Highlights: Ep. 31 | Mere Christianity | Part 10 | The Gift of Tomorrow
What happens when we die? Only a fool ignores this question.
“Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth; waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But…cock-crow is coming.” Our present world is a shadow-land compared to the next…it’s a faint echo…a pale, insipid, transitory life that only hints at the glory to come.
“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. The apostles themselves, who were set on 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’s since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”
Practical effects of hope: More joy…more motivation for service…more endurance in hardship…more courage…and more incentive to live in a way that pleases God.
But there’s a problem in all this. How can the expectation of heaven become vivid enough for us, so that we look forward to it? “Most of us find it very difficult to want “heaven” at all.” We love this life. We love this world. We love food, sex, nature, sports, pets, vacations, work, hobbies, etc. We are taught that heaven doesn’t have many of the things we’ve grown to love in this world. Our concept of heaven is less than robust, to say the least. Our understanding of heaven needs rehabilitated.
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want…acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
“Heaven” or more properly, the Age to Come will not be less than we now have but more! All that is golden in this life…All that is satisfying, valuable, beautiful, exhilarating, pleasurable, wonderful will not just be included in the Age to Come but it will be exceedingly surpassed! This world with all its pleasures, all its intensity, all its beauty, all its physical wonders…is merely a “shadowland” as Lewis called it. Quote: Never mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death. End Quote
The unicorn summed up what everyone was feeling. Quote: I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.
“LIve for the line.” (Randy Alcorn, The Treasure Principle and Heaven) The Weight of Glory, Essay: “Transposition” (Lewis) The Narnia Chronicles (Vol. 7) The Last Battle