‘Heavenly’

W. P. Turpin

We often hear the expression ‘heavenly’. Well, no person can be ‘heavenly’ unless he lives in heaven. The fact is, we all of us have too much the tendency to put off heaven until we die. We think of it as the place where God is, and where Christ is, and it is the resource for us when we leave this world, when we leave our bodies behind us. When we cannot live any longer here, we go to heaven. Or, it may be, if you advance a little upon that, when a person has everything blighted and ruined down here, and there is not a single thing left, then he turns to heaven. It is like a person taking refuge from the storm, and when the storm is over coming out again to enjoy the things around. Is that the case with you and me, beloved friends? That is the natural tendency and feeling of our hearts. We have very poorly, if at all, in our souls the thought of continuously abiding in that wonderful place where God is free to express Himself in all the infinite fulness of His love to us. He does not express Himself to us here. He gives us His care, His sympathy, His help, His cheer, His solace; He takes us by the hand, and leads us along the way, every step of the journey; but He does not express Himself to us here. He does there — that is the difference. 

That is what I feel that we want, every one of us, in these days: a more habitual dwelling in the house of the Lord. You may depend upon it: we should be a different kind of people altogether if we dwelt there. It is not visiting there; it is not running there for shelter out of the storm — but I will tell you what it is: it is knowing it as home, with all the joys of home. Do you know what they are? Home! It is not being driven there through sheer necessity, but it is the attractiveness of it that draws us there. What do you know of the attractions of that blessed one who is up there? You see, it is not a doctrine, nor a theory, but it is a divine, living, adorable, blessed, transcendent person for our affections. It is a person who has an attractiveness peculiar to Himself, and who throws this attractiveness, and blessedness and beauty connected with Himself, around the affections of my heart. It is not, as I said, that I am driven by mere necessity from all the things that are round about me here, but I am attracted by the beauties and blessedness and glories of that scene where Christ is everything to God, and where God delights to express Himself in all His fulness. There is the spot I long more to dwell in, to live in, to abide in; that is the place I desire to know as my home.

Now I see all this in its perfection in Christ as a man. We get it in that beautiful passage, ‘No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man …’ — who was in heaven? No: ‘which is in heaven’ (John 3:13). Take Him as a man (He was the mighty God, the creator and preserver of all things as well, of course), as the perfect man, He who walked that magnificent, blessed, shining pathway that we have tracked out for us in the gospels, and which, by the Holy Ghost, we can read and think over, and delight in. Was it not this continuous, blessed, wonderful communion and intercourse with all that belonged to that blessed place from whence He came that so marked His way? As He said, ‘I know whence I came, and whither I go’ (John 8:14). There was all that blessed distinctiveness and separateness about His walk here. Is there in our measure that about us? In walking along every day, are we like people who know whence we come and whither we go? Is that the thing which day by day is telling itself out in your business, in your home, in your intercourse one with another and in your families? What I am speaking of is a practical thing. It goes down into the most minute circumstances of our daily life. 

What sort of people we should be if there were that distinctiveness and divine power about us, and divine life, and divine satisfaction and rest!

W T Turpin[1]

[1] From Light for the Pilgrim Path.

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From: Truth and Testimony, 2022