HEAVENLY-MINDED OR EARTHLY GOOD?

Hope fills my prayers. Hope... that the situations and people that I pray for will find transformation in Jesus Christ. Hope and Biblical assurance.... that God hears those prayers with unimaginable compassion for the people, places and problems that came to this planet He created.

I think C.S. Lewis captured this well—and as I re-read his words, I'm reminded that he made a 180-degree turn from atheism to faith in God. He wrote in Mere Christianity:

“Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is.

“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

The apostle Paul was so burdened about people becoming Christ-followers that he imagined himself as miserable as a woman in labor. (Not that he had personal experience in that!) He wrote the church in Galatia, “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:9).

He didn't live Sunday-to-Sunday. He lived today-to-promised-eternity and heavenly citizenship, eagerly waiting for Jesus, “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” (Phil 3:21).

Writing in old, old age, reflecting on what he'd learned personally from Jesus, the apostle John wrote: “Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

With those words, he thumbed in time to the last pages of history. What encouragement to know the outcome!

I've heard of people who like to start a mystery or who-done-it book, but take a peek at the last chapter to see how it will turn out. That takes the mental exercise out of it! But we don't have to wonder about the incidents and characters, the clue-plants and distractions that are parcel to who-done-its. We know already Who-done-it! The sinless One who visited planet earth, taught, suffered, died, rose, returned to the Father...and is coming again!