Growing up in a small town, I often attended worship services and funerals that featured songs about heaven. Some had good theology. Others didn’t resemble biblical teaching on heaven at all. But heaven wasn’t just a major theme of our songs. Lots of people talked about it. As they talked about “the pearly gates” or their “heavenly home,” I noticed how they never talked about being freed from the presence of sin or gazing at the Savior or spending eternity with God in perfect worship. Instead, folks talked about heaven because they wanted to see Grandma Sally or escape difficulties or avoid making hard decisions. For many in my community, heaven wasn’t an infinitely holy place where God himself lived, the glory of God but rather a way to achieve a more-or-less optimized version of their present life without the interruption of various hardships.
But heaven isn’t heaven without Jesus.
PASTORING IN LIGHT OF HEAVEN
Years later, when I became a pastor, I reacted wrongly to this squishy, sentimental view of heaven. How so? Well, I simply didn’t give it much thought or attention! I so didn’t want to be an escapist about heaven. I didn’t want to sing sappy songs about
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