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Set Your Mind on Things Above

John Owen is well known for his thoughts on overcoming temptation and communion with God. He was a precise observant of the soul of man and how we are to live before God in upright relationship. The following passage from Owen reminds me of Colossians 3:1-3, a passage that we would do well to meditate on. It states, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” Though we must certainly live in the present, our minds and hearts should be pressing toward that far country we will obtain one day. Specifically, our minds should be consumed with the God of heaven, not merely the pleasures of that place in a existential sense. To paraphrase John Piper on this matter, he has asked audiences many times, if you could have all your family and friends in heaven, the best food and drink, the greatest entertainment, and all the pleasures one could think of, and Jesus wasn’t there, would that be okay with you? My prayer is that increasingly, with each day that passes, our answer would be a resounding no, and Owen makes a similar claim in this passage.

We may hereby examine both our own notions of the state of glory and our preparations for it, and whether we are in any measure “made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light.” Various are the thoughts of men about the future state,-the things which are not seen, which are eternal. Some rise no higher but unto hopes of escaping hell, or everlasting miseries, when they die. Yet the heathen had their Elysian fields, and Mohammed his sensual paradise. Others have apprehensions of I know not what glistening glory, that will please and satisfy them, they know not how, when they can be here no longer. But this state is quite of another nature, and the blessedness of it is spiritual and intellectual. Take an instance in one of the things before laid down. The glory of heaven consists in the full manifestation of divine wisdom, goodness, grace, holiness, – of all the properties of the nature of God in Christ. In the clear perception and constant contemplation hereof consists no small part of eternal blessedness. What, then, are our present thoughts of these things? What joy, what satisfaction have we in the sight of them, which we have by faith through divine revelation? What is our desire to come unto the perfect comprehension of them? How do we like this heaven? What do we find in ourselves that will be eternally satisfied hereby? According as our desires are after them, such and no other are our desires of the true heaven, – of the residence of blessedness and glory. Neither will God bring us unto heaven whether we will or no. If, through the ignorance and darkness of our minds, – if, through the earthliness and sensuality of our affections, – if, through a fulness of the world, and the occasions of it, – if, by the love of life and our present enjoyments, we are strangers unto these things, we are not conversant about them, we long not after them, – we are not in the way towards their enjoyment. The present satisfaction we receive in them by faith, is the best evidence we have of an indefeasible interest in them. How foolish is it to lose the first-fruits of these things in our own souls, – those entrances into blessedness which the contemplation of them through faith would open unto us, – and hazard our everlasting enjoyment of them by an eager pursuit of an interest in perishing things here below! This, this is that which ruins the souls of most, and keeps the faith of many at so low an ebb, that it is hard to discover any genuine working of it.

Jeremy Kimble (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Cedarville University. He is an editor for Credo Magazine as well as the author of That His Spirit May Be Saved: Church Discipline as a Means to Repentance and Perseverance and numerous book reviews. He is married to Rachel and has two children, Hannah and Jonathan.

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