Audio Transcript

A bunch of end-of-life questions have been asked and answered on the podcast over the years, episodes I tried to catalogue in the APJ book (fittingly, at the very end) on pages 441–449. In fact, the question “How do I know if I’m ready for heaven?” is how the whole book ends. I intentionally wanted it to end with that question, one of my favorite episodes ever in the podcast.

Meditating on heaven is important. I remember the late J.I. Packer once telling me and a couple of friends that he made it a common practice to walk the streets of his neighborhood in Vancouver just to meditate on the glories of heaven. Well, he’s there now, along with his wife, in the joyful presence of our Savior. But I feel like a younger generation still needs to reclaim his practice or something like it.

Well, we have this question today from an anonymous young woman: “Pastor John, when I think about going to heaven one day, I get most excited about seeing my parents, grandparents, and possibly pets. I know this is wrong — I should be most excited about seeing Jesus. What do I need to confess, and how do I overcome this? Thank you.”

I have six — no, seven — practical suggestions that I hope will move you beyond this condition of loving parents more than Christ. Now, someone might object right here and say, “Well, whoa, wait a minute, she didn’t say that. She didn’t say she loved her parents more than Christ. She said she was more excited about seeing them than she is about seeing Christ.” Well, there might be something to that objection to me, but I doubt it, because I think loving Christ more than we love our parents includes being more excited to see him than we are to see them.

I think the effort to interpret love for Christ so that it does not include things like the intense desire to see him is futile. I don’t think you can define love for Christ with that kind of limitation. When Paul says that we will receive the crown of righteousness if we love Christ’s appearing (2 Timothy 4:8), that does not mean, “find it boring or undesirable.” It means we are excited about the prospect of his coming. Is our desire strong? Do we want him, his presence, more than we want life to go on as it is with all of our present pleasant relationships? That’s what he’s saying.

So, here are my seven practical suggestions.

1. Assess yourself.

Do a very sincere, earnest assessment of your own heart to see if you really mean what you say. Love for Jesus has many components. One of them would be being excited to see him and to be with him. Others would include things like admiration for him — for his greatness, his wisdom, strength, goodness, beauty, his eternal nature, his never coming into being, his love demonstrated in the price he paid and gift he bought and how undeserving we are to receive it.

The personal affections of the heart that a person has for Christ are very varied. The emotional resonance that each of these excellencies of Christ find in our heart are different from each other. They’re not all the same sense of excitement. It may be that you are selling yourself short in not taking stock of some of the genuine affections for Christ that may be there in your heart — which are, in fact, just as or more intense than what you feel for your parents.

So, that’s the first suggestion I have; I don’t want to be too hard on you. You know your heart well enough to say, “I really do love my parents more than I love Christ.” Do a very serious self-assessment to read your own heart accurately. That’s number one.

2. Let it shock you.

Perhaps be shocked and sobered by the fact that you may be in more trouble than you think you are. It’s not just wrong to prefer something more than Jesus; it’s damnable. Jesus said in Matthew 10:37, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

So, Jesus does two things in that verse. He clarifies the kind of love he has in mind — namely, the kind of love we feel for our most precious relationships. In other words, the love he requires is not simply some stoic, self-denying dedication, but rather the same kind of affections we feel for our parents and our children. The second thing he does in that verse is point out that the complete absence of the kind of supreme affection he demands means we’re not Christians, we’re not saved, we’re not going to heaven.

Not to be worthy of Jesus (which is what he says: “You’re not worthy of me”) doesn’t mean that we don’t deserve Jesus. Nobody deserves Jesus. It means it’s not fitting that we should be considered his disciples. So, don’t think that you are dealing with a minor problem of your emotional life of excitement. You’re dealing with the life-and-death problem of whether you are a Christian.

3. Recognize the fight.

This may soften the previous point a little (we’ll see). Realize that, as a Christian, your genuine spiritual affections are variable, which means they can grow and become stronger, and they can decay and become weaker. Second Thessalonians 1:3 refers to our faith in Christ as growing, which I think implies that our love for Christ can grow.

We all know that the intensity of our faith and our love rises and falls in various circumstances of life. That’s why Paul speaks of fighting the good fight of faith (1 Timothy 6:12; 2 Timothy 4:7). And the same can be said of love. We fight to maintain our love for Christ. The world is always attempting to capture the affections of our heart. That’s why 1 John 2:15 warns us, “Do not love the world” — and that’s everything created.

“Pray earnestly that God would open your eyes to see the beauty of Christ and how desirable and superior he is.”

The reason I said this realization might soften the previous point is that, on the days when you find your love for Christ weakening, I don’t want you to conclude you’re not a Christian. We have all been there. Our affections rise and fall. The response of those days is not to conclude you’re not a Christian, but to prove you are a Christian by putting to death “what is earthly in you” and fighting for a fresh, greater taste of the preciousness of Christ and the rising of your affections in him (Colossians 3:5). That’s real life.

4. Pray for sight.

Pray earnestly, day and night, that God would open your eyes, that you would see the beauty of Christ and how desirable he is and how superior he is to your parents or your children, in every way that should excite your affections.

This is the way the psalmist prayed. This is the battle he fought. “Open my eyes that I can see the wonders of God, the wonders of the word, the wonders of Christ” (see Psalm 119:18). It’s the way Paul prayed: “I pray that the eyes of your hearts would be enlightened, that you may know what’s the hope and the inheritance and the power at work within us” (see Ephesians 1:18–19). These are all part of the glory of Christ.

And even Christians need to pray regularly that we would see, that our eyes and our hearts would see Christ and the glories of Christ — and how supremely desirable they are — more clearly.

5. Look to Christ.

Most of all, look intently and steadfastly and earnestly at Jesus. We do this by looking through his word.

• 2 Corinthians 3:18 (so important): “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image.”
• Hebrews 3:1: “Consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession.”
• Hebrews 12:3: “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility.”

Behold him, consider him, consider him — this is our daily bread, right? This is what you do. Men shall not live by bread alone, but by every word (Deuteronomy 8:3), because the word reveals Christ, and Christ is supremely desirable above parents and children. That’s what sustains our faith and our love. The only way to savor Christ as we ought is to see him as we ought.

6. Read good books.

Use good sermons and books to help you do this: Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “The Excellency of Christ”; John Bunyan’s All Loves Excelling; John Owen’s The Glory of Christ (for all three of those, just type them into Google and you can read them online — you don’t even have to buy them); Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly.

7. Lean on community.

Finally, be among people who cherish Christ above all. It’s contagious. That’s what churches are for.

I pray that God will use these seven suggestions to deepen and confirm your love for Christ. Maybe I’ll throw in one more — sorry — just one more sentence. One of Christ’s beauties is that, when you love him above his gifts, you get the gifts thrown in. But if you love his gifts above him, you lose both.