It's OK to get carried away

Have a listen to this song that's been on my mind for over a week now.

"When I Get Carried Away"

I love the play on words in the song - but the message is far deeper than just that. It's something that touched me in a place that needed reaching after my brother's death.

The subject of Heaven doesn't get much press anymore. "Pie in the sky bye and bye" (so heavenly minded we're no earthly good) has been one of the criticisms that the world has had regarding the church. But our hope and our expectation is that we will spend eternity with Jesus. It's a fact that brings us more and more comfort the older we get. Faced with our own mortality, perhaps by a diagnosis, perhaps by the illness or death of someone close to us, we can draw great comfort from the fact of "absent from the body, present with the Lord." Paul said, "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all people."

That doesn't prevent us from enjoying life now. There is no hard and fast rule that we have to go through life as though it's all "our cross to bear" or "a vale of tears." Jesus said that the ones who believed in Him HAVE eternal life, HAVE passed from death to life. That means eternal life - the abundant life Jesus spoke about - begins the moment we ask Him into our hearts as our only hope of deliverance from the penalty of our sin. The more we realize this, the more we will overflow with gratitude to Him for doing for us what we couldn't possibly do for ourselves. We can feast on that; it's the meat and potatoes of the Christian life.

And Heaven .... becomes GRAVY. (For those who like sweets, it's the icing on the cake...) and we will truly let the glory roll when the roll is called in Glory.