What are those who come and stand at our border wanting entrance into America thinking? Do they see a better life, a future of having more than they’ve ever had before? Are they yearning to become a citizen of the greatest country in world because of freedoms they have not had in their own country? Can anyone really blame them for wanting those things?
Does only their yearning make them any more free? No, of course not. Desire and want rarely materializes into reality without a lot of commitment, responsibility, and the willingness to make it work.
How many Americans do we find staring longingly into Mexico or Canada (or any country), wanting to become a citizen of those countries?
Not many.
There’s another group of people who are also standing at a border, desiring to cross into a country to which they’ve never been before: Christians.
Christians who have a “heavenly mind” have learned from the Word of God to rejoice “in the Hope of the Glory of God.” We hear a bit of heaven in the Melody of Redemption and the Songs of the Redeemed. We read of the absence of tears, sickness, sorrow, and the complete absence of fear and pain.
We can only imagine.
Too often the cares of this world steal from us the joy of our expectation of Eternity with God. We too often look to the world as a source of comfort. John Angell James said in ‘The True Christian’:
In looking so much to the earth, and earthly-minded men, we become too familiarized with sin, as to lose our clear perceptions, our accurate discrimination of it’s evil nature, and our accurate sensibilities to it’s criminality and odiousness. We lose our self-abhorrence to our own sins, by the view of so much evil around us.
We are inundated by worldly ideas, desires, and temptations on every turn. Years ago a pastor wrote a piece about people starting to let one of the most influential devices of evil into their homes across the country. He was speaking of the newly invented Television set. We would not invite people into our homes who behaved and talked as horribly as those actors and entertainers we allow ourselves and families to watch on TV. The same can be said about movies and DVDs. Those things have destroyed our “clear perceptions” and “accurate discrimination” of evil and has dulled our recognition of our own sin. We have become accustomed to sin.
James went on to say the we may “recover our keenness of vision and tenderness of conscious only by lifting up our eyes to that pure and blessed region (Heaven) where no sin dwells and Holiness is in perfection; and where one view of Jesus…will strike all sin forever dead.”
The Bible teaches there are only TWO eternal places: Heaven and Hell. There is no passage from one to the other, and Jesus is the ONLY way into heaven.
Where will you spend Eternity?
THE RIGHT RENDITION 