Paradise - Covenant Church

What challenges or fortifies you in trusting the certainty of heaven?

Read 2 Corinthians 5:6-8. Paul expresses the immediate availability of heaven as being “at home with the Lord.” J. C. Ryle wrote of Luke 23, “That word ‘to-day’…tells us that the very moment a believer dies, his soul is in happiness and in safe keeping. His full redemption is not yet come. His perfect bliss will not begin before the resurrection morning. But there is no mysterious delay, no season of suspense, no purgatory, between his death and a state of reward. In the day that he breathes his last he goes to Paradise. In the hour that he departs he is with Christ.” How does this reality and the perspective of Paul shape your understanding of death?

Christopher Watkin writes, “AI can inform us about diseases, but Christ ‘has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’ (Isa. 53:4). AI is a word that can instruct flesh, but it cannot become flesh; it cannot suffer with us; it cannot die for us. And precisely because of this incapacity, AI does us an inestimable service: It shows us the uniqueness, preciousness, and incomparable wonder of a God who became fully human and bore our sufferings to die in our place.” The hope of heaven is being with Jesus, the one who lived and died and lives again for us. In what ways does the intimacy of heaven (being with Jesus) equip you for death?

Death is often denied and dreaded. Scottish poet William Dunbar wrote, “The fear of death distresses me.” How have you experienced others cope with death? What promises from these passages speak peace into the fear of death?

What from this passage and this discussion is something you want to put into practice or be more aware of this week or praise God for?