A TASTE OF HEAVEN

Eph.1:18 – By having the eyes of your heart flooded with light, so that you can know and understand the hope to which He has called you, and how rich is His glorious inheritance in the saints (His set-apart ones),

Heaven is impossible to grasp by the human mind. It just does not make rational sense. The natural man just sees it as a ‘better place’ where people go when they die. They sort of see it as a giant family reunion, kind of like Thanksgiving Day (how has that worked out for everyone?) To many it is just a better alternative to the other place that no one mentions and most don’t believe really exists.

In today’s verse Paul is praying for our eyes to be opened to catch a glimpse of this place called heaven. What makes heaven so heavenly? To the lost person what I am going to say is not very attractive. To those who have been born again there is nothing that comes even close. Heaven will be an eternal interaction with the Lord and an unveiling of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Here is how Jonathan Edwards describes heaven.

“ (In heaven) he will dwell and gloriously manifest himself to eternity. And this renders heaven a world of love; for God is the fountain of love, as the sun is the fountain of light. And therefore the glorious presence of God in heaven fills heaven with love, as the sun placed in the midst of the hemisphere in a clear day fills the world with light. The Apostle tells us that God is love, I John 4:8. And therefore seeing he is an infinite Being, it follows that he is an infinite fountain of love. Seeing he is an all-sufficient Being, it follows that he is a full and overflowing and an inexhaustible fountain of love. Seeing he is an unchangeable and eternal Being, he is an unchangeable and eternal source of love. There even in heaven dwells that God from whom every stream of holy love, yea, every drop that is or ever was proceeds.”

In this life we get a taste of what that will be like. If you have ever been touched by the Holy Spirit that is what it is, a small taste of what will be our experience for eternity. So this is what Paul is praying for, that we would be touched powerfully by the Holy Spirit that we can acquire a taste for heaven.