That longing we have for more? That dissatisfaction we feel? Those questions that we ask? Those are tugs from God pulling us toward him.
Imagine it this way. One night as you were sleeping, a string was tied around your big toe. You detected the tying of the knot but were too sleepy to respond to it. As you continued to slumber, someone started tugging the twine. Somewhere in your subconscious you felt a pull.
Still, you slept. You slept until your foot fell off the side of the bed and landed on the floor. It’s a wonder you didn’t do the same. You awoke with a start and looked down at the string. As you did, someone gave it such a yank that your foot popped forward as if your knee reflex had been tapped.
What would you do at this point? Ignore the pull and go back to sleep? Many people do. Someone from somewhere is drawing them out of their slumber, but they refuse to respond. They cover their head with a secular pillow and try to go back to sleep.
But then comes a super-yank. The death of a friend. The warning of a doctor. A birthday cake with too many candles. This pull is too hard to ignore. So you follow the string. It winds you down the hall, through the living room, and into the kitchen, where your family awaits you with a surprise birthday party.
God has tied a string on every person, not to the toe, but to the heart. He pulls. He pulls with the glory of a sunset or the pain of a chemo treatment. He seeks to awaken us. And every so often, he succeeds. Someone wakes up. Someone follows the string down the hall, through the rooms…
They do what Paul said: they “seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above” (Col. 3:1-2 NKJV).
Paul used two stout verbs here. The first, seek, means “coveting earnestly, striving after.” The idea is to seek heaven the way a sailor seeks the coast or a pilot seeks the landing strip.
If, perchance, we too quickly read the word seek, Paul also employed the verb set. “Set your mind on things above” (Col. 3:2 NKJV). This verb emerges from a Greek term that means “to set one’s mind on, to be devoted to.”
I obeyed this passage in an earthly fashion. In 1988, we moved from Rio de Janeiro to San Antonio. Months before our departure, friends sent us a picture of a house that was for sale. It was a brick residence with a brown door and a large front lawn. With one look, I was sold. I posted the photo in our kitchen and gave it multiple gazes a day. I studied its exterior and pondered its interior. I showed the photo to the girls and examined it with my wife. By the time we moved to San Antonio, I could have picked out that house from a dozen others. I was acquainted with my home before I reached it.
Christ wants you to do the same. He has changed your permanent residence. “Think only about the things in heaven” (Col. 3:2 NCV). “Keep your mind on things above” (GW). “Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth” (NLT). “Pursue the things over which Christ presides” (MSG). These translations combine to declare in one verse: live in the light of heaven!
How heaven-minded are you?
- Are living and dying equally appealing options?
- As you dream about your future, do you dream beyond the grave?
- Do you ever look into the face of a fellow believer and think, In a billion years, I’ll still know you?
- Are you to the point where a walk through the cemetery leaves you jealous?
- Do you plan more for your heavenly home than you do for the construction of an earthly one?
- Have you ever not bought something because it will have no value in heaven?
- Have you ever heard thunder and thought Christ was coming?
- Do you daydream about the moment you’ll see your loved ones?
A day with no thought of heaven is a day poorly used. The soul needs hourly gazes into the life to come. You need to know what your departed loved ones are doing. We need to envision the rapture and the millennium. Let’s imagine the New Jerusalem and the face of God. Heaven is the green vegetable on the spiritual diet. Be consumed with the things above.
One of my sermon-illustration books contains a story about a missionary and his little son. They moved from England to Central Africa in the company of four other adults. Three of them died. The health of the father began to fail, so he resolved to return to England. He and his boy bounced for days across Africa in an old, broken-down wagon. Upon reaching the coast, they embarked for England by sea. Within a few hours they encountered a brutal storm. The waves and wind combined to make the sound of cannon blasts and shake the ship from stem to stern. During a lull in the tempest, the father held and warmed his son.
Presently the boy asked, “Father, when shall we have a home that will not shake?”
I can’t vouch for the story. The book provides no source. But I can most certainly vouch for the question. I’ve asked it. You’ve asked it. Each and every person has felt this world with its troubles and tremors and asked, “God, when shall we have a home that will not shake?”
His answer? “Soon, dear child. Very soon.”
In C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Reepicheep, the valiant mouse, resolves to discover Aslan’s country. “While I can,” he declares, “I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.”
May God stir identical hunger in us. May we sail, paddle, swim, and, if need be, die with our noses to the sunrise, savoring the day we will be finally home.
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