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My thoughts these days turn often to heaven. In those moments when I hover between asleep and awake, in those moments when I bow my head to pray, in those moments when I lift my voice to sing, my mind turns often to that place and to its people. My father made the journey there not too long ago and my son trailed close behind him. The two key men in my life—the one in whose footsteps I followed and …
How many tears do we shed over the course of a lifetime? From the days of infancy when we cry out from hunger and discomfort, to the days of old age when we weep from the agony of physical pain and the sorrow of compounding loss, we are creatures who cry, creatures who express inward trauma with outward weeping. The path that leads from birth to Beulah is a path stained by tears. It is little wonder, then, that many …
If you pay attention to Christian publishing, you’ll observe that certain themes come and go, rise and fall. One author will write a book on a subject and that may ignite interest so that several others follow up to challenge that person’s view, to affirm it, or to pursue it from a different angle. A recent theme, at least in one little corner of the Christian world, has been the notion of “home.” And now Ian K. Smith has added …
I am sure you remember all the heaven tourism books that cluttered the shelves of Christian bookstores a few years ago. This was a fad that was never going to last long, which is why authors and publishers were so quick to frantically churn out their own tales of unlikely visits to heaven. There was money to be made and they weren’t going to miss out on their share of it! But like most fads, this one collapsed almost as …
It does the Christian good to consider heaven. It does the Christian good to consider what awaits us when we at last succumb to death. It has been the subject of countless books but, interestingly, few that have remained in circulation for very long. For that reason we are served well by new works on the subject. I was glad, then, to find a copy of Derek Thomas’s Heaven on Earth: What the Bible Teaches about the Life to Come …
In this ongoing series of articles I am looking at books that have won the prestigious Platinum or Diamond Sales Awards from the Evangelical Christian Booksellers Association. The Platinum Award recognizes books that have achieved 1 million sales while the Diamond Award recognizes the few that have surpassed the 10 million mark. Today we turn our attention to a bestseller that was a latecomer to the heaven tourism genre, but which surpassed them all. Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo …
Travelling to heaven and back is where it’s at today. Don Piper spent ninety minutes there and sold four million copies of his account. Colton Burpo doesn’t know how long he was there, but his travel diary has surpassed 6 million copies sold, with a kids’ edition accounting for another half million. Bill Wiese obviously booked his trip on the wrong web site and found himself in hell, which did, well, hellish things to his sales figures. Still, 23 Minutes in …
I was looking through Edward Donnelly’s book Biblical Teaching on the Doctrines of Heaven and Hell and came across a really powerful quote about all that we are not able to do and understand and accomplish in this life. Read it and be blessed! The prospect of living forever in a renewed universe answers the frustration we feel over the brevity of earthly existence. For human begins have always felt that, at its longest, life is too short. There is …
Randy Alcorn has recently released a book titled We Shall See God (buy it at EPM or at Amazon) in which he has compiled some of the most profound spiritual insights on the topic of eternity from Charles Spurgeon’s sermons and arranged them into an easily-accessible format. He was kind enough to allow me to post one of the devotionals from that book. It is excerpted from a sermon Spurgeon preached on August 6, 1865 titled “No Tears in Heaven” and looking at Luke …
Some books receive titles that are a little bit mysterious, only hinting at what the book contains. There are others that just give it all away in the title. Biblical Teaching on the Doctrines of Heaven and Hell pretty well says it all. Edward Donnelly simply turns to Scripture to see what God says about these important doctrines of heaven and hell. Heaven is a popular subject at the moment. Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven has over 300,000 copies in print …