The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work

Scot McKnight in his Jesus Creed blog has started a reflective thread on Darrell Cosden's book, The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work . Cosden writes about a Christian theory of work. Looking at the "Look Inside" at Amazon this should be a good discussion.

The Love of God

Tonight, as I walked across the Wal Mart parking lot to my truck, a Ford Mustang with a young man pulled up to me. He asked was I from here? Yes, I replied. He asked could I help him out?

What do you need, I asked him. He needed to get to Lawerenceville VA, about a 3 hour drive from Fredericksburg and he had no money and was out of gas. I saw in the passenger seat a young female.

I looked in my wallet and found $22. I told him to follow me to the gas pumps on the other side of the Wal Mart building. He did. I ran my debit card through the reader and asked him what grade of gas did his car use. As I filled his car, I asked him how he had got in to this situation.

He had driven up to Washington for his wife to see her family. On his back home, he developed car problems and stopped in Fredericksburg. He had spent all his money on repairs and had none for gas. As I topped off his tank he asked for my name and he said his was Chuck. Thank you so much. Chuck, I said God just wants to remind you he loves you. We went our separate ways.

Love your neighbor as yourself, Jesus said. Being a good Samaritan is expressing the love of God to others.

Understanding Heaven

This past week I had the joyous occasion to celebrate my Dad’s 78th birthday with my sister, Denise and her friend Lily. It was a great evening.

Lily is an avid questioner. She is always asking questions about our faith and what we believe. At our birthday celebration we talked about our understanding of heaven.

I have always felt I had a distorted view of heaven. In my understanding of what I read in the Bible I couldn’t accept the commonly held view and many Christians hold that heaven is one great meet up with all who believed in Jesus while here on earth.

I believed that yes we would be with Jesus. Our spirit (soul) would be at peace with him in Heaven, a spiritual realm not a physical location. I viewed it as peaceful sleep. The more important thing than getting to heaven is what happens when Jesus at his return renews the earth by joining it with heaven as the world comes what it was designed to be. There are spirits would be joined in our new resurrected bodies. A body like the resurrected Jesus displayed in the New Testament.

Here is another posting of NT Wright’s view of heaven that is posted at Time. Maybe you have a thought to share?