus!’”
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Commentary
by James House
Such a variety of notions people have of heaven! Many of them have a good measure of true beauty, others of them paint an eternity that seems sure to be dissatisfying and boring in the long run, and still others seem inspired by little more than hedonistic imaginations.
In truth, as you likely know, the holy scriptures give few details of what heaven looks like nor what "daily life" there is like. What we do learn is that heaven is full of God's perfect love, peace, happiness and bounty; and full of His children that have become like unto Him.
'Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.'
'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'
'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect'
These are high ideals, which take strong repeated effort and repentance. Many may find this bar too high, too unobtainable.
"Purely ideal or not, one thing is certain: it will never be reached by one who is so indifferent to it as to believe it impossible. Whether it may be reached in this world or not, that is a question of NO consequence; whether a man has begun to REACH AFTER it, is of the utmost awfulness of import. And should it be ideal, which I doubt, what else than the ideal have the followers of the ideal man to do with?"
(from Thomas Wingfold, Curate)
"I know not one advanced Christian who tries to obey for the hope of Heaven or the fear of hell. Such ideas have long vanished from such a man. He loves God; he loves truth; he loves his fellow, and knows he must love him more."
(from Paul Faber, Surgeon)
"How many people would like to be good, if only they might be good without taking trouble about it! They do not like goodness well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of Heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it! They do not know that it is goodness all the time their very being is pining after, and that they are starving their nature of its necessary food."
(from Paul Faber, Surgeon)
As George MacDonald said, our Father in Heaven is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. As we put in effort to work toward the ideal, Christ's grace strengthens us, and we find successes week by week, year by year. But the high bar is still there to be met. As we improve, and our fellows improve - each at different paces, in different aspects - we find more joy with each other - more peace with each other.
"God takes time to what He does—the doing of it is itself good. It would be a sight for heavenly eyes to see you, like a bent and broken and withered lily, straightening and lengthening your stalk, and flushing into beauty.—But fancy what it will be to see at length to the very heart of the person you love, and love Him perfectly—and that you can love Him! Every love will then be a separate heaven, and all the heavens will blend in one perfect heaven—the love of God—the All in all."
(from Paul Faber, Surgeon)
When we are each admitting and casting off our faults and magnifying our unique expressions of love of God and neighbor, we are then each creating heavens within heavens "and all the heavens will blend in one perfect heaven - the love of God".
“O thou, wha keeps the stars alicht, an’ our souls burnin’ wi’ a licht aboon that o’ the stars, grant that they may shine afore thee as the stars for ever and ever. An’ as thou hauds the stars burnin’ a’ the nicht, whan there’s no man to see, so haud thou the licht burnin’ in our souls, whan we see neither thee nor it, but are buried in the grave o’ sleep an’ forgetfu’ness. Be thou by us, even as a mother sits by the bedside o’ her ailin’ wean a’ the lang nicht; only be thou nearer to us, even in our verra souls, an’ watch ower the warl’ o’ dreams that they mak’ for themsels. Grant that more an’ more thochts o’ thy thinkin’ may come into our herts day by day, till there shall be at last an open road atween thee an’ us, an’ thy angels may ascend and descend upon us, so that we may be in thy heaven, e’en while we are upo’ thy earth: Amen.”
(from David Elginbrod)