A few of my grade school teachers made the comment on my report card, “Paul would be a better student if he would stop daydreaming and pay more attention in class.” Even though those little mental excursions got me in trouble as a youth, I’m still trying to practice the discipline of “getting my head in the clouds.” Why the forward/upward focus? Because that’s where home is. Paul reminds us “Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” (Philippians 3:20-21).
Richard Baxter gives a number of reasons for meditating on heaven in his book, “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest.”1. Endurance in Suffering.
Baxter was an English puritan pastor and theologian in 17th century England who was chronically sick all his life. He was tubercular from his teens and suffered constantly from kidney stones, headaches and swollen limbs. In 1662, along with two thousand other Puritan clergy, he was banished from his church and persecuted by the British government for the last three decades of his life. Yet he continued to serve the church faithfully and became one of the most prolific spiritual writers in English history. What kept him going? From his thirtieth year he practiced a habit of meditating on the life to come for half an hour every day. Diligent cultivation of hope gave him daily endurance in disciplined hard work for God, despite the debilitating effect each day of his sick body and the overwhelming opposition of man.
Baxter wrote, “Frequent views of glory are the most precious medicines in all afflictions. These medicines, by cheering our spirits, render our sufferings far more easy, enable us to bear them with patience and joy, and so strengthen our resolutions that we forsake not Christ for fear of trouble. If the way be ever so rough, can it be tedious, if it leads to heaven? This is the noble advantage of faith: it can look on the means and the end together. The great reason for our impatience and complaining of God is that we gaze on the evil itself, but fix not our thoughts on what is beyond it. Could we but clearly see heaven as the end of all God’s dealings with us, surely none of his dealings would be grievous.”
2. Encouragement to Others.
Our hope of heaven is meant to be a source of encouragement to one another. Baxter observes, “When a man is in a strange country, how glad he is of the companionship of one from his own nation. How delightful it is to talk of their own country, their acquaintance, and affairs at home. When a worldly man will talk of nothing but the world, and the politician the state of affairs, and a mere scholar of human learning, and a common professor of his duties; the heavenly man will be speaking of heaven, and the strange glory his faith has seen, and our speedy and blessed meeting there. O how refreshing and useful are his expressions! How his words pierce and transform the hearers into other men!”
This practice of “heavenly meditation” is the reasonable response to the immeasurable mercies of God. “It is fitting that our hearts should be on God, when the heart of God is so much on us. If the Lord of glory can stoop so low as to set his heart on sinful dust, I think we should easily be persuaded to set our hearts on Christ and glory, and ascend to him in our daily affections, who so much condescends to us.”
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