Quotes about Heaven

Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.

For Jesus, the question wasn't, "How do I get into heaven?" but "How do I bring heaven here?

A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

I saw how the Bible isn't a book about how to get into heaven, it's a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be. There is very, very little in the Bible about what happens when you die. That's not what the writers were focused on. Their interest, again and again, is on how this world is arranged.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God's creation, where God's will and only God's will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we've bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.

If you believe that you're going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.

She understood heaven to be about partnering with God to make a new and better world, one with increasingly complex and expansive expressions and dimensions of shalom, creativity, beauty, and design.

Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.

And in trying to protect the image of God in them, we just might be protecting the image of God in ourselves in the process. Because with every decision, conversation, gesture, comment, action, and attitude, we're inviting heaven or hell to earth.