Heaven is Here and Now

I am reading the book Velvet Elvis and it is radically changing my view on Christianity and how I view God. God is showing me truth that is relevent to me today. It puts awe inside of me when I think about my savior and what he has done for me. I want to share a little from the book. I hope everyone reads this book.

So this reality, this forgiveness, this reconciliation, is true for everybody. Paul insisted that when Jesus died on the cross, he was reconciling all things in heaven and on earth to God. All things everywhere. This reality then isn't something we make true about ourselves by doing something. It is already true. Our choice is to live in this new reality or cling to a reality of our own making
God is retelling each of our stories in Jesus. All the bad parts and the ugly parts and the parts we want to pretend never happened are redeemed. They seemed pointless and they were painful at the time, but God retells our story and they become the moments when God's grace is most on display. We find ourselves asking, am i really forgiven of that? The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true. Our choice becomes this, We can trust his retelling of the story, or we can trust our telling of our story. It is a choice we make every day about the reality we are going to live in
And this reality extends beyond this life
Heaven is full of forgiven people
Hell is full of forgiven people
Heaven is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for
Hell is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for
The difference is how we chose to live, which story we choose to live in which version of reality we trust. Ours or God's
When we chose God's version of who we are, we are living as God made us to live. We are living in the flow of how we are going to live forever. This is the life of heaven, here and now. As we life this life in harmony with God's intentions ofr us, the life of heaven becomes more and more present in our lives. Heaven comes to Earth. That is why Jesus teaches his disciples to pray "May your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven". There is this place, this realm, heaven where things are as God desires them to be. As we live this way, heaven comes here. To this place, this world, the one we are living in.
WOW! This changes how I live my life. It is how we live now that determines how we will live in eternity. It is just a continuation. That is amazing. That really challenged me to realize that I am forgiven, and that I can have an identity in Christ and that heaven can be lived here on earth because God made me a new creation. The old is gone and the new has come.