#heaven

A Heart That Is Free, A Step That Is Light

The great general had led his troops to a hard-fought but resounding triumph on the field of battle. With the enemy army now vanquished and scattered, he rallied his regiments to press on toward the capital where they would secure the final victory. And though the men marched briskly, he urged them to still greater speed. In their haste, they began to toss aside whatever was superfluous, whatever was redundant, whatever was unnecessary. Soon the road was littered with all …

I Knew It!

Do you ever wonder what it’s like to enter heaven? Do you ever wonder what you will see first, what you will hear first, what you will feel and experience first? Do you ever wonder what your very first thought will be after you’ve fallen asleep in this world to awaken in the next? I’m sure you do. We all do. We all wonder what’s just beyond the great chasm that separates life from death, earth from heaven, here from …

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Have You Tasted Heaven?

A touching story from long ago tells of a young boy who lived in the distant reaches of the vast Canadian prairies. His family was impoverished, and parents and children alike had to labor day and night to prove their homestead claim. There was little time for anything beyond work, little money for anything beyond the barest essentials. They lived a harsh, rugged, hand-to-mouth existence. A day came when that boy’s father dispatched him to town to fetch supplies, so …

Homesick

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 …

The Only Tears In Heaven

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 …

Not Home Yet

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 …

The Bit of Heaven the Heaven Tourism Books Never Touched

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 …

Heaven on Earth

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 …

The Bestsellers: Heaven Is For Real

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 …

Heaven Tourism

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 …