Quotes About Eternity

Now love doesn't stop at death - or if it does, it's a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of nothingness. But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved in prayer before God.

Life after death, it seems, can be a serious distraction not only from the ultimate life after life after death, but also from life before death.

Paul believed, in fact, that Jesus had gone through death and out the other side. Jesus had gone into a new mode of physicality, for which there was no precedent and of which there was, as yet, no other example.

If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules - since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but simply of death itself, seen from a different angle.

heaven is undoubtedly important, but it's not the end of the world.

We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess. RESURRECTION:

In the Lord, your labour is not in vain: what you do here in faith will stand, will last.

God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again.25

The good news is bigger, better, fuller than you ever imagined.

The resurrection of Jesus is the launching of God's new world.

First, Jesus was going to take us to be with him in heaven. There are different ways people have imagined this happening, but the message is still the same. Somehow, the good news in the past (what Jesus did two thousand years ago) points forward to one particular piece of good news about the future (he will take us to heaven). This completes the new relationship with God that is for many the sole focus of the good news. And this is seriously misleading.

Resurrection and forgiveness are not strange things that might perhaps happen in the old creation.

Though many Christians in the Western world have imagined that the aim or goal of being a Christian is simply "to go to heaven when you die," the New Testament holds out something much richer and more interesting.

the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he'd always promised

on. And then we catch a glimpse—or was

What has happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in other words, is by no means limited to its effects on those human beings who believe the gospel and thereby find new life here and hereafter. It resonates out, in ways that we can't fully see or understand, into the vast recesses of the universe.

We must remind ourselves yet once more that all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.

How we are saved is closely linked to the question of what we are saved for.

Heaven is important, but its not the end of the world

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.

What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.

I am not, I will not be. I have not, I will not have. This frightens all children, And kills fear in the wise.

Motion does not begin in what has moved, nor does it begin in what has not moved, nor does it begin in what is moving. In what, then, does motion begin?