The Relationships of Heaven: Loving Yourself - GraceLife Church of Pineville

Introduction

Delight, happiness, bliss, perfection—all of these are words that would aptly describe the human expectation of Heaven, or life in eternity.

We conceive of Heaven as the greatest possible existence. We hope that Heaven will live up to those expectations in our imagination of what our heavenly existence will be like.

What we imagine that great existence will be like is built upon our earthbound experiences, either in those instances in which we’ve gotten a taste of human pleasure, or in those instances in which disappointments have created in us this longing for something different, something greater.

I’ve put this hypothesis before you in various forms: You can think of the afterlife in terms of the Great Commandment.

You can think of the afterlife in terms of the Great Commandment.

But let me linger on this idea of the Great Commandment—and remind you of our purpose with each sermon, each worship service.

A Personal Reminder

We grow in our knowledge of the Lord, and we do that weekly, monthly, and yearly, as long as the Lord allows. There comes a point in the Christian’s journey in which a reference to something like the Great Command(ment) is something you should know. You should hear that term (“Great Command”), be able to quote it, and know whether it’s found in the Old Testament, the New Testament, or both Testaments. You should also know why it is considered the greatest.

However, I know I’m not preaching at a Bible college or to seminary students. Not everyone will know that information. As the pastor, I do my best to speak at multiple levels: to those desiring “deeper” spiritual insight and to those who are perhaps being introduced to the faith for the first time, or reintroduced to it. That means, at times, I will reference things that will be familiar to some—perhaps things you’ve known for years—and that’s okay; in fact, it’s a blessing and a privilege. Look at the labor it took the apostle Paul to establish communities grounded in the faith! (Or ask anyone even today who ministers in other countries or communities where these things aren’t already known.)

Let me add, I don’t expect spiritual growth to always mean numerical growth. But I would expect that if you encounter those who don’t know the Lord, you will introduce them to the Lord at some point, and in that process, introduce them to the fellowship where you gather to worship the Lord. And when they join that fellowship, I would hope it’s a fellowship (like GraceLife) of pursuing God through His Word. That’s not just a theological value but a matter of practice. Our practice at GraceLife is this: We regularly engage and eagerly receive the Scriptures.

So when I reference the Great Commandment, I want you to know where to turn in your copy of Scripture to see it; turn there with a measure of purpose and even with a measure of gratitude for having your own individual copy of the Scriptures. For the bold, turn there with enthusiasm! Parents, it’s a good thing to let your children see you turning the (physical) pages of Scripture—they see you on your phone all the time. That being said, if you only have your phone with you, it’s okay to pull up your Bible app and turn it to Matthew 22.

Every Sunday, we participate in this practice of turning the pages of Scripture. You can do so knowing someone is seeing this passage for the first time, someone is visiting the passage like an old friend, someone is about to be convicted by it, someone is confused by it, and someone will be courted by it.

I was given the opportunity five years ago to shepherd GraceLife Church according to this book. But it was decades before that when I began to hear the pages of Scripture calling. Every Sunday, we participate in that sacred calling.

The Endurance & Fulfillment of the Greatest Commandment

Matthew 22:33–40 says this:

When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at His teaching.

But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

What I’m proposing again is that Heaven will be the greatest experience because it will be the perfect, perpetual fulfillment of this Great Command. By contrast, Hell will be the worst experience, because it will be the perpetual unfulfillment of the Great Command. Heaven is where and when you and everyone around you will always love God, always love self, and always love each other. Hell is where no one loves God, no one loves themselves, and no one loves others—in other words, Hell is where and when everyone hates God, hates themselves, and hates others.

Heaven will be the greatest experience because it will be the perfect, perpetual fulfillment of this Great Command.

That hypothesis is partly built on this idea: that which is good in this life carries over to the next life in some way. As I said in a previous sermon, “The good in this life will find its place in some form in the next, whether that’s through expansion or renewal or freedom or giving itself over to that better thing to which it has always pointed.”

In addition, one thing we know for sure that carries over into the next life is the Word of the Lord. “The Word of the Lord endures forever” (1 Peter 1:25).

So I’m proposing that the Greatest Commandment of the Lord will endure as something great from this life, and it will find its perfect fulfillment in the next life.

Additionally, as the Scripture teaches, the fulfillment of this command leads to life. We find that truth in the Gospel of Luke, which also contains Jesus’s teaching on the Greatest Command:

And a lawyer stood up and put Him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And He said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.” (Luke 10:25–28)

So I’m proposing that the Great Command that leads to eternal life should be thought of as enduring into eternity, and its perfect fulfillment will be the essence of eternal life. In fulfilling this command in the next life, you will be united to God; you’ll be united to the activity of God and to the life of God.

The Bigger Picture

Before continuing, let me give you the framework of where we are in our larger sermon series on the oracles of God.¹

Of the six elementary principles of the oracles of God found in Hebrews 5:12–6:2, we’re now on the sixth and final principle, eternal judgment. Under that umbrella, we’ve been talking about Heaven—the positive eternal judgment—for the past four sermons. First we talked about the nature of Heaven—what we mean by the term, and ways in which Heaven will be perfect. Then we talked about the activity of Heaven, since a natural question following “What will Heaven be like?” is “What will we do there?”

Now, we’re in our second sermon of talking about the relationships of Heaven, structured around the Great Commandments. We have discussed loving God, we’re currently discussing loving oneself, and next we’ll discuss loving others.

The Great Problem

“You,” or the self, is highly featured in this Great Command. There’s a silliness in some sense to even say that there always has to be some self, some you, or else there’s no command to be given. Obviously, the core of the command of Jesus is to love God. Any other act of obedience, no matter what it is, is a footnote to this command to love God.

So the focus is God, but look at how the elements of the self come out: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your might. The self-love portion of the command isn’t explicit, but it’s expected. In the same way that you look out for your self interests, Jesus says (to paraphrase), consider your neighbor as a fellow image-bearer of God, and love thy neighbor.

Loving God is personal. Loving yourself is the precursor to loving your neighbor.

And here is where we see the Great Problem in the Great Command. The Great Problem is the self. It’s you. It’s the self that is the problem with the way in which we love.

If you thought the problem was someone else, sorry! But here’s what our glorified hope looks like: Your ability to love will be perfect in eternity.

The Great Problem is the self. … [But] our glorified hope looks like: Your ability to love will be perfect in eternity.

Have you ever observed in someone else what you deem to be a great ability to love, to love themselves and love others, and then you thought for yourself, “Yep, never going to happen like that for me”? In eternity, you will not long for someone else’s capacity to love. You will not be disappointed in your capacity to love in this life.

In eternity, you will not long for someone else’s capacity to love.

In this life, we may say:

I wish I could love God like _________. (Fill in the blank the name of someone who seems to love God so well, so easily, with genuine desire.)

I wish I could love myself like _________. (Fill in the blank with someone whose confidence you wish you had—someone who doesn’t seem to struggle with shame, whose outward expression of their faith is such that they seem to have no reason to be embarrassed about their lives.)

I wish I could love others like _________. (How genuine their love for others seems! How real, and how free of pretense! That person seems so unselfish, so generous.)

You’ll love perfectly—on all three of these levels (God, self, others)—in the next life.

You’ll love perfectly—on all three of these levels (God, self, others)—in the next life.

When it comes to talking about the relationships of Heaven, your relationship to God and your relationship to others have a more tangible expression than this concept of your relationship to yourself. But as we’ve established, both of those relationships (relationship to God and relationship to others) are affected by your state of being. And so an aspect of this promise of glory that we should hope in is this: In Heaven, you’ll have a great hope toward the you that exists. You will love that you.

So, now, you have a reason to anchor your hope in Christ partly in how He will change you, in how He will glorify you. You will look forward to that you that will exist in heaven.

“Will I Still Be Me?”

There are a lot of questions about Heaven. One odd but popular one that I’ve heard often fits into this idea of loving the self. It’s a question whose answer I don’t fully understand:

Will I still be me in Heaven?

The truth is, it’s not so much a bad question as a nonsense question. Will circles still be round in heaven? Yes, that’s just what circles are. This question is a nonsense question in the sense that you can’t be someone else, because that’s not how being works.

You can’t be someone else, because that’s not how being works.

If you lost your identity, then this whole concept of eternal judgment becomes really strange. If you lose your identity, then “just do anything!” in this life seems like reasonable advice because you won’t be around later to care.

So, the answer is yes, you will be you in the next life.

But let’s consider why this question is asked. It’s probably asked in contrast to the teachings of other religions that do teach the loss of identity in some respect. This is one reason why the Christian teaching about the resurrection from the dead is so huge, unique, and glorious. It’s an event that gives value to the individual, to identity.

Consider, for example, the Buddhist concept of just ceasing to be, or the Hindu concept of the individual being absorbed into a great reality (whatever that is). We might think, “Well, that’s silly.” But the ideas of other religions are never completely silly. There’s usually some truth there, and those who possess the truth, who have the true Scriptures, can begin to see how elements of what’s true are there—but are perverted and twisted.

We see elements of both of these concepts in Christianity. The idea of joining to a greater identity is in Christianity, as is the concept of losing one’s identity. There is teaching about putting on the “new self” and becoming a “new creation” (see Ephesians 4:24; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Colossians 3:10.) And doesn’t the Bible also teach that we are going to partake of the divine nature? (See 2 Peter 1:4.)

We’re also banking on the fact that we’re going to be changed. But beings have the ability to undergo change without having their identity, their essence, their whatness altered. You’re changing even right now as you read/listen! And yet you’re still you.

Beings have the ability to undergo change without having their identity … altered.

Take the example of the growth of children. You as an infant were quite different than you are today. You are still you, though.

Let’s go to a verse we’ve often turned to in this eternal judgment sermon series—1 John 3:2—and let’s consider it in a new light:

Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.

The verse contains an implied question: What will we become? What will we be in eternity? It’s not to say that we’re going to be something other than human. We won’t become angels. That’s settling for a lesser existence.² You won’t become someone else either. We’ll be children of God. Children grow into something, don’t they? If we’re children of God, what will we grow up to be?

The text does not say that “it has not appeared as yet what we will get in the next life” or “what we will do,” even though both of those things (the stuff we get, the things we’ll do, for all eternity) are fun to think about. Instead, it says “it has not appeared as yet what we will be.” The capacity to enjoy stuff and do stuff is all about the capacity of the one enjoying the stuff. The text says, in essence, “I wonder who we will be!”

In that unknown, there’s great comfort.

Let’s ground ourselves again in the Great Command. God says we’re to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.” What does it mean to love God with all my heart, with my soul, my might? I think the general sense is probably more easily understood than the specific sense. We know that it means to love God completely, to love Him with the entirety of your being: who you are, what you do, what you think, what you feel.

I like this commentator’s summary of how the Great Command was originally given to Israel: “Israel must love God with all its essence and expression.”³ When you try to point out the specifics of the Great Command, its terms have a synonymous but nuanced range of meaning depending on the time of writing. Terms like heart and soul and strength are almost interchangeable (in fact, if you shift between Bible translations you’ll see they are). So we begin to give synonyms like mind, will, emotion, spirit, and intellect. It can be hard to point to exactly what those things mean. But I find excitement in that mystery, because, truth be told, even if I say, “Well, the soul points to that immaterial aspect of human existence,” I still don’t fully understand what that means. I’m a mystery.

The composition of human nature is a theological and philosophical argument debated through the ages. And as you ponder that mystery, you can rejoice in this: Heaven is the place where you will finally know who you are. You will understand yourself. You will meet your designer and deliverer. You will meet the One who made you, and you’ll meet the One who will remake you into that which you were meant to be in the perfection of Jesus. He will disclose Himself to us. In this disclosure, you will know who He is, and you will know who you are.

Heaven is the place where you will finally know who you are.

Consider the theme that we saw in studying the resurrection from the dead: there’s a continuity and a discontinuity between this life and our eternal lives.⁴ You will be you in eternity, but you’ll be the best you. And that means it will be a you that was known all along and a you that no one has ever seen. You’ll be a being capable of perfect love, including love of yourself, and perfect knowledge of yourself.

An Objection: What About Memories (Especially Bad Ones)?

Here’s an objection, though. If I have perfect knowledge of myself in the next life, surely that includes knowledge of the things I’ve done or the things done to me, and then the things that I did because of the things done to me, and all the guilt and regret about what could have been, who I could have been, who I should have been. How will these things, perfect love and knowledge, coexist?

Look at Isaiah 65:

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;
And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create;
For behold, I create Jerusalem for rejoicing
And her people for gladness. (vv. 17–18)

Now, wait a minute; Isaiah says that our memories will be gone—“the former things will not be remembered.” How can I be me if I don’t have my memories?

The easiest answer to that objection is to say that the text is not referring to a complete memory wipe but to the troubles mentioned in verse 16: “Because he who is blessed in the earth will be blessed by the God of truth; and he who swears in the earth will swear by the God of truth; because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they are hidden from My sight!” (emphasis mine). This easier interpretation certainly could be correct.

Some will argue that Isaiah 65:17 is talking about more than that, though. But even if the text is saying that the former heavens and earth won’t be remembered and won’t come to mind, I don’t think it’s the idea of erasing the memory so much as, to borrow a phrase, the “expulsive power of a new affection.”⁵ In other words, there will be something so great that it transcends other things and causes you to be wholeheartedly given to that moment. And if things are so great in the next life that the things of the past life just don’t come to mind, that will be okay.

Imagine that you have a regular dinner appointment with a friend, and you enjoyed yourself at this most recent dinner, but in that dinner, you never thought of the past dinner. Would the dinner be ruined now because you never mentioned the previous dinner you had before? Or would you enjoy the moment?

In Heaven, there will be no “I just wish I had …” thoughts. You will not be haunted by things you wish you had done. There will be no haunting of the past for bad memories because either:

Those bad memories will be gone from mind (erased).
They will undergo their own redemption process, and you’ll be able to recall them, but you will behold them in such a way that you will see nothing but the redemption and reward that Christ wrought.
Or maybe you will be able to remember if you so choose, but you’ll be able to see all of those bad things in light of Christ’s redemption.

I personally don’t think that the idea of complete memory erasure is biblical because I think the memorial foundations and walls of Revelation 21 give some hint that we will remember. I don’t think it’ll be the case that we’ll walk by and wonder, “Whose names are those on those walls, gates, foundations? Who are these people? What’s an apostle? What do you mean, ‘Israel’?” I don’t think you’ll walk around Heaven with your reward saying, “Anyone know why I have this?!”

Some things, it would seem, must remain. We won’t walk around asking, “Does anyone know why Jesus has these marks in His hands?”

In Heaven, there will be no “I just wish I had …” thoughts. You will not be haunted by things you wish you had done.

WE Will Behold Him

So if I’m changed and if I’m still me, will I get to retain any of my uniqueness? You must remember that Christ died to redeem you, not to remove you. We’re not deists. We don’t believe in a Creator God who set things in motion and then just kind of disappeared into the background.

Christ died to redeem you, not to remove you.

Check out Psalm 139 for a clue about whether we’ll retain our uniqueness, and for the character of our Redeemer and what He thinks of us:

For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them. (Psalm 139:13–16)

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis wrote the following:

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. … For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you, you, the individual …. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s.⁶

That beholding of Him will change you. It will change: your heart, your soul, your mind, your strength, your intellect, your will, your emotions, your spirit, your very self. (Use whichever of those terms helps you most to understand!)

If you want to do an interesting Bible study, explore those concepts, those ideas, in the Scripture and see how it is that you now fall short in those areas. (We don’t need the Scriptures to know how we fall short, but I encourage you to find it in the Scriptures, because the Scriptures will also bring alongside encouragement.) Then consider how great it will be to have those failures forever erased, forever prevented from occurring again. What will it be like to be the perfect expression of yourself?

If you were to do a quick survey of the Scripture, it would tell you this about our current human existence:

Our hearts, minds, or souls are foolish, darkened, lustful, stubborn, unrepentant, hardened, secretive, wandering, deceived, jealous, ambitious, greedy, and hostile.
Our hearts, minds, and souls are in need of comfort, of encouragement, and of being established.

The apostle Paul declared himself to be a victim of war. He exclaimed, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free?” (Romans 7:24). We will live in the freedom of eternity. And there you will finally be free to love, and you will love what you do, you will love what and how you think, you will love the way in which your desire doesn’t betray you or embarrass you, and you will love who you are.

Hold on to that hope for the future. But it would be a mistake to tell you, “Just wait ’til that happens.” The good news and great mystery of the gospel is that God has already “seated us with Him … in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6). That’s an identity that you have now that you should embrace.

You have the power to live out your eternal calling even now because you are empowered and indwelled by the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead.⁷

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