Looking to Heaven

“Salvation, salvation is the only necessary thing. This clay-idol, the world, is not to be sought; it is a-morsel not for you, but for hunger-bitten bastards. Contend for salvation. Your master, Christ, won heaven with strokes. It is a besieged castle, it must be taken with violence. Oh, this world thinketh heaven but at the next door, and that godliness may sleep in a bed of down, till it come to heaven! But that will not do it.”

SAMUEL RUTHERFORD.

HE Christian’s attitude to heaven is one of desire. Paul puts it thus: “I am ina strait betwixt two, having the desire to

depart and be with Christ, which is far better.” To set one’s heart upon, longing for heaven, a great desire for Jesus, to be with Him — that was Paul’s attitude. The very best Jesus has is for His disciples. God gives Jesus the key to everything, and Jesus turns everything over to His followers. This ought to kindle and inflame desire. We ought not, we cannot move heavenward with a chilled heart, a cold purpose, a frigid resolution, “For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: If so be

that being clothed we shall not be found naked.”

It is, it must be, an earnest desire. We start to heaven in a flame and it ought to be fanned to an intense flame at each step.

The Christian’s attitude is toward heaven, not to die, merely to be unclothed of the present. It is not simply to get rid of the cumbrance of the tentlike bodies. It is not death, for death has no charms for the true Christian. He fears not to ’ die, he fears not to live. Life has for him little charms apart from heaven. Death has no charms aside from heaven.

The attitude is thus given by Paul: “For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.” This supposes a desire so full of light, of expectations, of longings, that it burdens. Heaven is so charmful to the unclouded vision of faith, so bright and deathless under the rosy hues of an immortal hope, that the present burdens become an intolerable load. ‘To stay is to live in the graveyard, to have a home in a decaying house, to be dying. Earth is a vast cemetery. Everything betokens death, breathes death and is dying. The desire of heaven is kindled at the fountain of life where we become sick of the dead and sick of the dying. The soul, having tasted of the spring of life, longs to bathe in its full river, and yearns to plunge in its immeasurable ocean.

The attitude for heaven is the desire of life for life, of life against death. Here death reigns, imprisons and ruins. There life reigns, emancipates and enriches. We are impatiently patient for life eternal, life which is found nowhere else but in heaven. Sick of death, we aspire to life by living and longing for heaven. This groaning for heaven is not natural. Nature is of the earth, earthly. The Holy Spirit changes nature and fashions us for heaven. “Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given us the earnest of the Spirit.”

God has fashioned us for this heavenly life. He implants in us these heavenly desires. When we stand thus attested to heaven, thus looking toward heaven, thus longing for heaven, these are the marks of God’s hand, the results of His work of grace in our hearts. He puts in us the Holy Spirit to keep the memory freighted with and alive to the fact of heaven, to keep the desires ardent for heaven, to keep the hands busy for heaven and to keep the taste sweet and fresh for heaven. God works this mighty heavenly work in us so that we look not at the things which are temporal, value not the things which are insipid and transitory, and strive not after the perishing things of earth.

These are materialized and materializing times. Materialized times always make much of earth and little of heaven. True religion always makes little of earth and much of heaven. If God’s watchmen are not brave, argus-eyed, and sleepless, religion will catch the contagion of the times, and think little of and struggle less for heaven.

God makes much of heaven. He was the architect and builder of its magnificence and glory. It is His dwelling place, His city, by preéminence, His capital, His metropolis, the home of His family, the dwelling place of His earthly elect. God fashions every child of His after the pattern of heaven, feeds every child of His on its food, trains every soldier of His for its warfare, and begets in every child of His insatiable thirstings for heaven. When the taste is dull heavenward and the eye dim heavenward, then the luster of God has faded from the spirit, the work of God is checked in the soul, the life of God pulsates feebly, and the love of God is chilled to the heart.

“For this selfsame thing” — this heavenly fashion, these heavenly tastes and heavenly longings — says the apostle, “has God wrought in us and given us the earnest of his Spirit.”” Not only does this work of God wrought in us shape and mold us after the heavenly, but the true work of God in us gives a foretaste and pledge of the heavenly.

To the true Christian, heaven is not a mere sentiment, or poetry, or dreamland, but real solid and abiding granite in strength, home-drawing in sweetness and influence. God is never happier, never better to His earthly saints than when their heavenly trend is strongly marked. Heavenly longings and heavenly goings are plainly and emphatically declared of the saints whose devotion to heaven has unloosed and estranged them from earth. He is not ashamed to be called their God. For them He hath prepared a city. What does God think of us who have no sighings for heaven, no longings for it; earth, earthly, earthened? God’s throne is in heaven. His power, person and glory are preéminently there. Does God attract and hold us? Then heaven attracts and holds. Do we thirst after God?

Jerusalem, my happy home!
Name ever dear to me!

When shall my labors have an end,
In joy and peace, and thee?

When shall these eyes thy heaven-built walls And pearly gates behold?

Thy bulwarks with salvation strong,
And streets of shining gold?

O when, thou city of my God,
Shall I thy courts ascend,

Where congregations ne’er break up,
And sabbaths have ng end?