Quotes about Heaven

It's very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who "gets in" or how to "get in." What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he's interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.

Heaven, for Jesus, wasn't less real, but more real.

heaven is not forever in the way that we think of forever, as a uniform measurement of time, like days and years, marching endlessly into the future. That's not a category or concept we find in the Bible. This is why a lot of translators choose to translate aion as "eternal." By this they don't mean the literal passing of time; they mean transcending time, belonging to another realm altogether.

When the man asks about getting "eternal life," he isn't asking about how to go to heaven when he dies. This wasn't a concern for the man or Jesus. This is why Jesus doesn't tell people how to "go to heaven." It wasn't what Jesus came to do. Heaven, for Jesus, was deeply connected with what he called "this age" and "the age to come.

By the way, when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off [chap. 4]. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd.)

When we talk about heaven, then, or eternal life, or the afterlife—any of that—it's important that we begin with the categories and claims that people were familiar with in Jesus's first-century Jewish world. They did not talk about a future life somewhere else, because they anticipated a coming day when the world would be restored, renewed, and redeemed and there would be peace on earth.

Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes Is the deed ever truly done For Heaven and the future's sakes

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those Not in position to look too close.

Our sacrifice—the best we have to offer, And not our worst nor second best, our best, Our very best, our lives laid down like Jonah's Our lives laid down in war and peace—may not Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight. And that they may be is the only prayer Worth praying. 'May my sacrifice Be found acceptable in Heaven's sight.

When you pray, all heaven prays with you. That's a mighty army.

There is a day coming when there will be a religion without repentance, a salvation without the Holy Ghost, a Heaven without Hell.

"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.