Light of the World Today
Part Three of Three: Living Now in the Light
Key Scripture: Colossians 3:1–2 "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."
There is a particular kind of person you occasionally meet who seems to carry a quietness about them that the busyness of the world cannot quite touch. They are not detached from life. They love well, they work hard, they feel things deeply. But there is something anchored in them that does not move when everything around them shakes. More often than not, when you get to know that person, you find that they have a very clear sense of where they are going. They have thought seriously about eternity, and it has changed the way they live in the present.
This is what Part Three is about. Not just that Heaven is real, and not just that the road matters, but what it means to live today as someone who genuinely believes both of those things.
The Problem with Forgetting
The honest truth is that most Christians believe in Heaven the way they believe in a country they have never visited. They know it exists. They intend to go there one day. But it does not shape their daily decisions, their priorities, their relationships, or the way they spend their time and money. Heaven is filed away under future rather than lived as present reality.
Paul saw this as one of the great dangers facing the early church. Writing to believers in Philippi from a prison cell, he warned them with tears about people who had professed faith but whose minds were fixed entirely on earthly things. He called it a kind of destruction in slow motion. And then, in contrast, he wrote these words: "But our citizenship is in Heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ" (Philippians 3:20).
Citizenship is not a vague aspiration. It is a legal identity. It shapes where your allegiance lies, what laws govern your conduct, and where you ultimately belong. Paul is saying that the believer's deepest identity is not found in any nation, career, social status, or family name. It is found in a city that is coming, and in a King who is returning.
When you forget that, you start making decisions as though this life is all there is. You start protecting things that were never meant to be permanent. You start grieving losses as though nothing good lies beyond them. And you start living small.
A Life Remade by the Reality of Heaven
In the 19th century, a man named Edward Payson lay dying in his bed after years of ministry and considerable suffering. As his body failed him, those around him expected to find a man in anguish. Instead, they found a man in a state of extraordinary peace, almost luminous with joy. He wrote to his sister in his final weeks describing the experience of approaching Heaven not as dread but as homecoming. He said he felt like a vessel being filled to the brim, and that the nearer he came to eternity the more real it became, far more real than the room around him.
Payson was not unusual in this among those who had genuinely fixed their minds on Heaven. What is striking is what that certainty produced in him during his years of health and ministry. He was known as a man of unusual compassion, extraordinary generosity, and a complete inability to be impressed by earthly status or wealth. He spent himself freely because he knew something better was coming and so the things of this world had lost their grip on him.
This is exactly what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 4:17–18. He writes that the light and momentary troubles of this life are producing for us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all, as we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen. The seen is temporary. The unseen is eternal. A person who genuinely believes that will live differently from one who does not.
What Changes When Heaven Becomes Real to You
Several things begin to shift when you stop treating Heaven as a distant idea and start treating it as your actual destination.
The first is that suffering loses its power to destroy you. It does not stop hurting. But it stops having the final word. Richard Sigmund, whose account of his time in Heaven we touched on in Part One, said that when he returned to his body after eight hours of clinical death he looked back on every painful experience of his life and found that in the light of what he had seen, not one of them felt wasted or meaningless. Every sorrow had been held within something larger than itself. Paul knew this. Job knew this. And every believer who has ever walked through deep darkness while keeping their eyes on what lies ahead has discovered it too.
The second thing that changes is the way you treat other people. If Heaven is real and the road to it matters, then every person you encounter is either someone who is headed there or someone who is not. That changes everything about how you see them. The difficult colleague, the estranged family member, the stranger on the street, they are eternal souls, and how they spend eternity is of infinitely greater consequence than how they spend this Tuesday. A heavenly mindset produces an outward love, not an inward comfort.
The third thing that changes is your relationship with material things. Jesus said in Matthew 6:19–21 to stop storing up treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in. Instead, store up treasure in Heaven, because where your treasure is, that is where your heart will be also. This is not an argument against responsibility or saving for the future. It is an argument against the slow idolatry of accumulating things as though they are the point of your existence. When Heaven is real to you, your hands open more freely, your wallet follows your heart more honestly, and generosity starts to feel less like sacrifice and more like wisdom.
The Urgency We Cannot Afford to Lose
There is one final thing that living in the light of eternity produces, and it may be the most important of all. It produces urgency about the people around us who do not yet know the way.
In Part Two we met Howard Storm, a man who encountered both the darkness and the rescue. His life was transformed by that encounter, and he spent his remaining working years telling anyone who would listen that the stakes are real, the alternative is real, and the name of Jesus is the name that saves. He did not do this out of fear or religious duty. He did it because when you have seen what he saw, staying silent feels like a form of cruelty.
The same urgency runs through Scripture from beginning to end. Jesus told His disciples in John 9:4 that we must work the works of Him who sent Him while it is day, because night is coming when no one can work. The day is this life. The night is death. And the window between the two, for every person we know and love, is shorter than any of us knows.
We are not called to be aggressive or graceless in how we share our faith. But we are called to share it. We are called to be the kind of people whose lives make others curious about what we know and where we are going. We are called, as Peter wrote, to be ready always to give an answer to everyone who asks us for the reason for the hope that is in us, and to do it with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15).
If Heaven is as real as Jesus said, if it is as beautiful as the witnesses who glimpsed it testified, and if the road there is as clear as the gospel declares, then the most loving thing you can do for any person in your life is to make sure they know about it.
Conclusion
We began this series standing at a gate. We have spent three devotions looking at what lies beyond it, at the road that leads there, and now at what it means to live in the light of that destination.
Heaven is not a comfort for the dying. It is a compass for the living. It is the reality that straightens your priorities, softens your grip on temporary things, deepens your love for people, and gives you a courage that this world cannot produce on its own because it comes from knowing that this world is not the end of the story.
You were not made for this age alone. You were made for eternity. And Jesus Christ, who prepared the place, who opened the gate, who is the way, has done everything necessary to ensure that you can get there. The question that remains is simply this: are you living like it?
Do not miss Heaven. And do not let the people you love miss it either.