Every week, I meet with a small group of seniors to pray. Over the last few months, I’ve read portions of Heaven Is a World of Love by Jonathan Edwards to either open or close our time together.
My seniors tell me the clarity, depth, and warmth of the vision of God emanating throughout this sermon has inspired more confidence in prayer, comfort in suffering, and courage to show and share Christ’s love with others.
For Edwards—and for my seniors—contemplating heaven isn’t indulging idle curiosity or escaping the practical duties of life in the world. Instead, it arms them for life in the present.
Edwards’s sermon gives four ways we can taste the sweetness of God’s love in its fullness and so be spurred on to persevere in Christ.
1. Bathe in God’s love.
“Seeing [God] is an infinite being, it follows that he is an infinite fountain of love,” Edwards writes. “Seeing he is an all-sufficient being, it follows that he is a full, overflowing, and inexhaustible fountain of love. And in that he is an unchangeable and eternal being, he is an unchangeable and eternal fountain of love.”
That fountain fills the whole of heaven. Love, therefore, isn’t simply a feature of heaven, like a painting hung in a prominent place. Rather, God’s love is all of heaven.
“Love is in heaven not as a tree in a prairie but as the light in which the prairie is bathed on a bright summer morning,” Dane Ortlund writes.
To contemplate the heavenly world is to contemplate God in the fullness of his love. It’s a means of gazing at God’s beauty and receiving, enjoying, and reciprocating his love. Thus, contemplating heaven orients the eyes of our heart to know “the length and width, height and depth of God’s love” (Eph. 3:18, CSB).
2. Grow in your own love.
Christian maturity is measured in love. Jesus summarized the law in two statements: Love God with all your being and love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:29–31). Paul says, “The one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Rom. 13:8). First Corinthians 13 locates love as the height of Christian spirituality, such that to have any other gift but not love would be loss.
Yet, as experience and honest self-examination reveal, sin stains all our love. Tim Keller likens the best of human love to water running through muddy pipes, which makes it through the pipe but is contaminated. When love flows through sinners, even justified sinners, it picks up sin’s pollution.
This will not always be so. Love in heaven is without defect because God has banished the very presence of sin.
“No string shall there vibrate out of tune, to cause any jar in the harmony of the music of heaven, and no note be such as to make discord in the anthems of saints and angels,” Edwards writes. “Every member of that holy and blessed society shall be without any stain of sin, or imperfection, or weakness, or imprudence, or blemish of any kind.”
Knowing heaven will be without sin, where love will flow fully and cleanly, ought to give us a holy discontentment with our love’s present imperfections, motivating us to put sin to death and pursue the purity of heart with which we will “see God” (Matt. 5:8).
3. Cultivate unity.
People united in Christ can be vicious toward each other. The bitterness that springs up between Christians causes a lack of assurance, Edwards says. If heaven is a world of love, then when we fail to exercise godly love, how can we know we’re heaven-bound?
In heaven, however, Edwards says this tragedy will be undone:
Charity—or holy, humble Christian love—is a principle of wonderful power to give ineffable quietness and tranquility to the soul. It banishes all disturbance, sweetly composes and brings rest to the spirit, and makes all divinely calm, sweet, and happy. In that soul where divine love reigns and is in lively exercise, nothing can cause a storm or even gather threatening clouds.
In heaven, “everyone has not only a sincere, but a perfect goodwill to every other,” Edwards explains. “Sincere and strong love is greatly gratified and delighted in the prosperity of the beloved object.”
Contemplating heaven teaches us to delight in other Christians and rejoice to see them growing closer to Christ. It frees us from pettiness and envy. A heart indwelled by the Holy Spirit, with a seed of heavenly love, should grow not in bitterness but in charity, calmness, and grace toward others.
4. Resolve to persevere.
The biblical pictures of discipleship—such as carrying one’s cross, walking the narrow road, and waging spiritual war—show Christians that following Christ will be costly. The way to “the glorious city of light and love” is by “upward and arduous steps.”
Yet, as Edwards says, “Though the ascent be difficult and the way full of trials, still it is worth your while to meet them all for the sake of coming and dwelling in such a glorious city at last.”
The worthiness of the prize far outweighs the difficulties of the path. Edwards’s exhortation echoes Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 4:17–18. Paul and Edwards both remind us not to put our heads down, fixating on the difficulty at hand, but to lift our eyes to God.
Or, as Sam Storms puts it, “The strength to endure hardship now comes from reflecting on the promise of everlasting bliss in the age to come.”
Live with Longing
Contemplating life with God in heaven ignites a desire for heaven, a longing for more of Christ. Edwards says beholding Jesus’s glory in heaven “may stir you up the more earnestly to desire to be there.”
True heavenly-mindedness isn’t about having our head in the clouds but rather about being filled with a desire for being in God’s presence to gaze on his beauty (Ps. 27:4). By contemplating the wonders of living with God in heaven, we’re better able to live for Jesus today.
The Gospel Coalition