Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2); generally taken to mean heaven. The way prepared for His people actually began at the cross of which He must first suffer. If heaven is a place of divine preparation it therefore follows that those who go there must be divinely prepared. It also follows that this preparation begins by a new birth, since nothing natural or carnal shall enter there. Christ, in a little less than one hundred words, stressed the vital necessity of the new birth to a very religious man by the name of Nicodemus. The Apostle Paul said in the letter to the Romans (8:6), “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” An old Baptist preacher in the last century had some good thoughts on those words; let me share them with you. He said, “Just in proportion as our heart and affections are engaged on heavenly objects, shall we feel a sweet savor of heaven resting upon our spirit; and as we can only give back what we receive, every going forth of divine life below is but the fruit and effect of the incoming of that life from above.” Christ is our life, declares the Holy Apostle in Colossians 3:4; and as Christ, by His Spirit and grace, maintains the life of faith in the soul, it manifests itself in its gracious acting’s from Christ above on the believer below. Without spirituality of mind, which is the life of Christ in the soul, religion is but a mere name and empty shell, a delusion, and a deceptive snare. God does not take into heaven, into the glory of His eternal bliss, those whom He does not love, and who do not love Him. Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people. My dear friend this preparedness for heaven as an inward grace, must consist in that blessed spirituality of mind whereby heavenly things become our only happiness. As the preacher quoted above said, “When an inward delight is felt in those things the heart will be enlarged, the mind ennobled (elevated), the spirit softened, and the whole soul is lifted up as it were, into a holy atmosphere in which it bathes as its choice element.” This is “life” my dear reader, not a cold, dead profession as so many poor carnal creatures have who have only a name to live, but in fact are lifeless. You must make dead sure that you have more than a natural faith in Jesus Christ and the truths of His gospel. Strive for Christ, and nothing short of Him, because life is knowing Him.
“Faith in the bleeding Lamb, O what a gift is this! Hope of salvation in His name, How comfortable ‘tis! Knowledge of what is right, How God is satisfied, A foe received a favorurite, An alien made a child.”
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