Podcast: How the Hope of Heaven Changes Us Right Now (Matt McCullough)

June 09, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Heaven Is Yet to Come, but It Can Change Our Lives Now

In this episode, Matt McCullough reminds us of the powerful tool that we have when we remember our future with Christ and discusses ways we can cultivate a longing for heaven. Instead of having a “Grab it while you can!” mentality, looking forward to our future hope as Christians can help us fight temptation, manage anxiety, and make our present suffering purposeful.

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Remember Heaven

Remember Heaven

Matthew McCullough

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

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:48 - Remember Death

Matt Tully
Matt McCullough serves as pastor of Edgefield Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and is the author of Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime from Crossway. Matt, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Matt McCullough
I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me back.

Matt Tully
The last time that we talked was in late 2020, I believe, right in the middle of the Covid pandemic. We were all—the US and around the world—kind of reeling from what was going on, trying to figure out what this thing was and how serious it was. How long are we going to be in lockdown? All those things. And I thought it was really interesting because we talked about your first book with Crossway called Remember Death. And it’s just quite the moment to have that kind of a conversation. So I wonder for those who aren’t familiar with that book, could you summarize a little bit what were you trying to do with that book, and how does it relate to this new book, Remember Heaven?

Matt McCullough
Well, at first I’ve got to recover myself from thinking about Covid again. Thank you for putting that back on my radar. A shiver went up my spine. What a time. What a wild time. With Remember Death, in the introduction of that book, the way I set it up is that I’m trying to show how important it is to be honest about your own mortality if you really want to understand why Jesus is such good news. That the Bible draws that connection for us, and that our culture makes it harder and harder to see the connection. That’s so important to the Bible and to the way the gospel is framed. So I talked about that book as a book about wisdom that is just trying to help us see what’s true, whether we like to talk about it or not. No one ever gets out of life alive, so we may as well take that seriously and account for that fact sooner rather than later. But it wasn’t just about wisdom. It’s also about hope because it’s facing up to the facts about our condition that helps us to understand why Jesus talks so much about eternal life, or why he even described himself as the resurrection and the life; why his promises to us solve a problem that we have. So that book was based on this conviction that our culture, in a very unique way compared to other times in places, has made it possible for us to live most of our lives as if death is somebody else’s problem, not ours. It’s shoved out of sight and out of mind because, typically these days, people die not at home. More often than not, it’s going to be in some sort of facility—either a hospital or a nursing home—that’s so different from normal life and so isolated from where we spend most of our time. So it’s possible to not ever really see death up close for much of your life.

Matt Tully
To almost forget about death.

Matt McCullough
To almost forget about it. Yeah. And you add to that the fact that so much of our focus these days is on distracting ourselves from anything we don’t want to think about.

Matt Tully
Anything unpleasant. You started writing that book before the Covid pandemic had hit. You weren’t aware of that when you started that. Do you think, as you look back, and you’re a pastor working with people every day, do you think even that pandemic affected the way that we think about death as a culture? Because that just brought it to the fore in a way that I think was pretty unique in our culture, at least recent history in our country.

Matt McCullough
Yeah, it did. And I don’t think it really made much of a difference long term. I don’t have any data to back that up; just anecdotal here. But yeah, I remember when we talked about this last time, one of the things I was wondering about was whether Covid might be this one-two punch that would change our relationship to death awareness and to just an understanding of an everyday awareness that this is a real problem, and we’re facing it whether we want to or not. Because Covid, at least for a time there we were tracking death rates from Covid on the front page of the newspaper every single day, and it just went up, up, up, up, up. At the same time, at least for that quarantine phase early on in the pandemic, a lot of the things we used to distract ourselves from death were taken away. You couldn’t go to a football game, you couldn’t go on vacation, you couldn’t go out for dinner. You were stuck at home, alone. So here it is, right up in front of our faces, and here we are without as much as we’re used to having to distract ourselves from it. I think there was a chance that we’d grapple with it with a little more honesty. And I think maybe for a while we did. But I certainly haven’t noticed anything shift big picture. I think our culture is still incredibly death-avoidant, and I think that connects back to a challenge that I faced as a pastor in trying to help people see the relevance and the beauty of Jesus. As long as we’re not paying attention to death, this huge part of what makes him so wonderful doesn’t land. We need to see him as a solution to a problem that’s real and inescapable apart from what he’s done for us. So Remember Death was about looking very closely at a problem that most of us would rather not look at and that our culture keeps us from seeing so that we could see Jesus more clearly through it. That said, and this gets to your question about how does that book compare to this book about heaven, helping us to get a stronger grasp on hope was a big part of Remember Death, but the main tool was, like a stick, to drive you to Jesus. Like, this is bad.

Matt Tully
Your main focus was, Here’s the problem. Don’t ignore it.

Matt McCullough
And I got a lot of good feedback from people who read the book who said, “It did that for me. It was a stiff drink.” And I think the connection to hope was there, but it certainly wasn’t the main airtime in the book. And so ever since then I’ve had it on my mind that it could be really good to do a follow up that does more with the hope so that the background of death is still there and it still comes up in this next book, but this one’s more carrot than stick. This is more about, all right, once death has exposed a lot of false hopes and cleared the ground for that, if death awareness has left us clinging to the only hope that there is in life and in death, then how can we leverage that hope for life now in the meantime? And that’s what Remember Heaven is trying to do—take the hope and drive it in to the details of life now.

06:58 - Why Do We Struggle to Remember Heaven?

Matt Tully
The books really do work well as a pairing, where you can maybe start with Remember Death, which is the bad news that we can’t avoid, and then follow that up with Remember Heaven, where we get the full, beautiful picture of God’s answer to our death. But one thing that stood out to me a little bit is you mentioned how with death we have this tendency to, in some ways, forget about it, or we make ourselves forget about it with distractions and all these other things in our culture, but we have a similar problem with heaven in some ways. We tend to not think about it, at least not in the right ways at times and maybe for different reasons. So I wonder if you could just speak to that a little bit. What do you think it is about our culture and about the way that we live our lives that can sometimes prevent us from keeping our eternal hope in our minds and let that be a real, active thing in our lives?

Matt McCullough
It’s a big problem and hard to concisely talk about, but I’ll just start speaking to it, and you can help me be more productive as I go. So I think part of our challenge is basic to being a human, living in a body in a world that’s material and that’s full of attractions that seem more present, more tangible, more touchable, more enjoyable than a world that isn’t yet visible and we’re told will last forever. You can’t see it.

Matt Tully
We theoretically believe heaven is going to be this perfect, wonderful place and that it’s going to be the best, but we haven’t actually seen it yet.

Matt McCullough
How do you long for something that you’ve never seen? How do you long to be somewhere you’ve never been? I don’t have any trouble meditating on thinking about the place that I go on vacation every year with my family. We’ve gone there every year since I was born. The Appalachian Mountains. We go to the same basic place, hike the same basic trails. I love being a creature of habit. It gets better and better every year. So when it gets close to time for that vacation, I’m on it. I’m thinking about it all the time, whether I want to be or not, when I’m supposed to be thinking about other things. Because I have been there. I know exactly what joys it’s going to bring to me. And Heaven isn’t like that. It takes more discipline to try to focus on what the Bible actually tells us about our future, since we haven’t been there. So there’s that problem. I think that’s always been a problem for Christians from the earliest time. I think that’s why Paul talks like he does in 2 Corinthians 4 about keeping our eyes fixed on the things that we can’t see. But I think in the modern world, there’s an extra layer of problem that we’re dealing with in our culture that makes it even harder to hold onto that vision of where we’re headed because it’s hard to focus on anything at all.

Matt Tully
Just in general.

Matt McCullough
Just the distraction of technology. The fact that, at least where I live, so many of us have so many more opportunities for comfort, for pleasure, for recreation than most humans have in all of human history. This world does seem to offer so much, and we have it at our fingertips. So it’s just maybe easier even than it would’ve been for Christians before us to keep chasing something we don’t have yet.

Matt Tully
We don’t often think about the downside of worldly blessing. Good worldly blessings, not like indulging in sin, but even with just the good gifts that God has given us, there can be real dangers associated with those.

Matt McCullough
Real dangers. So the gifts are not the problem; it’s our relationship to them that’s the problem. I think one of the things I talk about in the book a lot is God’s good gifts in this good world that he made are some of the best means by which he draws us onward toward heaven, if we learn to see them in light of how they connect to him and to what he’s promised to give us then. The problem is those same things are also some of our biggest temptations. When our relationship to good gifts aren’t God-centered, then it’s an alternative to heaven and a kind of heaven on earth that we’re going to be constantly tempted to build for ourselves. And we get let down by those things every time we treat them that way, but for some reason, we just keep going back to that well.

10:56 - Misconceptions About Heaven

Matt Tully
I want to get into some of those dynamics that all of us have experienced in our day-to-day lives, but one of the other things that you mentioned as a contributing factor to our lack of setting our hope in heaven in the way that we should is that sometimes we can have these misconceptions about heaven that maybe lead us a strain in different ways. So as you think about the church—Christians in particular; sincere, true, Bible-believing Christians—what are some of those common misconceptions that you would say can sometimes have a hold?

Matt McCullough
One of the oldest ones is that heaven would be boring. That’s been around a long time. It is not a new thing. The notion that heaven must mean some sort of disembodied spirit world full of angels with wings and harps and whatever. I know it’s cliche, and I don’t really talk to a lot of people who think that’s what it’s like, but I don’t think they have a better set of images to fall back on.

Matt Tully
That’s what I was going to say is it’s the image of what it’s going to look like and be, but part of it is we don’t know what we’re going to be doing.

Matt McCullough
Exactly.

Matt Tully
And so you kind of think, Well, I guess we’re just going to be sitting around. Or maybe we’re in a church service all day long for eternity.

Matt McCullough
Totally. And so heaven can seem like, without a lot of careful work and discipline to focus on what the Bible actually says, it can seem like a huge constriction of the world rather than expansion of it; a subtraction of things that we love about life now that then we’ll never get to do again, rather than this unimaginably wonderful fulfillment of everything good here in this life. So there’s that problem. I think that some other misconceptions are, and it’s going to depend on the time and place how powerful or effective or influential they are, but I think one of the things that I’ve run into in the last ten years or so in my own ministry is, and this isn’t so much a misconception about what heaven will be like as to how the hope of heaven should function here and now. It’s a kind of concern that if we’re talking about the world to come, it’s distracting us from this world here and now and it’s significant problems and the precious people who live in it and the needs that they have. A kind of head-in-the-sand effect. That’s not so much a misconception of heaven but more a misunderstanding of how the hope of heaven should function.

Matt Tully
How it impacts us. It can make me worried that if you’re too focused on heaven, if you set your hope too fully in heaven, you’re maybe going to be apathetic about what’s going on here on earth.

Matt McCullough
Yeah. Or use it as an excuse to just not pay that close of attention to people who don’t have it as good as you do. It should never be that. At the same time, Christians should never apologize for being hopeful, future-oriented, and tethered to a world that isn’t this one—a world that’s greater and still to come. That’s partly because it’s at the heart of our gospel, and it’s just all through the Scriptures that this should be our vision, and our activity in this life, both what we enjoy and the good things in life and in how we serve and what we invest in for these years that we have, ought to get its shape from the ultimate future that’s set in front of us.

14:02 - Remembering Heaven Is a Command

Matt Tully
In the book you spend some time looking at Colossians 3, where Paul commands believers to “set your minds on things above.” And it struck me that that command that he gives there, and there are other passages in Scripture that are similar to this, it’s got this active force to it. There’s an intentionality and there’s even a willpower dynamic there—I think you’ve used the word “discipline”—when it comes to setting our mind and setting our hope on this future reality that’s going to be revealed to us someday. As I think about my own life, and I wonder if this is true for others, I don’t often think about our call to hope in heaven and to hope in Christ’s return and all that he’s going to bring with that, I don’t often think of it in those active terms. It’s supposed to be this great thing that’s out there, and I kind of think, Well, if that’s going to impact me, it should just kind of happen organically, I suppose. And yet it seems like there is this intentionality that’s at play in what Scripture actually teaches about this. Speak to that a little bit.

Matt McCullough
You’re exactly right. That’s a command that Paul gives: “Set your mind on things above, where Christ is and where you’ll be with him in glory.” That little section in Colossians 3 comes at the front of my favorite summary of what it means to live as a Christian. Colossians 3 is just jam-packed with gold. It covers so much ground. Sins to put off, virtues to put on. It touches relationships such as marriage and family and work. It covers the gamut. And right at the top of it is a command to discipline your mind so that all of those ways of life, all of what you’re putting off and putting on, flows out of your confidence about where you’re going and what it will be to be with Jesus. And I think that’s not a coincidence that Paul’s saying in order to put off and to put on, first, set your mind, be disciplined, focus, remember the things that you’re going to be tempted to forget. Keep in front of your eyes the things that you can’t really see yet. Don’t have your head turned by all that you can see that’s only passing away. And Paul goes there so often in his letters. This is one example. And I think that Christians from the past have sometimes done just a better job than I have of making that a cultivated practice. One of the key influences on my book is an old book by a Puritan named Richard Baxter. Crossway put out an amazing new edition of this a couple years ago. It’s abridged and it’s got some slightly updated language. It’s so usable. So this is a little ad for this amazing Richard Baxter book called The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. In that book what he’s laying out is a process for meditating on heaven, because even in the seventeenth century, he was finding that even when death was way more common and way more visible than it is now, even when people had less comforts, less pleasures, less distractions, they still had a hard time focusing on death and ultimately on heaven. And so his book was calling for this spiritual discipline of focus of mind. And so what I’m trying to do is actually just do what he said to do, to take Baxter’s call and live it out in these chapters so that readers can learn to do it themselves.

Matt Tully
It just strikes me that in our culture today and even in our church cultures today we can be so oriented towards practical application and action. What do I need to do differently? How is this going to affect my relationships and how I’m talking to people or decisions I’m making? Sometimes, though, in that rush to application, we can maybe miss the more foundational, almost mental or spiritual application in our own hearts and minds.

Matt McCullough
Totally. Perspective is practical, because what you see is going to affect what you love and what you do. Again, that’s why Paul makes it a command—cultivate perspective, and a lot of the Christian life is going to flow from that.

18:02 - How to Hope for What We’ve Never Experienced

Matt Tully
Oftentimes I think the closest thing that we have in our lives, and you’ve already attested to this with these trips to the Appalachian Mountains, the closest thing that we have and experience to this longing and this hope in something good that’s yet to come are the things like a vacation, or maybe a new home, or the arrival of a new baby, or a marriage. There are these earthly goods that we get to experience that we just have this almost uncontrollable longing for as time approaches and as it draws near. And yet, as we all know, these things always, to some extent, leave us feeling dissatisfied. They never quite deliver the promise that we might have hoped they would. So what are some positive and negative lessons that you think we could learn from these real-world examples of our hope in something yet to come?

Matt McCullough
I think just the experience you laid out is a sign of why the hope of heaven is so important for our life as Christians. We are future- oriented people. As humans, that’s just how we operate in the world. We need something to look forward to. And if you got something that you’re excited about, like a vacation or Christmas or whatever coming up, it’s crazy what you can get through along the way if you know you’ve got something on the other end of it.

Matt Tully
Incredible ballast for lots of things.

Matt McCullough
Our view of the future—something to look forward to—has a huge effect on our experience in the present. But, as we’ve learned through experience, things that we hope for don’t actually usually lead to any kind of real change. Christmas comes and goes and you’re still stuck with the same stress you’re dealing with at work when you took a week off.

Matt Tully
We all hope that it would magically just resolve itself, but it never does.

Matt McCullough
The new sweater doesn’t make you new. So what we need is something to look forward to that won’t just come and go and leave us unchanged. I think to your question about what are some of the positives and what are some of the negatives about having short-term things that we’re looking forward to, I think that if we can learn to see good gifts, like relationships and beautiful scenery and delicious meals, as little expressions of the goodness of God, whose goodness comes to us through things that he gives us, then it can actually help us absorb the fact that those things don’t last. Because the promise of heaven is that when we’re in his presence, we’ll experience fullness of joy forever. This is Psalm 16. One of the chapters in the book really trust to meditate on Psalm 16’s promise that “in his presence are fullness of joy and pleasure forevermore.” So every little pleasure along the way is a little taste, a little appetizer ror the ultimate pleasure of being in his presence. If that’s how we start to see those things, then two things can happen. One, we can start to loosen up a little bit and not expect them to fully satisfy us. Just expect they’re not going to because he’s not here, not fully. And as long as he’s not with us fully, everything’s going to leave us wanting more. So a reality check or a shift of expectations helps us not to squeeze them too hard and to ruin them. And then the promise that one day we will be with him in full helps us to see, okay, I’m going to experience the goodness that I’m longing for. Nothing will ever take that away from me. So the little tastes I’m getting now are not the end of the story. When I enjoy that vacation and then say goodbye to it and it’s over again, I don’t have to just think back, look over my shoulder and think, Boy, I wish I was back there. Man, why didn’t that last longer? I can start thinking, Well, what’s next? Because the goodness of God that came to me through that gift is still there. It’s still offered. It’s still coming in full one day. So I’m looking ahead and expecting to be refreshed by him through gifts along the way.

Matt Tully
We’ve talked a lot so far about these good gifts that God gives us that, as you already said, are meant to be signs. They’re meant to be pointers ahead to the best gift—the gift of God himself and life with him forever. But the other half of our lives, maybe more than half of our lives, are not these peaks. We’re often in valleys and in seasons of suffering and pain and confusion. So I wonder if you could just reflect on how this hope that we have can meet us in those moments.

Matt McCullough
I think that’s so crucial. I think that the place that I go to first to that question is what Paul has to say in 2 Corinthians 4, where he is really honest about the fact that what he calls the outer man is wasting away. Affliction is just a basic part of reality. It's not something that some people get stuck with while others end up winning at life.

Matt Tully
It can feel that way sometimes.

Matt McCullough
It can. And it’s just not true, because the outer man is not a renewable resource. You are spending it down from the first breath that you draw. And eventually everybody suffers. So what we need to live in that light is some sense of where all this is headed and what it all means. So I think what Paul is doing in 2 Corinthians 4 is helping us see what God is doing through suffering in light of heaven. That heaven is the key to knowing what suffering means. What Paul says there is that as the outer man is wasting away, the inner man is being renewed. I don’t think what he’s saying is that we’re losing our bodies, but we’re going to hang onto our souls. That’s not Paul. He’s talking about resurrection right after this. He talks in chapter 5 about how he doesn’t want to be unclothed; he wants to be further clothed. He’s not just talking about setting the soul free. He’s talking about this inner man as the man that belongs to the new age and to the kingdom that’s coming; the man that’s being renewed in the image of Jesus. That renewal is happening even through the suffering and affliction that the outer man is experiencing. The outer man is trapped in time and is still afflicted by death in all of its minions. Even as that’s wasting away, that inner man is being renewed. He says that these afflictions that we experience right now are preparing for us an eternal weight of glory.

Matt Tully
What does that phrase mean? The weight of glory. That’s one that has sometimes perplexed me.

Matt McCullough
I think what he’s saying is that the the substance of it, our experience of glory of heaven (and he’s talking about heaven here) is being prepared by affliction. It’s being added to, it’s gaining heft. It’s like that glory and our experience of heaven’s joys is feeding on the suffering we live through in the meantime. That’s what I mean by “What does it mean?” Well, Paul’s connecting what you’re going through now to where you’re going. What you’re going through is preparing where you’re going.

Matt Tully
Ironically, this negative experience now is actually adding to this incredibly positive experience in the future.

Matt McCullough
Exactly the way I compare it in the book is with the experience that I have drinking water when I’m feeling fine and comfortable and sitting in a my recliner reading a book to drinking water after I get in from a run. I’m not a super athletic person and I don’t enjoy running, but I do it sometimes. And sometimes when I’m pressed for time, there’s this big hill in my neighborhood that I’ll just run up and down, run up and down, up and down, up and down just to get a better workout in a shorter amount of time. It’s miserable, especially in August. And so when I come in from a run like that and I grab a glass of water and I fill it with ice and then I take those first few sips, there is nothing like the taste of that water.

Matt Tully
There’s nothing you’d want more.

Matt McCullough
There’s nothing I’d want more. It tastes different to me than it does when I’m sitting with a book in my easy chair. Every step up that hill has prepared the way to glory. That water is, to me, something different than it would’ve been in a different situation. And I think that’s what Paul is saying. Our suffering now is preparing us for the joy we’ll experience in heaven. Heaven will be what it is to us because of what we’ve been through here. And I think that connects beautifully to probably everybody’s favorite picture of heaven: Revelation 21 and this new Jerusalem that’s coming down. It’s defined as a world of no more. No more crying, no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain. All that no more. The joy of the no more. You have to experience those things to feel good about having them taken away from the world. The glory is prepared by affliction. So knowing where we’re headed helps us know what it all means along the way. I think that’s crucial.

26:05 - How the Hope of Heaven Helps with Anxiety

Matt Tully
I wonder if you could just speak more specifically now to people who are listening right now who have particular struggles around things like depression or anxiety. That’s obviously something that is a pretty common experience among people today and among Christians today. And so some of the pain and the suffering of this life, even if it’s not manifested in some kind of physical sickness, it nevertheless can be very intense and very difficult. And I think sometimes this dynamic of latching on to hope, of finding something to hope in in the future, can be particularly hard when someone might be struggling with something like that. So as a pastor and just from your own experience in your own life, any particular words of encouragement or counsel that you would offer to somebody who might be suffering in that way?

Matt McCullough
Let me just drill down on the anxiety piece for a sec. We’re having a moment as a culture on anxiety. I don’t have the stats in front of me. I’ve got the books on my shelf that talk about the skyrocketing rates of reported anxiety among adults, and then the even more stunning and alarming rates of anxiety among kids just even in the last ten years. And I’ve dealt with it enough, especially as a pastor, to know there’s a lot going on I don’t understand. It’s a mysterious phenomenon and I really don’t want to do anything to try to minimize it or explain it away. And I don’t know a single person who’s dealt with anxiety that wouldn’t love to obey Jesus and not be anxious about their life. Sometimes you can hear that command and I feel like blaming the victim. I don’t want be feeling this way, but I am. So there’s that. It’s a mystery. But now if I could just risk saying some things about it, at least at the level of experience that I do think hold no matter what the specific causes might be. I think it’s important to see anxiety as always connected to the future. So some have distinguished anxiety from fear in that way. Fear is something you experience related to a threat that’s right in front of you. You’re hiking on a trail, there’s a rattlesnake in the trail, you have fear until that thing slithers away. With fear, it’s pretty easy to get rid of it. Once the snake is gone, the fear is usually gone.

Matt Tully
You can deal with the present situation.

Matt McCullough
Yeah, and clear it out. Anxiety has a lot of the same symptoms: the same heart racing, the same troubled breathing, the same tense muscles, a lot of the same physical experiences as fear. But what makes it so frustrating and difficult is that it’s not some specific threat you could clear away. It’s usually more diffuse than that. It’s more nebulous and tough to pin down. It’s related to what’s possible, not to what is.

Matt Tully
Maybe not even what’s likely.

Matt McCullough
Yeah, totally. But just what could be. So the definitions of anxiety that I cite in the book all highlight that future component to it. It’s the possibility of a negative future that I really want to avoid. That’s what I’m experiencing. I’ve got a chapter in the book on anxiety, and what I try to do there is say, first of all, anxiety makes a ton of sense if you’re really on your own in a world that’s really, really fragile. If you are as vulnerable as you are and you can’t hope for anything beyond this life, you ought to have anxiety because you’re going to lose a lot. One of the writers that I mention there is Blaise Pascal whose writing has helped me so much. I don’t know anything about the stuff that he’s known for with math, but his stuff on life and what it is to be human is so, so good. And one of my favorite definitions of what it means to be human is his. He calls us basically thinking reeds.

Matt Tully
A reed like a narrow stick.

Matt McCullough
Yeah, like a reed like a stick, a blade of grass, like Isaiah 40. We’re as vulnerable as a blade of grass. One little drop of poison in that water right there could kill me. That’s how vulnerable I am. So many bad things can happen to me, but I’m a thinking reed. Our glory and our misery as humans is that we’ve got to know that about ourselves, so we buy insurance on everything and we wear masks in pandemics (we were talking about Covid earlier). We do what we can to try to make sure we avoid bad outcomes and experience good ones. That feels like a curse as often as not, and it is a terrible way to have to live if you don’t know that you’ve got a future that’s locked in, that’s airtight, that’s untouchable. And that future is held by someone that is not you—someone who controls what you can’t control, who knows what you can’t know, and who loves you and is as committed to your future as you are. And that’s what the hope of heaven gives us. First Peter 1 is so, so good on this. He talks about heaven as this inheritance that’s imperishable and undefiled and unfading. Nothing can get to it, basically. It’s hard to know what it actually is. It’s kind of abstract and none of us have ever seen it before, but let me tell you what it’s not. Peter’s saying it’s not like everything here. It’s not vulnerable. And it’s not just that that inheritance is unfading, but you are being kept by God for it. You’re guarded until it’s revealed at the proper time, he says. So what I try to do is leverage the hope of heaven to fight back against anxiety wherever it’s coming from, however mysterious it’s cause is. A weapon in the fight against it that you’ve got to be using as a Christian is the hope of heaven and an inheritance that nothing can touch held by a God that that holds you for that day.

31:30 - How the Hope of Heaven Helps with Fighting Sin

Matt Tully
One other area that you address in the book, and we don’t have a ton of time to go into this right now, but it’s just how this hope of heaven can help us in our fight against sin. And that’s obviously another one of those things where we can sometimes fall into the mindset of, ultimately, it’s really just a matter of willpower, or it’s a matter even of just remembering the gospel, as in the past of the gospel, that Christ did die for my sin. He paid for my sin, and therefore I should now live differently. How does heaven in particular come to bear on resisting temptation and fighting for holiness?

Matt McCullough
I think one of the biggest challenges I’ve experienced and what I’ve certainly seen among my friends as I’ve served as a pastor is hopelessness. One of the biggest barriers to holiness is hopelessness. What I mean there is that a lot of times the things that we’re dealing with we’ve been dealing with. Sin sometimes has us in a grip that we feel like we can’t escape, or maybe better yet, has these ruts that we slip into, these grooves that we naturally find, like water running downhill. And over time, the more you fight and fail and fight and fail and fight and fail, the more you contend to believe that it’s just hopeless. I’m not going to change. I compare this to the way I feel about handyman projects around the house. I gave those up a long time ago, and the reason is that I’m terrible at them. I don’t have experience. That’s one thing, but somehow I just seem to miss this sixth sense that some of my friends seem to have, at least that’s how it feels.

Matt Tully
But you can kind of just define yourself that way then. You view yourself as I just don’t have this thing.

Matt McCullough
I don’t have this thing. But more to the point, I’ve tried and I’ve failed. I’ve tried and I’ve failed. I’ve tried and I’ve failed. What I’ve learned from experience is that I can fail the easy way or I can fail the hard way, but I’m going to fail. I already know how this ends. I can try to figure it out, and I can try to take on the project on my own, but I’m going to learn that it’s going to take more money than I thought it would, more time than I thought it would. When I get finished with it, it’s not going to look like I thought it was supposed to. I’m probably just going to end up calling a friend to come help me fix it anyways. So I can take that route to failure, or I can just go ahead and just accept defeat.

Matt Tully
Fail quickly.

Matt McCullough
Fail quickly. I think sometimes people feel like that in the struggle with sin. I’ve certainly seen that in caring for brothers who are fighting against porn in particular. That one just feels uniquely hopeless for so many guys. And if you think you know how this ends, I think it is hopeless. You can just give into that. The reason that the hope of heaven can be such a powerful tool in this fight is that the promise of the gospel is that this ends in perfect holiness, actually. That’s where all this ends. First John 3 is key here. “When we see him, we’ll be like him. We will see him as he is, and everyone who has this hope purifies himself, as he is pure.”

Matt Tully
Right there. Hope and then the act of purification.

Matt McCullough
Purification through hope. We know that one day we’ll see him and that when we do, our hearts will never be tempted by any of his competition ever again. To see him is to love him with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength. That day is coming. And when it’s here, we’re done with sin. Guaranteed. That’s how this ends. And in the meantime, if we know that’s how it ends, it helps us know both why we should fight and how we should fight. We should fight because we know that Jesus wins this battle when he returns. He wins it for us, so why wouldn’t we fight a battle we know is already won? He is also showing us how. The method is look at Jesus. When we see him as he is, then we’ll be done with sin. In the meantime, we look at him where we can see him. We study his beauty in the gospel. We look at his love and how he poured himself out for us. And over time we’re going to become more and more like him as our love for him grows through looking at him. So that hope is both telling us why we should keep going and also how we can be purified by it in the meantime. I think 1 John 3 is just pure gold on this.

35:31 - How to Cultivate a Longing for Heaven

Matt Tully
Matt, maybe just a few final lightning round questions for you. What’s one passage of Scripture about heaven that you would say you return to most often these days?

Matt McCullough
I’ve mentioned it already, but the 2 Corinthians 4 text is really helping me and helping a lot of friends right now. That’s Paul saying we don’t lose heart even though we’re suffering, even though the outer man is wasting away, even though we’re going through all this affliction, because we know that this affliction is preparing a weight of glory. We focus on the eternal things that are not seen, not the passing away things that we can see. It’s so hard to live with that and so powerful when we can that I try to go back to it over and over and over again and help others do the same.

Matt Tully
What’s one word that’s dominated your thinking that’s maybe just been most at the forefront about heaven since you started working on this book?

Matt McCullough
Groaning is one. I don’t know about from beginning to end, but certainly recently that one has been front and center for me. Paul uses that language in a couple of different places in his letters for spiritual maturity—a groaning for a world to come. How do you know someone’s got the Spirit? Romans 8: the Spirit groans for all that God has promised, the renewal of heaven and earth. So I think cultivating longing is a basic facet of a faithful Christian life. If I’m not groaning, then I’m missing something. So what can I be doing to try to deepen that experience for myself, lean into that work of the Spirit, and how can I help others do it?

Matt Tully
What do you make of all the heaven tourism books from about a decade ago?

Matt McCullough
Not much. To be honest, I haven’t read most of them. I don’t take them seriously.

Matt Tully
Net positive or net negative in terms of Christian consciousness of heaven these days?

Matt McCullough
I don’t know because I haven’t read them, so I should be careful what I say about them. My sense and my perception is it’d be probably a net negative because, again, from a distance and not having read them (maybe just having read book jackets), it seems like the authority for what heaven is and ought to be like is not coming from the Scriptures but coming from what somebody says they experienced. That’s not good enough for me. And I’m worried about that sort of effect on my people. I want them tethered to setting their minds on what God has said is coming.

Matt Tully
Last question for you then. If you could only pick one, and there are probably many different things that someone could do, what is a simple or practical way that Christians could work to cultivate a mindset that’s set on heaven, a hope set in heaven, into their day-to-day lives?

Matt McCullough
You ask about day to day, so I should probably think a little more on this, but as you were formulating the question, I was immediately thinking of don’t miss church on Sunday. I see that as my primary strategy for cultivating my longing for heaven, for setting my mind on things above. I talk about it in our church sometimes in the welcome when I’m setting up a Sunday morning, referring to it as a firewall for us in our week. That’s the reason we’re commanded to not forsake this right here. As you see the day drawing near, don’t forsake it. Be there and stir each other up.

Matt Tully
Interesting. There is a connection with the return of Christ.

Matt McCullough
Absolutely. Hebrews 10: come to church because heaven. And the way I think that works is all week long in the world, we are constantly being offered false hopes, and we are constantly tempted to claim them. And in that normal life, in that Monday through Saturday, if you will, our minds are going to be distracted by fine but lesser things, and our hearts are going to be stirred up by the possibility of making a name for ourselves through our work. Our eyes are constantly drawn toward whatever lightning sale Amazon’s got going on this week, trying to claim for ourselves some sort of piece of heaven on earth. All of that is going on Monday through Saturday. And as that fire is raging—that’s how I see that, like a consuming fire—we need a built-in time in our week to serve as a firewall. It might come in the door with us on Sunday morning, but when that call to worship speaks for God into our lives, wham! The fire hits it and can’t go further. Every week we’re here to remember what Christ has done, what Christ has promised, and that Christ is coming again. That’s the purpose of those gatherings. And so we intentionally layer our services thick with heaven songs, with readings that go there. Anytime a sermon text gives me half a chance, I’m talking about the world to come, because no one else is going to do that for our people out in the world. Everything else is going to say here, now, grab it while you can. We have to fight back, and Sunday morning’s a great way to do it.

Matt Tully
Matt, thank you for, even in this conversation, helping us all to fight back and to remember heaven, to remember this incredible hope that God has given to us in his love and mercy. We appreciate it.

Matt McCullough
Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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