Remember Heaven E-Book

Matthew McCullough

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 244

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

How the Hope of Heaven Shapes Our Lives as Christians in the Meantime What we expect from our future has tremendous power over our experience in the meantime—that's why the Bible places the hope of heaven at the center of the Christian life. But even if we affirm the reality of our heavenly future, we often struggle to long for heaven, much less to connect the promises of the world to come to the concrete details of life in this world as it is. If and when we think about heaven at all, it's easy to think of it like an insurance policy that will be there when we need it. But the Bible defines our future hope as an inheritance—a trust fund that is certain, inexhaustible, and freely accessible here and now. In this book, Matthew McCullough offers a series of meditations that model how to draw on the hope of heaven for everyday life in the meantime. Chapters connect specific struggles of life in this world—from dissatisfaction and inadequacy to anxiety, grief, indwelling sin and more—to specific promises of the world to come. Drawing on insights from Christian writers of the past, McCullough shows how the Bible uses the hope of heaven to help us now. - Offers Hope: Helps readers deal with feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, grief, and dissatisfaction to curate a healthy life perspective around God's promises - Biblical and Practical: Engaging meditations offer Christians applicable advice for living joyfully in light of the inheritance that awaits them in heaven - From the Gospel Coalition: This accessible book makes a great gift for students, pastors, and Christians of every age

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“This book surprised me—in a delightful way! I expected a book about heaven to help me understand our eternal home. It certainly does that. But it does something more. Remember Heaven connects this world and this life to the future. It fuels daily living by considering everlasting life. It renews hope by exploring how heaven relates to earth. This book is not just about heaven but also about recovering hope in everyday life. Read this book and get ready for some heaven-sent encouragement.”

Mark Vroegop, President, The Gospel Coalition; author, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy

“This book is beautifully written and profoundly reorienting. Matt McCullough deftly shows us the deep consolation and bright hope we have in Christ. I hadn’t realized how much I needed it.”

Sam Allberry, Associate Pastor, Immanuel Nashville, Tennessee; author, One with My Lord

“I know few authors who can approach Matt McCullough’s ability to write with pastoral sensitivity, biblical insight, and cultural awareness. This book will challenge and encourage you with the hope of heaven, the ‘rebirthright’ of every Christian. Don’t settle for the dismal distractions of this world.”

Collin Hansen, Vice President for Content and Editor in Chief, The Gospel Coalition; Host, Gospelbound podcast

“In a world distracted by temporary pleasures, even Christians can lose sight of the wonders of heaven. Matt McCullough reminds us that where we place our hope matters, as he skillfully redirects our focus to the sure and glorious future God has promised. Chapter by chapter, this book provides profoundly practical insights for living faithfully in the here and now, all through the lens of the eternal joy that awaits us.”

Jenny Manley, author, The Good Portion—Christ: Delighting in the Doctrine of Christ

“Matt McCullough is a delight to read. Remember Death blew me away a few years ago. Sure enough, Remember Heaven is masterful too. Matt has an uncommon ability to apply soaring truth to everyday life, with surgical precision and pastoral care. Turning these pages moved me to long for the world to come and, ultimately, for the King who is coming. And it reinvigorated me to think and live differently now. Cheer up, brothers and sisters! Our future is unimaginably bright.”

Matt Smethurst, Lead Pastor, River City Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia; author, Tim Keller on the Christian Life and Before You Share Your Faith; Cohost, The Everyday Pastor podcast

“In Remember Heaven, Matt McCullough probes several of our most common struggles, with sensitivity and insight, and he shows how each facet of the hope of heaven can nourish and sustain us. I love this book. I needed this book. I’m pretty confident that you need this book too. I highly recommend it and plan to give away lots of copies.”

Bobby Jamieson, Senior Pastor, Trinity Baptist Church, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; author, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness

Remember Heaven

Remember Heaven

Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime

Matthew McCullough

Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime

© 2025 by Matthew McCullough

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: David Fassett

First printing 2025

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-9916-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-9918-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-9917-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCullough, Matthew, author.

Title: Remember heaven : meditations on the world to come for life in the meantime / Matthew McCullough.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2025. | Series: The gospel coalition | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024035216 (print) | LCCN 2024035217 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433599163 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433599170 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433599187 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Future life. | Heaven. | Christian life.

Classification: LCC BT903 .M446 2025 (print) | LCC BT903 (ebook) | DDC 248.4—dc23/eng/20241113

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024035216

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024035217

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2025-02-20 10:04:58 AM

For my father, Mark,

who has

gladly chosen tents in this world,

firmly set his eyes on the city to come,

and

faithfully shown me what he sees.

Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Set Your Mind

How the Hope of Heaven Grounds Our Lives as Christians

1  Bound for Fullness of Joy

How the Hope of Heaven Reframes Our Dissatisfaction in the Meantime

2  Bound for Spotless Righteousness

How the Hope of Heaven Overcomes Our Feelings of Inadequacy in the Meantime

3  Bound for Perfect Holiness

How the Hope of Heaven Empowers Our Battle with Sin in the Meantime

4  Bound for Untouchable Security

How the Hope of Heaven Relieves Our Anxiety in the Meantime

5  Bound for No More Pain

How the Hope of Heaven Makes Our Suffering Meaningful in the Meantime

6  Bound for Endless Love

How the Hope of Heaven Makes Our Grief Bearable in the Meantime

7  Bound for Home Together

How the Hope of Heaven Sets Our Mission in the Church

  Conclusion: On Things Above

Why Our Longing for More Makes All the Sense in the World

  General Index

  Scripture Index

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Edgefield Church family, for the unspeakable joy of being your pastor and for doing so much to prepare me for the world to come. I love you guys. And I’m more grateful than ever to be walking home with all of you.

To my fellow elders at Edgefield, thank you for encouraging me to write and for all the structural support that makes it possible. I don’t deserve the privilege of serving with each of you. But, my goodness, am I glad I get to.

I’m grateful to Ivan Mesa, Collin Hansen, and the Gospel Coalition editorial team who saw potential in this idea and guided me every step of the way. What a gift to have friends who get such evident joy from helping others say what they have to say. Thank you, too, to the amazing team at Crossway, especially Todd Augustine and Gerard Cruz. It’s an amazing privilege to work with a publisher whose books have meant so much to me over the years.

Whatever flaws remain in these pages, I can promise you there would be far more if not for the many friends who gave me feedback on drafts along the way: Lynn Henderson, Seth Jones, Rama Kumaran, Bill Heerman, Joshua Minchin, Stephanie Mitchell, Carly Prentice, and Emily Riley. Thank you for your time, for your insight, and for the love that shared them with me.

Lindsey—I have no sweeter foretaste of the marriage feast to come than the everyday joy of our marriage in the meantime. I love you.

Walter, Sam, and Benjamin—I’m sure no father has ever had more fun than I have had being your dad. More than anything, I want this joy to last forever. Through Jesus it can.

And finally, I thank my parents, Mark and Amy, who were the first to show me the beauty of Jesus and who have made it so clear throughout my life that they are seeking a homeland. “But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:16). Happy seventieth birthday, Dad.

Introduction

Set Your Mind

How the Hope of Heaven Grounds Our Lives as Christians

Another Christmas just came and went, along with a wonderful week away with our extended family.

We had been counting down the days to that trip from the time we finished our Halloween candy. We knew it meant a break from the grind of normal life. We knew we’d see grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins we only see a couple of times each year. We knew the favorite foods we’d be eating and that there would be presents. Our trip was packed with all this goodness and more.

Just a few days after returning, I could already feel it. The dreaded postholiday blues. Do you know what I’m talking about? I haven’t seen any scientific data to back this up, but I’ve seen enough life to know that this phenomenon is real. And it has two important lessons to teach us.

First, it is incredible what a difference it makes when you have something to look forward to. An exciting event on your horizon can change how you see everything else in your life. Adults are less bothered by annoying problems at work. Kids are less likely to bicker with siblings around the house. Even those facing terminal illness can draw inspiration and even some relief by thinking ahead to another Christmas with the people they love most. It’s simply wonderful to have something to look forward to.

The second lesson is more sobering. What we really need is something to look forward to that won’t leave us back where we began. This Christmas I got a sharp-looking, quarter-zip pullover sweater. I expect to be wearing it for the next decade or more, long after it’s gone out of style. But I know it will eventually wear out. Even more to the point, it doesn’t change anything about what I see when I look in the mirror. It can’t remove the not-so-hidden, middle-age paunch underneath. It can’t put a single hair back on my bald head. It hasn’t plucked the gray out of my whiskers. As for work, the stress I left behind was still stressing me out when I got back. My holiday was truly wonderful. I was right to look forward to it. But nothing I enjoyed about it lasted for more than a week, and I ended up right back where I started.

Hope matters. We can’t live without it. But what we hope in matters even more. We need a hope strong enough to bear the weight of our lives in the meantime. And that is precisely what we have in the hope of heaven.

What is the hope of heaven to your life as a Christian? That is the simple question I want to raise and help you answer through this book. The question flows from Paul’s words at the beginning of what may be his most beautiful and comprehensive passage on living as a follower of Jesus:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Col. 3:1–4)

In Colossians 3 Paul talks about envy, idolatry, anger, and slander. He talks about kindness, compassion, patience, and forgiveness. He talks about sex, marriage, and parenting. Yet every bit of this portrait—from what sins to put off to what virtues to put on, from how we love one another to how we conduct ourselves in church and at home and in the workplace—flows from a mind that is set on things above.

Right at the center of the Christian life, Paul places an intentional, disciplined, cultivated focus on heaven. Does that sound right to you?

I’m convinced that heaven suffers from a serious brand problem.

For some, the idea of heaven seems boring. This is a problem with a long pedigree. Catherine Earnshaw, of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, speaks from nineteenth-century England what many people feel today:

If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable. . . . I dreamt, once, that I was there. . . . Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.1

Do you see the implication? Heaven is literally a nightmare. As one writer sums it up, “Our ancestors were afraid of hell; we are afraid of heaven. We think it will be boring.”2 Many Christians may know better than to accept clichés about chubby angels playing harps in the clouds, but they don’t have more relatable images to fall back on. Why should I want to be at a worship service that never ends?

For others, the thought of longing for heaven feels a little bit wrong, as if there’s a zero-sum relationship between longing for heaven and loving the world as we know it now, with its precious people and their serious problems. “Heavenly-minded” is an age-old knock on people who are no earthly good. Karl Marx famously described religion as the opiate of the people, something to take the edge off their pain and keep them from taking action to make things better. I’ve heard Christians of my generation speak of heavenly-mindedness in pretty much those terms, as cover for indifference and inaction. Isn’t it self-indulgent to look ahead to an eternal world of bliss when real people are really suffering all around you?

For still others, the notion of heaven seems almost pitiful, more like loss than gain—as if heaven means the end of familiar joys in this world, joys that are significant and wonderful. Why should I long to be in some other world when I’ve got so much to live for in this world?

My sense, however, is many Christians simply aren’t thinking about heaven at all and, if asked, couldn’t say why they should be. Maybe it makes sense why an eighty-three-year-old widow with terminal cancer might long for heaven. But what about a twenty-three-year-old law student in her second year? What about a thirty-three-year-old engineer with his first kid on the way?

Throughout this book, I want to show that the issue is not whether you love this world and its joys, its people and their needs. The question is whether you have any hope beyond this world and what it has to offer. Concrete, unshakable, life-giving hope is the birthright of every Christian, and this hope is meant to touch every part of our lives in the meantime.

Sadly, I’m convinced that we tend to view heaven the way we view our car insurance. We know we need to have it, but God forbid we ever have to use it. The best thing about having car insurance is the peace of mind it provides: you don’t have to think about it until the moment you need it. Meanwhile your focus stays fixed on the car itself—what style you like best, what features you need, how you want to use it, where you want to drive it.

As the Bible describes heaven, it’s not at all like an insurance policy filed and forgotten. It is an inheritance you are sure to receive and, beyond that, an inheritance you can draw on right now. Throughout Scripture, the promise of heaven functions like a trust fund—certain, fully funded, and freely accessible while we wait for faith to turn to sight. I want to help you see the incredible riches stored away in that trust fund and how to draw on that wealth day by day.

But first, back to Paul and his crystal-clear, countercultural basis for our lives as Christians. Why should we set our minds on things above? Why does Paul lay this command as the foundation of the Christian life? I see three reasons, and these frame everything that follows in this book.

Hope Is Essential

Heavenly-mindedness is absolutely vital because what we want or expect from our future has a huge effect on our experience in the meantime. We humans are future-oriented creatures whether we like it or not.

We are not the only creatures with an eye on what’s coming, of course. Birds build nests in the springtime. Squirrels bury nuts in the fall. Bears store up fat for winter hibernation. But birds, squirrels, and bears operate on instinct, aimed at simple survival.

Humans alone have hopes and dreams. We imagine opportunities to crave and possibilities to fear. We train for careers. We plan for families. We save for retirement. We buy insurance for our houses, our cars, our health, and even our lives. Only humans make conscious choices now in the hope or dread of what might be later.

The question is not whether your view of the future shapes your life today. The question is which view of the future is shaping your life today and what effect it is having.

Tim Keller often used a helpful thought experiment to capture this point.3 Imagine two women hired to do the same job, under the same conditions, and for the same amount of time. They both have to perform the same menial tasks, hour after hour, day after day. They both carry on through the same sweltering heat in summer and the same freezing cold in winter. But one of these women was told she would receive $30,000 at the end of the year, while the other woman was promised $30 million.

Surely the one promised $30,000 would struggle to keep going. She would deal with bitterness. Maybe she would feel underappreciated and misused. She’d be looking over her shoulder for other opportunities that might pay more or cost less. She’d be discouraged where she was and afraid of missing out on better options.

But the one promised $30 million would put up with just about anything. She would work day in and day out with a smile on her face because every minute of every day would bring her closer to a payday she couldn’t get anywhere else.

What view of your future has functional control over your present? Your mind is set on something still to come. Everything in your Christian life flows from whether that something is the future God has promised to you.

The stakes could not be higher. To face up to life in this world as it is, you need a hope beyond this world that can survive anything. That’s because anything can happen. Some of our dreams will fade away. Our bodies will wither and fall. Our relationships will be strained by sin and ultimately lost to death. And more often than not, we can’t stay out of our own way as we stumble on toward the grave and what comes next.

Life can be brutal. If you live long enough, in one way or another, it will be. When Jesus said to lay up treasures in heaven, this fundamental truth about the world was his backdrop—this is a world where moths devour, thieves steal, and rust destroys (Matt. 6:19–20). There is a baseline of brokenness to life under death that no one escapes. The only way to face up to this reality is with a hope beyond the reach of death and all its minions—loss, separation, change, time itself. You need a clear view of where all this is going, to carry on no matter what along the way.

Diversion Is Easier

We are commanded to set our minds on things above because it would be so much easier not to. Diversion by one thing or another comes much more naturally. I don’t have to tell my kids to finish their ice cream. I do have to command them to take five bites of their cauliflower soup.

Focusing on heaven is more like eating cruciferous vegetables than eating ice cream. It’s better for us. It’s more nourishing. It builds our strength and our resistance to all sorts of infection. But it is sometimes less attractive than other options competing for our attention and our affection. Apart from the work of God’s Spirit in us, the affections of our hearts and the allure of our environment will constantly set our minds on things on earth.

We are relentlessly biased toward false hopes we can see, touch, and control—hopes that can’t satisfy us, can’t save us, and can’t possibly outlive us. This was the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. It was the story of Israel wandering through the wilderness. It was the story of Israel forced into exile. And it is our story too. How do you stay focused on what is unseen and eternal when what is seen and temporary is so present and so powerful?

This is the driving concern behind one of the most important books on heaven ever written: Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. Baxter was a pastor in seventeenth-century England during the bloody years of the English Civil War. Surrounded by that carnage and following a near-death experience of his own, he worked out a process for meditating on heaven as a spiritual discipline.

Baxter was stunned by how little his flock seemed to care about the life to come, despite the obvious difficulty of their lives here and now. The problem as he saw it was not that Christians denied that there is such a place as heaven or even doubted that they themselves might be there someday. The problem was the gap between the head and the heart: “When truth is apprehended only as truth, this is but an unsavory and loose apprehension; when it is apprehended as good as well as true, this is a solid and delightful apprehending.”4

In other words, we need a sense of heaven’s goodness in the heart before the truth we profess shapes the lives we’re living. By nature we have no trouble seeing what’s good about power, sex, fame, or money (and what it can buy). But it takes discipline to see the goodness in what is not yet seen—to see God’s promise for our future as good as well as true.

Meditating on heaven, Baxter argues, is how we use our understanding to warm our affections. It throws open “the door between the head and the heart.” The meditation he seeks to model is “simply reading over and repeating God’s reasons to our hearts and so disputing with ourselves on his argument and terms.”5 It involves using our judgment to compare the allure of the world to the promises of heaven, until the scale tips toward the latter from the former.

This is the work I hope to do chapter by chapter throughout this book. This is not so much a how-to guide as it is an attempt to practice meditating on heaven with you. My goal is to do for the friends that I pastor now in the twenty-first century something like what Baxter did in the seventeenth century for his readers.

However, we face barriers to meditating on heaven that Baxter could not have imagined four hundred years ago.

We Are More Insulated from Death

For one thing, our lives on average are far more insulated from misery than the average Englishman in 1650, with far more opportunities for wealth and comfort. Beginning in the late eighteenth century and accelerating ever since, life expectancy, net worth, and quality of life have skyrocketed throughout the West. I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t trade places with anyone from the seventeenth century. But our unprecedented prosperity can radically distort our perspective on this world.

In Baxter’s time, death lurked beneath every sniffle. Life expectancy was roughly thirty-five years. Now it is more than twice that number. Modern medicines, skillful doctors, and remarkable technologies make it seem like there’s always something more to be done, some other way to push back death to another day.

In Baxter’s time, most people died at home, in the same few square feet in which their families spent their lives. They walked to church through the graves of people who were dear to them. The ever-present reality of death gave ever-present incentive to look up and beyond the shadows of life on earth. Now when someone does come to die, more often than not, it’s in a sanitized industrial facility, completely isolated from where we live our lives. It’s become easier and easier to live most of life as if death is someone else’s problem. And without an urgent awareness that life is just a breath, it makes sense that we would set our minds on squeezing as much as possible from this world here and now.

We Are More Secular

Compared to Baxter’s time and place, we live in what some philosophers have called a “secular age.”6 I don’t mean that we all deny the existence of God. I mean that in our day-to-day lives, we don’t have to assume his existence the same way they did back then. We don’t feel as vulnerable to forces beyond our control or recognize our radical dependence on a reality beyond ourselves.

We live our lives surrounded by stunning human achievements, from high-rise buildings to space-traveling rockets to artificial intelligence we created to outpace our own. Our lives are mediated through all sorts of technologies that filter our work and our play and even our relationships. And compared to Baxter’s preindustrial world, we enjoy an unimaginable degree of control aimed directly at our own pleasure and comfort. If I want to, I can have blueberries delivered to my door with a couple of hours’ notice in the middle of February.

In a world like ours, even Christians can easily lose sight of the fact that every meal, just like every breath, comes from above. It takes effort to remember that we are wholly dependent on God, we answer to God for these lives he’s given us, and therefore we ought to look to him in everything.

We Are More Distracted

Perhaps no barrier to heavenly-mindedness is more influential day-to-day or more typical of our modern context than the smartphones we carry around in our pockets, lay on our desks while we’re working, then plug in by our pillows while we’re sleeping. I recently saw a cartoon from the New Yorker featuring a headstone with the image of a smartphone etched near the top. The epitaph had just two lines:

50% lookingatphone

50% lookingforphone7

By some estimates adults are spending on average as many as four to six hours per day scrolling on their phones. When you consider how much of that usage happens in spurts, spread out here and there in the middle of whatever else we’re supposed to be doing, we’re spending all our waking moments drawn to our phones. That makes it tough to set our minds on anything at all, much less on things above and things to come.

How we spend our moments is how we spend our lives. Do you want your life measured by how many fantasy football titles you won? Or how many limited-time deals you grabbed? Or how many likes you got on that family photo? Or how many days in a row you nailed the Wordle challenge?

John Stott once preached to a crowd full of eager young students who were interested in giving their lives to international missions. He reminded them to remember who they were, as citizens of heaven and pilgrims on earth, and to be wary of how quickly we can fix our eyes here below:

I read some years ago of a young man who found a five-dollar bill on the street and who “from that time on never lifted his eyes when walking. In the course of years he accumulated 29,516 buttons, 54,172 pins, 12 cents, a bent back and a miserly disposition.” But think what he lost. He couldn’t see the radiance of the sunlight, the sheen of the stars, the smile on the face of his friends, or the blossoms of springtime, for his eyes were in the gutter. There are too many Christians like that. We have important duties on earth, but we must never allow them to preoccupy us in such a way that we forget who we are or where we are going.8

I’m sure it has never been more difficult to set our minds on things above than it is right now. But the stakes are as high as ever. We have much to lose if we do not and so much to gain if we do. Which brings me to the final reason for Paul’s command, and the ultimate motivation for everything that follows in this book.

Christ Is Worthy

In Colossians 3 Paul’s ultimate reason for the command that he puts at the foundation of the Christian life is that heaven is where Christ is and where you will be with him someday: “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is. . . . When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (3:1, 4).