Does Heaven Have a Brand Problem?

What Is Your Hope?

What is the hope of heaven to your life as a Christian? The question flows from Paul’s words at the beginning of what may be his most beautiful and comprehensive passage on living as a follower of Jesus:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Col. 3:1–4)

In Colossians 3 Paul talks about envy, idolatry, anger, and slander. He talks about kindness, compassion, patience, and forgiveness. He talks about sex, marriage, and parenting. Yet every bit of this portrait— from what sins to put off to what virtues to put on, from how we love one another to how we conduct ourselves in church and at home and in the workplace—flows from a mind that is set on things above.

Right at the center of the Christian life, Paul places an intentional, disciplined, cultivated focus on heaven. Does that sound right to you?

Remember Heaven

Matthew McCullough

In these practical meditations on biblical promises, Matthew McCullough shows how cultivating heavenly mindedness shapes readers’ lives in the meantime.

I’m convinced that heaven suffers from a serious brand problem.

For some, the idea of heaven seems boring. This is a problem with a long pedigree. Catherine Earnshaw, of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, speaks from nineteenth-century England what many people feel today:

If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable. . . . I dreamt, once, that I was there. . . . Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.¹

Do you see the implication? Heaven is literally a nightmare. As one writer sums it up, “Our ancestors were afraid of hell; we are afraid of heaven. We think it will be boring.”² Many Christians may know better than to accept clichés about chubby angels playing harps in the clouds, but they don’t have more relatable images to fall back on. Why should I want to be at a worship service that never ends?

For others, the thought of longing for heaven feels a little bit wrong, as if there’s a zero-sum relationship between longing for heaven and loving the world as we know it now, with its precious people and their serious problems. “Heavenly-minded” is an age-old knock on people who are no earthly good. Karl Marx famously described religion as the opiate of the people, something to take the edge off their pain and keep them from taking action to make things better. I’ve heard Christians of my generation speak of heavenly-mindedness in pretty much those terms, as cover for indifference and inaction. Isn’t it self-indulgent to look ahead to an eternal world of bliss when real people are really suffering all around you?

For still others, the notion of heaven seems almost pitiful, more like loss than gain—as if heaven means the end of familiar joys in this world, joys that are significant and wonderful. Why should I long to be in some other world when I’ve got so much to live for in this world?

My sense, however, is many Christians simply aren’t thinking about heaven at all and, if asked, couldn’t say why they should be. Maybe it makes sense why an eighty-three-year-old widow with terminal cancer might long for heaven. But what about a twenty-three-year-old law student in her second year? What about a thirty-three-year-old engineer with his first kid on the way?

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I want to show that the issue is not whether you love this world and its joys, its people and their needs. The question is whether you have any hope beyond this world and what it has to offer. Concrete, unshakable, life-giving hope is the birthright of every Christian, and this hope is meant to touch every part of our lives in the meantime.

Sadly, I’m convinced that we tend to view heaven the way we view our car insurance. We know we need to have it, but God forbid we ever have to use it. The best thing about having car insurance is the peace of mind it provides: you don’t have to think about it until the moment you need it. Meanwhile your focus stays fixed on the car itself—what style you like best, what features you need, how you want to use it, where you want to drive it.

As the Bible describes heaven, it’s not at all like an insurance policy filed and forgotten. It is an inheritance you are sure to receive and, beyond that, an inheritance you can draw on right now. Throughout Scripture, the promise of heaven functions like a trust fund—certain, fully funded, and freely accessible while we wait for faith to turn to sight. I want to help you see the incredible riches stored away in that trust fund and how to draw on that wealth day by day.

But first, back to Paul and his crystal-clear, countercultural basis for our lives as Christians. Why should we set our minds on things above? Why does Paul lay this command as the foundation of the Christian life?

Hope Is Essential

Heavenly-mindedness is absolutely vital because what we want or expect from our future has a huge effect on our experience in the meantime. We humans are future-oriented creatures whether we like it or not.

We are not the only creatures with an eye on what’s coming, of course. Birds build nests in the springtime. Squirrels bury nuts in the fall. Bears store up fat for winter hibernation. But birds, squirrels, and bears operate on instinct, aimed at simple survival.

Humans alone have hopes and dreams. We imagine opportunities to crave and possibilities to fear. We train for careers. We plan for families. We save for retirement. We buy insurance for our houses, our cars, our health, and even our lives. Only humans make conscious choices now in the hope or dread of what might be later.

To face up to life in this world as it is, you need a hope beyond this world that can survive anything.

The question is not whether your view of the future shapes your life today. The question is which view of the future is shaping your life today and what effect it is having.

Tim Keller often used a helpful thought experiment to capture this point.³ Imagine two women hired to do the same job, under the same conditions, and for the same amount of time. They both have to perform the same menial tasks, hour after hour, day after day. They both carry on through the same sweltering heat in summer and the same freezing cold in winter. But one of these women was told she would receive $30,000 at the end of the year, while the other woman was promised $30 million.

Surely the one promised $30,000 would struggle to keep going. She would deal with bitterness. Maybe she would feel underappreciated and misused. She’d be looking over her shoulder for other opportunities that might pay more or cost less. She’d be discouraged where she was and afraid of missing out on better options.

But the one promised $30 million would put up with just about anything. She would work day in and day out with a smile on her face because every minute of every day would bring her closer to a payday she couldn’t get anywhere else.

What view of your future has functional control over your present? Your mind is set on something still to come. Everything in your Christian life flows from whether that something is the future God has promised to you.

The stakes could not be higher. To face up to life in this world as it is, you need a hope beyond this world that can survive anything. That’s because anything can happen. Some of our dreams will fade away. Our bodies will wither and fall. Our relationships will be strained by sin and ultimately lost to death. And more often than not, we can’t stay out of our own way as we stumble on toward the grave and what comes next.

Life can be brutal. If you live long enough, in one way or another, it will be. When Jesus said to lay up treasures in heaven, this fundamental truth about the world was his backdrop—this is a world where moths devour, thieves steal, and rust destroys (Matt. 6:19–20). There is a baseline of brokenness to life under death that no one escapes. The only way to face up to this reality is with a hope beyond the reach of death and all its minions—loss, separation, change, time itself. You need a clear view of where all this is going, to carry on no matter what along the way.

Notes:

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (New York: The Library Paperback Edition, 2000), 99–100.
Carol Zaleski, “In Defense of Immortality,” First Things, August 2000, https://www.first things.com/
Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical (New York: Viking, 2016), 153.

This article is adapted from Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime by Mathew McCullough.

Matthew McCullough (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is the pastor of Edgefield Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime.

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