Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
Heaven
James Hudson Taylor
Would that God would make hell so real to us that we cannot rest; heaven so real that we must have men there; Christ so real that our supreme motive and aim shall be to make the Man of Sorrows the Man of Joy by the conversion to him of many.
J. C. Macaulay
[The] presence of the Holy Spirit in a life will reflect in the countenance, and the more fully the Holy Spirit controls a life, the more marked will be the light of heaven in the face.
Katherine Walden
Grace infused in the sweet fragrances of suffering and brokenness for Christ’s sake results in a concentrated, undefiled extract of heaven.
John Wesley
John Wesley tells of a dream he had. In the dream, he was ushered to the gates of Hell. There he asked, “Are there any Presbyterians here?” “Yes!”, came the answer. Then he asked, “Are there any Baptists? Any Episcopalians? Any Methodists?” The answer was Yes! each time. Much distressed, Wesley was then ushered to the gates of Heaven. There he asked the same question, and the answer was No! “No?” To this, Wesley asked, “Who then is inside?” The answer came back, “There are only Christians here.”
George Macdonald
The shadows of the evening that precedes a lovelier morning are drawing down around us both. But our God is in the shadow as in the shine, and all is and will be well: have we not seen his glory in the face of Jesus? and do we not know him a little?…This life is a lovely time, but I never was content with it. I look for better — oh, so far better! I think we do not yet know the joy of mere existence…. May the loving Father be near you and may you know it, and be perfectly at peace all the way into the home country, and to the palace home of the living one — the life of our life.
J. Robertson McQuilkin
I think God has planned the strength and beauty of youth to be physical. But the strength and beauty of old age is spiritual. We gradually lose the strength and beauty that is temporary so we’ll be sure to concentrate on the strength and beauty that is forever. And so we’ll be eager to leave the temporary, deteriorating part of us and be truly homesick for our eternal home. If we stayed young and strong and beautiful, we might never want to leave.
C. S. Lewis
If you have really handed yourself over to Him it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
Lewis Sperry Chafer
Anyone can devise a plan by which good people may go to Heaven. Only God can devise a plan whereby sinners, who are His enemies, can go to Heaven.
John Owen
Poor souls are apt to think that all those whom they read or hear of to be gone to heaven, went there because they were so good and holy…Yet not one of them, not any one that is now in heaven (Jesus Christ alone excepted), did ever come there any other way but by forgiveness of sins.