Continuing in Scot McKnight's book 'The Heaven Promise,' today is on chapter 12 "The Fifth Promise: Heaven Will Be an Eternal Global Fellowship." Once again, I will simply list the quotes I highlighted in the book:
"Simply seek happiness, and you are not likely to find it. Seek to create and love without regard to your happiness, and you will likely be happy much of the time." "Joy is an uncapturable yet utterly predictable side effect of genuine community." (both these are from M. Scott Peck)
"God has promised us an eternal, global-village fellowship. To be ready for Heaven we will have to be raised into a new kind of embodied life, and the best example of what that life will be like is the resurrected body and life of Jesus. What happened after he rose from the dead? He immediately renewed fellowship with the apostles, he ate and drank with them, and he promised them abundance in the kingdom to come."
"Some of us think our neighbors ought to keep their distance for fear of overstepping boundaries between us. Others think we ought to be more neighborly, walking to and fro between homes. So let's get this straight: forget bad neighbors, remember your best neighbor, and now ramp that up a notch or two. Just when you have wrestled with yourself to the point where you will admit that there is such a thing as really good neighbors with whom you'd want not only to be neighbors but even to go on vacation with, now we are asking you to consider spending eternity with those same people... If the great poet George Eliot can say, 'In every parting [of friends] there is an image of death,' we can answer back that in the resurrection all partings are stopped at the gate, all images of death are erased, and every parting leads to an eternal reunion."
"If we let the Bible shape our view of Heaven, we expect our schedules to be filled with banquets and feasts and parties."
"Heaven will be what I have referred to as a 'fellowship of differents.' All reconciled, all things forgiven, all back to loving relationships of trust and joy, and everyone will have a story to tell - one that all of us will want to hear. Heaven will be a global village where the verandas are filled with evening conversations among eternal neighbors."
"Peter Kreeft has echoed a question that is heard repeatedly: 'Will we recognize our friends in Heaven?' His answer is brilliant: 'In fact, ONLY in heaven will we really know our friends, from within.'"
"Heaven will be all of us attending to God while knowing one another in an endless fellowship of deep joy."
"Many of our celebratory meals, however, are cooked with a guilty conscience. We know there are people in poverty, people who are starving and will die from lack of nutrition. We know that people eat a handful of rice and drink dirty water each day, that parents weep at night because they can't buy food for their children, that people have barely enough. Meanwhile, we sit in comfortable homes with an abundance of food and wine and beer and juices. In Heaven, there will be no hesitation. Everyone will be at the table, and everyone will have his fill, and everyone will experience the bounty of God's provision."
