The Death of My Son Awakened Me to the Reality of Heaven
Citizens of Heaven
The beginning of this book really starts with the death of my son. Back on November 10th, 2013, my oldest child, Cam, talked about wanting to go see Jesus, and he asked all kinds of questions like, “Can we get in the car and go visit with Jesus?” And we told him that we wouldn’t see Jesus until we were in heaven. And so then he started to ask a bunch of questions about heaven. The conversation ultimately ended with him professing faith in Christ and acknowledging that Christ had died for his sins and that Christ was his Savior.
And so he then mysteriously and without explanation died that night. My child now was living in heaven. He was a three-year-old who had a profession of faith, and he was with the Lord above. And so my heart and my mind were with my child. And he lived in the full glory of God in heaven.
Heavenward
Cameron Cole
Pastor Cameron Cole shares his personal story of grief, as well as the apostle Paul’s theology of heaven in Scripture, to show how heavenly mindedness transforms the daily lives of Christians.
When I went to college at Wake Forest, my mom had previously never had any interest in Wake Forest. But now that her precious baby boy was at Wake Forest, she had the sweatshirt, she had the bumper sticker on the car, she checked the website, and she’d watch all the Wake Forest sports, because that’s where her child was. And so she now was interested in it, and it was on her mind.
Well, that was true for me with heaven, but even more so. And so I just had this new extremely magnified sense of heavenly mindedness that really was transforming my life in a positive way. Even though I was grieving, this heavenly mindedness was giving me greater perspective. It was refining me. It was motivating me for things of the Lord.
But I felt a little crazy because I was thinking about heaven so much, and I didn’t feel like anyone around me was. And then I like to say that I made a friend, and my friend was the apostle Paul. I started reading Paul’s letters and started to see how Paul integrates things of eternity into every aspect of the Christian life. Not just, “This is what happens when you die,” but, “This is why you repent from sin, this is why you share the gospel, this is why we have hope, and this is why we’re content.” It was all heavenly realities.
When we are saved, we now live in the heavenly realm. We are now citizens of heaven.
I don’t think that the heavenly mindedness that I experienced after my son’s death would’ve been sustained if I hadn’t started to study Paul’s theology of heaven and started to realize that any person should be heavenly minded and have a heavenward life just based on the basic fundamentals of our own salvation.
When we are saved, we now live in the heavenly realm. We are now citizens of heaven. And so many of the realities of heaven, like the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, are given to us here and now.
And so with that being said, I was so blessed by this heavenly mindedness that came out of my son’s death, and I was also so blessed and sustained by the biblical realities about heaven that I just wanted to share that with other people. I wanted other people to have the same kind of comfort and hope and motivation and perspective that I had and that the Lord had given to me out of that tragedy and through his word.
Cameron Cole is the author of Heavenward: How Eternity Can Change Your Life on Earth.
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