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What is the difference between the study materials available for the Heaven book?

Today’s guest post is by our dear friend Diane Meyer, who tells a great and fun story that really fits with the character of our generous, delightful God. Most giving stories I hear don’t involve a dice game and a Harley Davidson motorcycle. But that’s what makes this one so unique.

My son-in-law Dan Franklin is teaching pastor at Life Bible Fellowship in Upland, California. Dan is married to my daughter Karina, and the father of three of my grandsons, but that’s not the main reason he’s one of my favorite teachers. In this video, Dan talks about the problems behind the phrase, “Speak your truth.”  

This article by Greg Morse is vitally important. Its message, which has been on my heart a long time, is this: on the one hand, it’s true that we are sinners saved by grace, meaning for now we are still sinners. On the other hand, when we talk about how normal sin is, suggesting it’s inevitable that we as Christians sin, we are really missing something vital about Christ’s empowering grace.

I think Charles Spurgeon comes as close as anyone I’ve read to articulating what Scripture as a whole reveals. Sadly, though I attended both a good Bible college and a good seminary, I never read Spurgeon or learned anything about him. I’d been a pastor for ten years before I discovered him, and then I couldn’t get enough of him.

Relativism dominates the thinking of most educated people (which means sometimes that uneducated people are morally smarter). The “it all depends” morality, controversial fifty years ago when called situational ethics, denies the existence of any objective standards of right and wrong. What’s wrong for one person, so it insists, may be right for another. One uses internal, not external, standards to judge morality.

Because work began before sin and the Curse, and because God, who is without sin, is a worker, we should assume human beings will work on the New Earth. We’ll have satisfying and enriching work that we can’t wait to get back to, work that’ll never be drudgery.

Question from reader: In Heaven, you make a case that we will have some type of body in the intermediate Heaven. So what body do we receive in 1 Thessalonians 4:17? It says, “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”

If we don’t clean our dirty laundry, the world will hang it out on the line for everyone to see, every time. Our goal shouldn’t be to convince the world there’s no sin in the church. The world already knows there is, and so should we. And only if we do know will we do something to deal with and prevent it in Christ-honoring way.

We appreciate this group’s passion to see abortion ended. Any sincere prolifer would be ecstatic if abortion ended. Unfortunately, Abolish Human Abortion’s methods and philosophy are problematic. 

When we’re asked to do worthless or unprofitable things, it doesn’t take much wisdom to say no, does it? Especially not when you do one of those things and think, “Okay, that was a waste…I’m never doing that again.” The real problem is all the good things we’re asked to do.

The problem of how we could possibly be reconciled with a God who hates evil is the greatest problem of history. Before we can see God in Heaven, something must radically change. This calls for no less than the greatest solution ever devised. 

Does it really matter whether we believe that God is happy? Yes—it matters more than anything has ever mattered, or ever will. Upon it hinges, for instance, whether or not we can believe God’s promises, like those found in Romans 8.

Fasting is not just an ancient practice or something you have to do before a blood test. It is also a spiritual discipline... Here are some helpful resources about fasting as a spiritual discipline: