Moving from Earth to Heaven

Changing your address

I just read an amazing truth that is about as obvious as the nose on your face but which I had never even thought about. I don’t know why I had not thought about it – I just hadn’t. Someone posted the pithy little saying “You can’t kill a Christian – you can only change his address”. That is such a simplistic saying and simplistic little sayings often have a mis-leading affect on the listener. Not this one. Put just as simplistically – it’s totally true.

Where do you live right now? What’s the simplest way of describing your present abode? I suppose you would say that I live in England and I would say of many of you that you also live in England, or that you live in the USA or elsewhere. Yet even that is not a simple enough address because, actually, you live here on earth. You live in the midst of a small part of God’s creation called earth. There are other parts of His creation that we call the moon and stars – we have even managed to visit the moon. We have never managed to get anywhere near the stars as they are simply too far away. It recently took a space probe years to reach some of the other planets in our own solar system so how long to reach the stars?? A long time.

Yet there is another part of God’s creation that is part of our inheritance in His Son Jesus Christ. As we have no better name for it we call it heaven – the Bible gives is that name for it too. Jesus told us to pray that, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The trouble starts when we pray that prayer publicly and we manage to offend some poor wee soul who doesn’t believe as we do. In some parts of the world that offence can and frequently does lead to the death of the person who prayed it. That is where our belief differs from the rest of the world.

When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour one of the wonderful things that happens is that we are automatically included in His inheritance of eternal life. What that means in the same simplistic vein is that we don’t die, we are already eternal beings because of this great inheritance and we simply change our address from earth to heaven. Sure, our earthly body dies, but we who are eternal beings, go to join Jesus in heaven. We leave our earthly homes and bodies in exchange for our heavenly ones.

I have heard many testimonies of people dying, going to heaven and then returning to witness to us about it. One very famous such testimony is from Jesse Duplantis. I have heard of many who having watched their loved ones passing away, then see them in heaven – often dancing for joy with Jesus. The Bible says there is joy in heaven over every saved soul – how much more joy then when one of them goes home to his or her reward.

Knowing all this though – does it not stir your heart towards those who have yet to meet Jesus? Does it not move something deep within with an urgency to try to win those who don’t know Him to the Lord? We know what our reward will be but we also know what their reward will be too. Does that knowledge not stir your heart and spur you to a greater effort to win them to the Lord?

Come the day and they will thank you. So will Jesus as He welcomes you with those wonderful words, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”