Choosing Heaven

Did you ever get bogged down in what different people believe about what the Bible teaches about salvation and eternal life? It’s easy to do. You listen long enough to enough different people and all you have is a lot of conflicting opinions so you don’t even know what you believe about where you stand, spiritually speaking. Some operate from a list of Do’s and Don’ts. Some say there is a minimum requirement for our salvation. Some indicate that there is a special prayer to pray. Others believe that once you are “in” you’re there for life and others feel that you can walk away from the agreement you made to follow God. But, what did Jesus say about eternal life and how it is to be attained?

John records the words of Jesus' prayer for His followers in John 17 where He states that eternal life is simply knowing God.

“And this is the way to have eternal life –

to know you,

the only true God and Jesus Christ,

the one you sent to earth.”

So the real question is, how well do you know God? Do you spend time learning and listening to Him? Jesus also said in Matthew 11:29  “take my yoke upon you and learn from me.” If you hope to truly know God, you need to be yoked to Him, experiencing His movements and not resisting, but falling in step with Him as you learn the rhythm of His ways. If you aren’t in the Word, reading and learning; if you aren’t in a fellowship of believers who are growing and worshiping together; if you aren’t making a daily commitment to follow Jesus and take His yoke and place it on your shoulders, then you can’t expect to truly know God.

As parents, how are you helping your kids to know Jesus? Do you talk about what Jesus said? Do you show them what it means to walk with Him? We all want heaven for our kids, but maybe what we should be striving for is not hoping to get them into heaven, but getting heaven into them. Jesus said that the Kingdom is within us and we can offer them a bit of the heaven on earth now by the way we live our life and share His teachings with them. We can’t ensure that they will follow Jesus, but I believe that they have a much stronger chance of choosing Him if they have watched what it means to connect to and move with Jesus in our day to day lives. If we are making decisions based on our fatigue or our history rather than on our relationship with God, they may learn our rules and expectations and even acquire good moral values, but that doesn’t direct them to God. Making your life an example for them of walking with God is so important if you want them to do the same.

Mom and Dad, is heaven your primary goal for your children? If so, then make God the number one priority in their lives. Don’t keep pushing family worship to the back burner because they need to be loyal to their team and not miss a game. Don’t remain silent about spiritual issues because you don’t understand the Bible in its’ entirety, but keep learning and digging and growing and sharing as you grow. Consider how many hours your child is awake each week and write down the hours you are guiding them to invest in different things. How does connecting with God measure up to connecting with sports or studies or chores or playing video games?

We live in a culture that teaches us to be devoted to our team or our sport and not let them down. Can we not take a stand against that philosophy and tell our team, right from the start, that our family values worshiping God together on Sunday and will not be playing in Sunday morning games.  Perhaps if we took a stand, the world would see the value of following and worshiping God. Perhaps our children would learn that Jesus is a priority over all else. Investing our time and energy and money into our physical bodies without considering the cost to our soul leaves us unbalanced. That lifestyle is taught nowhere in scripture. We are mind, body and spirit and must develop in all those areas to find balance and health and possibly heaven. Of all the things to neglect, please don't let it be the spirit that connects your child to their Creator and their purpose.

God gave these kids to YOU to raise for His glory. Not to the coach. Not to the school. Not to their friends. Begin today to put some heaven into them by openly following God in your home and showing them how to do the same. Be bold. Be kind. Be yoked to the only One who really knows how to navigate through life here with heaven right inside our hearts. Who wants to wait if you can have heaven right here and now?!?