While believers on earth are right to focus on serving in local churches to guard and proclaim the gospel and carry that good news to the ends of the earth, we are helped in that ongoing, though temporal, task by focusing on what will become of the church in heaven. Indeed, we are most effective in our work on earth when we keep heaven in view for there the church will be perfect and with God, for God is love (1 Jn 4:8).

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. –C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Jonathan Edwards‘s fifteenth and final sermon on 1 Corinthians 13 is often overlooked, but is remarkable and evergreen. Compilers of his works note that “Heaven Is A World of Love” rivals “Sinners In A Hand of Angry God” as a second masterpiece in imagery, poetry, and rhetoric.[1]

I recently reread this masterpiece slowly over the course of several months. Part of this is because I do not read fast, but mostly because Edwards is often read best at slower rate.

I first learned I benefited from reading Edwards this way while in college when I was given this copy of his “The End for Which God Created the World,” and read it one summer, paragraph by paragraph, each morning before I went to work.

Reading Edwards this way, at first, is hard. It is like a novice visiting to the Smithsonian and completing a tour of each gallery in record time while the experts have barely left one room, or even one painting. When you slow-read Edwards, you have time to see the masterpiece take shape–the poetry and the brilliance that is there but seen only after a long gaze. This time spent forges a bond with the work that eventually brings a smile, or tears, but always joy.

This is why I have never quite understood the maxim that New England theologians were “so heavenly minded that they were of no earthly good.” Quite the opposite, Edwards shows that extended meditation on heaven can provide much stability and sanity to those on earth for good living.

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