And thus you will surely go to heaven. For heaven
will begin on earth, and last on after this earth, and all that binds
you to this earth, has vanished in the grave.
Heaven will begin on earth, I say. When St. Paul told these very
Ephesians to whom my text was addressed, that God had made them sit,
even then, in heavenly places with Christ Jesus, he did not mean in
any wise--what they would have known was not true--that their bodies
had been miraculously lifted up above the earth, above the clouds, or
elsewhere: no, for he had told them before, in the first chapter,
what he meant by heavenly places. God their Father, he says, had
blessed them with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places, in
Christ, in that He had chosen them in Christ before the foundation of
the world--and for what end? For the very end which I have been
preaching to you. 'That they should be holy, and without blame
before God, in Love.' That was heaven. If they were that,--holy,
blameless, loving, they were in heavenly places already,--in that
moral and spiritual heaven in which God abides for ever. They were
with God, and with all who are like God, as it is written, 'He that
dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.'
My dear friends, this is the heaven for which we are all to strive--a
heaven of goodness, wherein God dwells.
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