Heaven is Our Aim Now

14 July 2025  Matthew 10:34-11.1

“Whoever receives Me receives the one who sent Me.” Matthew 10:40

“I have come to bring not peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Jesus comes between us and everything in this world because in heaven He is everything.

Think about all the things that will not be in heaven because Jesus is everything. There won’t be any more faith – why would we need it? We won’t have to trust that Jesus is there because He is there, He is everything there. We won’t need hope either for the same reason. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). But in heaven He is seen, because He is everything.

There won’t be any Bible Study in heaven. Why would we need it? We have the Author and Inspiration of all scripture right in front of us, the one who can explain all things, including all the things the Bible skips over. Bible Study would be like looking at old photo albums when all the people in them are right in front of you.

There will be prayer in heaven, but it will be an infinitely deeper and richer kind of prayer. We won’t have to pray for our daily bread, strength to resist temptation, wisdom, understanding, forgiveness, or mercy anymore – why would we need to? We are in heaven where there is no temptation, and we have already received all the mercy and understanding in the universe. Prayer will be entirely what the greatest spiritual writers have called contemplation, the experience of union with God, a form of prayer so advanced that even the most experienced people of prayer in this world only ever have fleeting moments of it. But in heaven, because we are surrounded by the presence and glory of God all the time, contemplationgoes on all the time.

There will be no rest in heaven because there will be no weariness. There will be no sleep, and no night. There won’t even be Church in heaven: “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22-23).

There will be no marriage in heaven in the sense that people will go to heaven to get married. There will, however, be love because God is love (I John 4:8). Husbands and wives, who have loved each other with all their might for years and decades, and have found that the boundaries separating one from the other have begun to blur, fulfilling in this world the promise of scripture that “the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5, Ephesians 5:31) will find their love to be completed and perfected in heaven, part of the chorus of joy sung continually by the angels who rejoice in all the things and people who rejoice in God.

“I have come to bring not peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Jesus comes between us and everything in this world because in heaven He is everything. Having heaven as our aim means submitting everything to it now. It means digging deep into scripture daily to learn more about God’s presence, power and will. It means the steady labor of turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand, which is what the Bible means by “pray without ceasing” (cf. I Thessalonians 5:17). It means receiving as often as possible the “food for the road” which God provides (in Latin viaticum, a synonym for the Eucharist). It means the hard work of developing the discernment which enables us to see in our enemy the neighbor who needs the mercy of God as much as we do. All of this means that Jesus must today be more important than our jobs, our kids, our marriages, our money, our comfort, our country, or our lives.

He must be that today, because in heaven He is everything.