Scared of Heaven

Yesterday, on the way home from church, my twelve-year-old daughter told me that she is sort of freaked out about going to heaven. Over the years I have had various concerns about what heaven might be like, myself, so I wasn’t surprised by the comment. “What freaks you out about it?”

She mentioned some stuff – I don’t remember exactly what, but the bottom line was her statement: “We won’t be able to do whatever we want.”

Hmmm, well, yes, and no. We won’t be able to do whatever we want, if we are thinking in terms of our human wants here on earth. But when we are in heaven, we will only want to do what God wants, so, in the end, we will be doing whatever we want.

This then gets to the heart of why we are here on earth. We are here to decide whether or not we want what God wants. God loves us all, and wants us all to go to heaven. But he isn’t going to make us do anything that we don’t want. So, if we decide, here on earth, that we do want to do what he wants, we are deciding that we do want to spend eternity in heaven. If we decide here on earth that we don’t want what he wants, it will make him sad, but he will honor our wishes, and not make us go to heaven. Instead, we will be free from doing what he wants for eternity, in hell.

Of course, even after we decide that we want what he wants, we slip up and go our own way sometimes, and even vice versa. That is why Jesus came to earth to die for those slip ups, also known as, sin. And that is also why God lets us decide all the way up until we have breathed our last breath, this side of eternity. It’s never to late to decide that you do want what he wants, as long as you trod this sod!

If we truly believe that God loves us and wants the best for us, we don’t need to worry about what heaven will be like – of course it is going to be great!!