Sermon quotes on heaven
Randy Alcorn
The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history…the unifying testimony of the human heart through history is belief in life after death. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal-that this world is not all there is.
Heaven
Augustine of Hippo
Enter into joy without sorrow, which contains all pleasure, where every good will be, and not any evil. Where life will be vital, sweet and lovable, and always memorial; where there will be no assaulting enemy, nor any snares, but supreme and certain security, secure tranquility and tranquil pleasure and pleasurable happiness; a happy eternity, eternal blessedness and the blessed vision of God, which is the joy of the Lord thy God. O joy above joy! Joy overcoming all joy; joy besides which there is no joy … When shall I enter into thee, that I may see my God, who dwells in thee?
Augustine of Hippo
We shall in the future world see the material form of the new heavens and the new earth in such a way that we shall most distinctly recognize God everywhere present and governing all things, material as well as spiritual.
Javier Bardem
Heaven sounds boring. Maybe they let you go to hell on weekends (For contrast).
Henry Ward Beecher
The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.
Ambrose Bierce
Heaven: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound on yours.
Robert Browning
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?
John Donne
Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven.
John Donne
I shall rise from the dead … I shall see the Son of God, the Sun of Glory, and shine myself as that sun shines. I shall be united to the Ancient of Days, to God Himself, who had no morning, who never began … No man ever saw God and lived. And yet, I shall not live till I see God; and when I have seen him, I shall never die.
Jonathan Edwards
The way to Heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural bias of our flesh.
Jonathan Edwards
No inhabitants of that blessed world will ever be grieved with the thought that they are slighted by those that they love, or that their love is not fully and fondly returned … There shall be no such thing as flattery or insincerity in heaven, but there perfect sincerity shall reign through all in all. Everyone will be just what he seems to be, and will really have all the love that he seems to have. It will be not as in this world, where comparatively few things are what they seem to be, and where professions are often made lightly and without meaning. But there, every expression of love shall come from the bottom of the heart, and all that is professed shall be really and truly felt
Heaven: A World of Love
E. J. Fortman
[The essence of heaven is the] beatific vision, love, and enjoyment of the triune God. For the three divine persons have an infinitely perfect vision and love and enjoyment of the divine essence and of one another. And in this infinite knowing, loving and enjoying lies the very life of the triune God, the very essence of their endless and infinite happiness. If the blessed are to be endlessly and supremely happy, then, they must share in the very life of the triune God, in the divine life that makes them endlessly and infinitely happy.
Anthony Hoekema
Because of man’s fall into sin, a curse was pronounced over the creation. God now sent His Son into this world to redeem that creation from the results of sin. The work of Christ, therefore, is not just to save certain individuals, not even to save an innumerable throng of blood-bought people. The total work of Christ is nothing less than to redeem the entire creation from the effects of sin. That purpose will not be accomplished until God has ushered in the new earth, until Paradise Lost become Paradise Regained.
Adoniram Judson
When Christ calls me home I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from school.
C. S. Lewis
Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C.S. Lewis
Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.
“And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
The Great Divorce
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Everything will be glorified, even nature itself. And that seems to me to be the biblical teaching about the eternal state: that what we call heaven is life in this perfect world as God intended humanity to live it. When he put Adam in Paradise at the beginning, Adam fell, and all fell with him, but men and women are meant to live in the body, and will live in a glorified body in a glorified world, and God will be with them.
John Milton
The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.
John Newton
When I get to heaven I shall see three wonders there. The first wonder will be, to see many people there whom I did not expect to see—the second wonder will be, to miss many people whom I did expect to see; and the third and greatest wonder of all, will be to find myself there.
J. I. Packer
Hearts on earth may say in the course of a joyful experience, ‘I don’t want this ever to end.’ But invariably it does. The hearts of those in heaven say, ‘I want this to go on forever.’ And it will. There is no better news than this.
Blaise Pascal
Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
Zacharias Ursinus
Everlasting life consists in the eternal habitation of God in the faithful through the Holy Spirit; in a true and perfect knowledge of God, and of His works and will, kindled in the heart immediately by the same Spirit; in true and perfect wisdom and righteousness, together with a perfect conformity of all the strength and powers of the mind and will, with the mind and will of God, having respect both to the body and soul, which joy is freely given of God, by and for the sake of Christ, and is begun already in this life, to be fully perfected in the life to come, that so God may to all eternity be praised and glorified by His saints.
Epitaph in Bushey Churchyard
Here lies a poor woman who always was tired,
For she lived in a place where help wasn’t hired.
Her last words on earth were, Dear friends I am going
Where washing ain’t done nor sweeping nor sewing,
And everything there is exact to my wishes,
For there they don’t eat and there’s no washing of dishes
Don’t mourn for me now, don’t mourn for me never,
For I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.
Quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, Oxford University Press.
Sam Alberry
The day of Jesus’s return will be a wedding feast—and Christians are invited to it not as guests, but as a bride. None of us will have to sneak into heaven through the back door—we’ll be walking up the aisle.
Why Bother with Church? And Other Questions About Why You Need It and Why It Needs You.
Jeffrey Burton Russell
Heaven is itself the metaphor of metaphors, for a metaphor opens to more and more meaning, and heaven is an unbordered meadow of meaning. Heaven is where language collapses into perfect language and then further—into the truth beyond language. Heaven is what things really mean.
A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence, Princeton University Press.
Jerry Walls
A good God would not create us with the kind of aspirations we have and then leave those aspirations unsatisfied.
Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy, Oxford University Press.
J R R. Tolkien
“There is a place called heaven where the good here unfinished is made complete; and where the stories unwritten and hopes unfulfilled are continued. We shall laugh together yet.”
Erwin Lutzer
Christ “didn’t merely enter heaven but strode into it as its rightful owner and heir.
Christ Among Other Gods, p 151
Soren Kierkegaard
It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to heaven.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
John Newton
I am still in the land of the dying; I shall be in the land of the living soon.
John Donne
Bring us, O Lord, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginning, but one equal eternity; in the habitation of thy glory and dominion, world without end.
Quoted in John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 98.
Source Unknown
Good people don’t go to heaven, forgiven people do.
Philip Yancey
Ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, “Be good.” Jesus’ stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, “Help!”
Vance Havner
There are a lot of questions the Bible doesn’t answer about the Hereafter. But I think one reason is illustrated by the story of a boy sitting down to a bowl of spinach when there’s a chocolate cake at the end of the table. He’s going to have a rough time eating the spinach when his eyes are on the cake. And if the Lord had explained everything to us about what’s ours to come, I think we’d have a rough time with our spinach down here.
James Forbes
Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.
The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
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