Heavenly Minded

This episode contains portions of the following programs:

"The Two Buckets"

"Preparing for That Day"

"Misconceptions about Heaven"

"Teach Us to Number Our Days"

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Woman: Who, her? She’s so heavenly minded she’s no earthly good! 

Dannah Gresh: Hmm. What do you think? Is it possible to think about God and heaven so much that you’re no good in the “right here” and “right now”? Or could that maybe be a misconception?

Tell ya what I think: if we’re truly thinking about heaven and spiritual things in the right way, we’ll do a lot of good here on earth.

Thanks for joining me today on Revive Our Hearts Weekend. My name is Dannah Gresh. I’m so glad you’re taking a moment to think with me about…

Song: “Heaven Is a Wonderful Place,” Joni Topper, Your Song Is on the Wind, ℗ 2020 self published

Song EQ’d to sound tinny, add record pops and scratches:Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and gr— (skips, stutters and stops mid-word)

Dannah: But maybe you think of heaven this way . . .

(yawn)

(harp playing) 

Dannah: Okay, so we might have some wrong thinking to deal with when it comes to heaven! 

The Bible has a lot to say about eternal life with God. For example, we read in Psalm 16, “At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Wow! Pleasures . . . forevermore? That doesn’t sound too boring! 

I often think about heaven in terms of the glorious, most wonderful bucket list of things I’m missing here on earth. For example, I love snorkeling. It’s one of my pleasures. And I’d sure love to swim with whales. The big guys like humpbacks, maybe. In fact, I tried swimming with whale sharks once. They’re not really whales, but anyway, not so successful. Right then and there I said, “Lord, any chance I could have the world’s best swim-with-whales-excursion in heaven?” 

Now, you may think that’s odd, but I started talking to God like that when I read a book simply titled Heaven. It explains what heaven is really like and it unlocks understanding about what we can expect. I learned that in some ways it is a whole like like our earth but oh-so-much-more-magnificent and perfected. The book was written by Randy Alcorn, one of my guests today. 

We’ll also hear from Joni Eareckson Tada, Erin Davis, and of course Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. They’re going to show us that being heavenly minded is actually a really good thing. 

Let me start by reading something from Revelation chapter 21.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” [Remember those words, “former things.”] And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

Here’s Erin Davis, with some thoughts about that passage.

Erin Davis: Here’s what Revelation 21 has done in my life: it has run a steel rod of truth straight up my back! It helps me stand for the gospel in ways that no other passage really does, and here’s why. Because Revelation 21 puts everything in my life into two categories.

I had a short stint as a secretary in college, and I struggled with the filing system because there were so many different categories, different colors of folders, different places for things to go. Revelation 21 gives us just two categories! I am a farm girl, and so the farm girl in me likes to think of them as two buckets: former things and eternal things—that’s it.

There’s no third option; there’s no gray area. There are just former things and eternal things. This passage has given me a new filing system for everything in my life. Either it will last forever, or it is destined to pass away. It’s either a former thing, or it’s an eternal thing.

The former things are listed for us right here in Revelation 21:4: 

He [the “He” is Jesus] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

Tears? Former thing. Death? Former thing. Mourning is a former thing; crying is a former thing; pain is a former thing. 

• All physical pain your body will ever experience, it’s a former thing. 
• All heartache your heart will ever experience, it’s a former thing. 
• Everything that is broken in our culture and everything that is broken in us, they all go in the former things bucket.

They’re goners; they’re circling the drain. I like to think of it with a different word picture: they’re expired milk; they’re just waiting to be thrown out. Now, sure, they might sink, but it’s not something that I am going to have to carry with me forever.

We think about our own lives; we think about what keeps us up at night, what makes our stomach tied in knots with anxiety. What keeps us from worshiping, because we’re so consumed with worry? What fractures our human relationships, because we just can’t let it go?! All of those things will ultimately end up in the “former things” bucket.

And yet, those are the things that we spend the most time thinking about, the most time trying to fix, the most time venting about or talking to others about. Scripture is saying, “Put them in the former things bucket. It’s where they belong. They’re destined to pass away.”

Dannah: In that message from her podcast The Deep Well, Erin Davis went on to talk about the second bucket, eternal things. Things that last. You can listen to the rest when you go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode, called “Heavenly Minded.”

Joni Eareckson Tada has lived her whole adult life with quadriplegia. A diving accident in her teen years left her paralyzed and dependent on others. She’s thought a lot about heaven, and she says that perspective helps her as she deals with her physical limitations and chronic pain. I asked Joni this.

Dannah: How has being in a wheelchair made you think differently about heaven?

Joni Eareckson Tada: I think it has prepared my heart for heaven. Heaven is a holy habitation for holy people. It’s why Jesus said, “Be holy as I am holy” (see 1 Peter 1:16). But suffering, my wheelchair has prepared me in that I can’t bear to be depressed. I can’t bear to be self-centered. I just can’t stand it when I have that sullen, morbid, peevish self-centeredness. And my wheelchair kind of ratchets me up out of that. Like a big lever, it just sucks me up out of the miry pit and puts my feet on solid ground.

And, oh my goodness, I need Jesus so desperately. I wake up in the morning—and I’ve said this to your audience before—“I can’t do quadriplegic one more day—I especially can’t do it with pain. But I can do all things through You, Jesus, as You strengthen me” (see Phil. 4:13).

“I know I’m going to get more strength if I unearth out of my heart more sin. So, Holy Spirit, shine Your searchlight and expose in my deepest recesses the sin that needs to be confessed and turned away from. I don’t want it besetting me. I don’t want it entangling me because I want to be closer to You.”

And that means I’ve got to be more holy. And, of course, heaven is that place where we will be like Christ finally.

So my wheelchair prepares me for that day. It gets my heart set on heaven. It sets me up for that day. Oh, Dannah, I can’t wait to stand up next to Jesus. I’m going to hold His nail-scarred hands. I’m going to say, “Oh Jesus, thank You. Look what You did.” And He will know I mean it because He will have seen me and the way I dealt with suffering on earth.

If I had never suffered, if I never persevered through it, I just don’t know if my gratitude would have a lot of depth. But when I express my thanks to Jesus on that glorious day, man, He’ll know I mean it.

He was my life and breath. He was everything to me. Like John chapter 6 says, “He became my flesh and blood. I drank His blood. I ate His flesh” (see vv. 53–55). I consumed Him. I ingested Him every single day. And a wheelchair helps you do that. And when it does that, man, you get your heart on heaven like anything else.

Dannah: So suffering makes heaven sweeter.

Joni: Yes, it does. It makes it so sweet.

Dannah: How has understanding heaven and studying it in the Word helped you through the suffering?

Joni: Well, I think when you understand what heaven is:

• The culmination of all things.
• The final defeat of Satan and his minions.
• The time when the Lord Jesus will be crowned as the undisputed Champion of the universe.
• The time when you will gain reward—the reward of hearing, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” 
• When you understand that your sanctification will be complete.

Oh, my goodness, you’re going to step into glorification, and what’s that going to look like?

When you have that perspective, it puts your suffering on earth in context. You cannot understand suffering in its context unless you look at it from a heavenly perspective. Unless you see that, yes, there’s a finish line, hope is concrete and real, and it’s on its way.

And you will be rewarded. Every little obedience that you do down here on earth is going to gain for you a bigger, deeper, wider capacity for joy and worship and service in heaven.

And so heaven makes suffering on earth bearable. And, believe it or not, not just bearable, but enjoyable because it’s that sheep dog that drives you down the road to Calvary and into the arms of Jesus. What a home base that is. Right?

Dannah: Beautiful reflections there, from Joni Eareckson Tada. 

If you just tuned in, you’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. I’m Dannah Gresh. Today we’re thinking through some of the ways being “heavenly minded” helps us live life better even now, on this side of glory. 

When we think about heaven, we need to make sure our thoughts are grounded in God’s Word. There are some misunderstandings, some misconceptions we need to avoid. Like the idea that in heaven we’ll be some sort of disembodied souls floating around on the clouds. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and Randy Alcorn talked about that not too long ago. Randy is the author of many books, including several on heaven. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Randy, what got you interested in studying, writing, thinking about heaven?

Randy Alcorn: I think more than anything else was when my mom was dying of cancer in 1981. I would read to her every night from Revelation 21 and 22. I’d read other passages also, but I got into a habit or a rhythm with that. 

I’d read those two full chapters to her and what struck me was how physical and tangible they are! They are talking about the walls of this great city and the precious metals and the streets and the River of the Water of Life that was coming through the center of the New Jerusalem and the Tree of Life, which is now really a forest of life growing on both sides of this great river.

So you’ve got the allusion back to Eden with the Tree of Life and this beautiful paradise, but it’s bigger and greater than Eden! So it’s like the first two chapters of the Bible and really through most of chapter 3 are there, in Eden. 

But then you’ve got the last two chapters of the Bible, which are a return to Eden, but a greater Eden that’s now a city and has got culture and civilization and all of that. The thing that struck me was: “Wait a minute! When I think of heaven, I just think of the heaven you go to when you die,” which is really before the resurrection.

And this is all after the resurrection, which actually happens in Revelation 20. So, yes, our loved ones who are there right now, that’s where they are—in the present heaven. But we will all experience together for the first time our ultimate destination which is the new earth!

Nancy: So, some misconceptions about heaven . . . It sounds like the big misconception is we don’t think about it fully enough, or as big and robust and encompassing a concept as it is. 

As you’ve talked with people about this, what are some of the things we may have always assumed or thought about heaven that you’ve discovered, biblically, don’t quite describe it accurately?

Randy: Right. Well, the big thing . . . I think there are a lot of smaller things, even about the present heaven. There are a lot of people who literally have been taught (but if they haven’t been taught this it’s what they have assumed or somehow picked up) is that we really won’t be ourselves anymore.

People say, “Do we lose our identity? Will we remember who we were? Will we still be the same people? Will we recognize our loved ones? Will we even remember our loved ones?” All of these are a failure to recognize continuity, that we continue to be the person that we are when we go to heaven.

So, even though we don’t have our resurrection bodies yet, because we’re not resurrected one at a time . . . Other people have that false notion that when you go to heaven, your body will be there. Well, of course our bodies are left down on earth, and there’s physical evidence for that so we should know that.

But other people assume, “Well, what about all these passages that have people wearing white robes, walking around, talking?” (Which implies vocal chords of some sort, they’re communicating somehow.) 

You’ve got passages in the book of Revelation where you have people carrying palm branches. You’ve got the rich man and Lazarus where the rich man is saying to Abraham, “Send Lazarus over to put his finger in water and cool my tongue.” (see Luke 16:24) And you’re thinking, “Wait! ‘Tongue, finger?’ It sounds like bodies!”

And so part of the answer to that might be that God gives a temporary physical form to human beings since an essential part of our nature is not just our spirit. It’s our spirits, and He breathes into the body of Adam a spirit. It’s body and soul or spirit together that constitutes what it means to be a human being.

So, figuring out what the present heaven is like is one thing, and people have plenty of misconceptions about it. But the huge misconception is that we fail to move forward to our ultimate destination, which is on the new earth.

It says in Revelation 21 God will bring the present heaven, New Jerusalem, down to the new earth which will be an actual physical place that actual physical people—resurrected people—will live in, dwell in forever! And He will be with us and be our God! 

And I believe that means resurrected culture. It means certainly resurrected what we see on the earth. We’ve got water flowing. We’ve got the Tree of Life and presumably other trees. We’ve got eating and drinking, because Jesus said seven or eight times in the gospels in the kingdom of God we’ll sit down, we’ll eat and drink together. (see Luke 14:15; 22:16, 30)

As I argue in the book, that’s way more than just referring to a temporary millennial kingdom. It’s talking about the ultimate kingdom of God we’ll live in forever. So, there are countless misconceptions about heaven. I just think the devil has kind of messed with us in this area.

Dannah: Again, those are some helpful thoughts about heaven from author and pastor Randy Alcorn. He was speaking with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. 

I want to close with a final thought from Nancy, but first let me remind you about Nancy’s new book on the life, words, and works of Christ. It’s called Incomparable. It’s structured as a fifty-day devotional about Jesus. The last section of the book is called “Now and Forever with Christ,” and it tells all about the amazing implications of Jesus’ death on the cross, His resurrection, ascension, and soon return.

We’ll send you a copy of Incomparable by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth as a thank-you for your donation of any amount. Contact us at ReviveOurHearts.com to give. Click where you see “Donate,” and be sure to request Incomparable as your thank-you gift. 

Next week we’ll tackle the subject of hospitality. How can you and I make others feel welcome when they enter our homes and our lives? I hope you’ll join us for that.

Hasn’t it been wonderful to think about heaven today? It really does change the way we view our circumstances today, the trials we’re facing. 

To finish up, let’s hear from Nancy. She taught a series on Psalm 90 called “Living in Light of Eternity.” That psalm by Moses ends with a prayer asking the Lord to establish the work of our hands.

Here’s Nancy.

Nancy: Now, I don’t know what kind of work you have to offer up to the Lord. Some days my work is teaching sessions like this. Some days my work is spending hours and hours at the computer planning to teach days like this. Some days it seems very tedious. Some days when there’s a group of women like this here, it’s very encouraging and exciting. But every day’s work needs to be offered up to Him.

Your work may be preparing meals for your family. It may be washing the dishes after you have prepared those meals. It may be doing laundry. It may be caring for little ones. Some of you are home schooling your children. Perhaps you are writing notes of encouragement to people who are going through some difficult times.

Whatever the work, lift it up to God, and say, “Oh Lord, my life is too short to waste. I don’t want to spend this life just going through this meaningless treadmill, labor and sorrow. I want my life to be spent in light of eternity. I want it to be invested in a way that brings You glory. And so, Lord, would you let Your beauty be upon me and would You establish the work of my hands. Transform my labors into something that is meaningful for Your kingdom.”

Then we thank Him that by His grace He is able to transform that sorrowful, short life into an abundant, joyous—not always easy—but hope-filled life that looks forward to all of eternity in His presence.

When my dad went to be with the Lord, my mother found in his desk drawer a little slip of paper that had this verse written on it: Psalm 90:12.

It was written out in this paraphrase: “Teach us to number our days and recognize how few they are. Help us to spend them as we should.” My dad was a man who lived in the light of eternity, always reminding himself and us that we had so few days. We knew not how few he would have, as at the age of fifty-three he had a heart attack and instantly was in the presence of the Lord.

He was a man, I believe, who had a fruitful, triumphant entrance into eternity. From the time he met the Lord in his mid-twenties until the day he went to heaven twenty-eight years later, he set about seeking how he could live the days he had left on this earth in light of eternity.

If you knew you had only a few days left or months or years—and if it’s thirty or forty or fifty years, it’s still just a few days really—what would you do differently? Are there any phone calls you would make that you've been putting off?

Is there a family member that you’d get in touch with and say, “Can we get reconciled?” Is there someone who you've been waiting to come and ask your forgiveness? That you would take the initiative and see if you could be restored in the relationship. Is there some wrong from your past that you would be motivated to make right? Would you hold on to that grudge? Would you whine and complain about the circumstances that you have at this moment of your life, if you knew that shortly you were going to be in eternity and none of that would matter anyway?

Father, we would pray with Moses, this man of prayer. We would say, "Please have compassion on your servants and satisfy us early with Your mercy, that we would rejoice and be glad all the days of our lives. Make us glad according to the days in which you have afflicted us. Let Your work appear to Your servants and Your glory to their children. Let the beauty, the delight of Your approval, the Lord our God, be upon us. Establish the work of our hands for us. Yes, establish the work of our hands. We pray it for Jesus' sake and for the sake of Your great kingdom, amen.

Revive Our Hearts Weekend is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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