Quotes about Heaven

If you die unconverted, you will have the worse place in hell for having had a seat or place in God's house in this world. As there are many mansions, places of different degrees of honor in heaven, so there are various abodes and places or degrees of torment and misery in hell; and those will have the worst place there that [dying unconverted, have had the best place in God's house here].

Christ is man as well as God; he is a creature, as well as the Creator, and he is the most humble and lowly in heart of any creature in heaven or earth. This may well make the poor unworthy creature bold in coming to him. You need not hesitate one moment; but may run to him, and cast yourself upon him. You will certainly be graciously and meekly received by him. Though he is a lion, he will only be a lion to your enemies, but he will be a lamb to you.

Humility is a great ingredient of true faith: he that truly receives redemption, receives it as a little child: Mark x. 15, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child, he shall not enter therein.

Bonhoeffer was constantly trying to correct the idea of a false choice between God and humanity, or heaven and earth. God wanted to redeem humanity and to redeem this earth, not to abolish them.

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence... Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

By praying "his" prayers—the Psalms of the Old Testament, which Jesus prayed—we effectively piggyback on them all the way to heaven.

Several times Bonhoeffer used Barth's image of the Tower of Babel as a picture of "religion," of man trying to reach heaven through his own efforts, which always failed.

For Luther the Bible was not a book like Aristotle's Ethics or like a volume of Livy or Cicero. It was something entirely apart from every book in the world. It was the living Word of God and therefore could not be read like any other book. It was inspired by God, and when one read it, one must do so in such a way—with such closeness and intimacy—that one fully intended to feel and smell the breezes of heaven.

To the proud, the applause of the world rings in their ears; to the humble, the applause of heaven warms their hearts.

The place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.

If you walk with the Lord on earth, you also will walk with Him in Heaven. If you walk away from the Lord on earth, you will walk away from Him, right into eternity.