Having finished another round of finals and my first year of graduate school, these next couple days are going to be rather relaxing. Among things I'm now finding time to do, today I wrote a letter to my grandparents (!) and dived into the devotional I've been picking at for some time now. I know eternity scares the living daylights out of many people, but my favorite theological topic remains eschatology (studying the "end things"). Eschatology echoes through the core of my being, because there is so much that is broken. Both in my personal life and globally. And while it's often difficult (try as hard as I might) to have faith that God's going to fix things now (which, sometimes He will, sometimes He won't), it's immeasurably uplifting to think about that day when the whole earth will be transformed and the tears wiped from every believer's eye.
So....today's devotional was on the Ascension and the importance of it to our faith. Here are a few selections that tickled my heartstrings, and I hope they may encourage you as well:
"Christ's ascension benefits us because we now have our own flesh in heaven; our lives are hidden with Christ who dwells in glory above (Col. 3:3-4). Christ's flesh in heaven is a guarantee that ours will be there too someday. Our hope is not an eternity as disembodied souls but real, resurrected, material human bodies in God's presence forever. Christ's body is the first one there, but not the last."
"The ascension also implies that "asking Jesus into your heart" does not mean inviting a kind friend or comforting therapist into your life. It means--if we are using the nonbiblical phrase in a biblical way--that we are expressing our desire to be one with the king of the universe. The Jesus who lives within our hearts is sitting exalted at the right hand of God the Father Almighty."
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