Living from Heaven

When Jesus taught us to pray, 'Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,' he was handing us the pattern for an entire way of life. A supernatural lifestyle is not meant to be rare or exotic; it is meant to be normal Christian living. Deep within us we crave something that is not fully found here on earth — God himself, and his will. And the will of God finds its complete expression in one place: heaven.

What heaven is like

Heaven is a place of one hundred percent allegiance to the will of God. There, his will is known, and everything freely submits to it. This is not because heaven is a place of control; there was once a rebellion in heaven, which tells us that even there, there is genuine freedom. Heaven is a place of absolute freedom, and yet in that freedom its inhabitants choose God's will above their own. Why? Because they know beyond doubt that God's will is better for them than their own will could ever be.

What we are doing here on earth is practicing the life we will one day live in heaven: taking time to know God's will, and then choosing to do it, even enforcing it where there is rebellion. This is what we have been called to. We were not saved merely to become a pleasant group of nice people, huddling together until we escape to heaven. We were sent — just as God sent Jesus (John 20:21) — to bring the will of God from heaven to earth, and to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).

How Jesus did it

Acts 10:38 tells us how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit, and he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed, for God was with him. Notice that: God was with him. Why did Jesus, of all people, need God to be with him? Because although Jesus is God and never stopped being God, while he was on earth he lived and operated as a man.

Think of the old tale of the prince and the pauper who traded places, the prince going out to live in poverty while still being a prince, all the resources of his royalty set aside. That is a picture of Jesus. He remained fully God, yet he lived as a man, and so he needed the Holy Spirit with him to do what he did. When he walked on water, when he fed the five thousand, when he healed the woman bent over for eighteen years, it was because God was with him, not simply because he was drawing on his own divinity. God was with him so that what is humanly impossible became possible. And that is all the supernatural really is: heaven's will being done on earth.

Then Jesus gave us his name as the badge of that same authority, and said, as you go, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8). Notice the phrase 'as you go' — in the ordinary course of daily life. As you go to work, announce the kingdom. As you go to school, declare it. As you go to the mall, carry it. Being a Christian is not mainly about filling the week with church activities, church on Sunday, house fellowship on Monday, prayer meeting on Tuesday, and back again. All of that can happen while heaven's actual business goes undone. The real question is whether the kingdom is breaking in through your life wherever you go.

Living from heaven, not from earth

So how do we make this our regular lifestyle? Here is the heart of it: you have to live from heaven. You cannot live a kingdom lifestyle unless you actually live from that kingdom. Paul says it plainly in Colossians 3: set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.

You cannot make a difference on earth if you are just like everyone on earth. If you spend all your time chasing what people on earth chase, worrying about what they worry about, fearing what they fear, and reacting exactly as the world reacts, there is no way you will experience a different reality. You can only experience a different reality if a different reality is your perspective. So set your mind on what is happening in heaven, and learn to ask a heaven-shaped question: what has heaven said about this? What is heaven saying about me, about my family, about my finances, about my future?

The way an event looks from earth is often remarkably different from how it reads in heaven. Take an example. On earth, your situation is described as, 'You do not have a job.' In heaven, the same season may be described as, 'Taking time to be prepared for the work of the ministry.' If you know that, and you choose to live from heaven, it will change how you pray. You will not merely cry, 'Lord, I have no job, please give me one.' You will pray, 'Lord, thank you that my job is on the way. During this time of transition, prepare me, and give me every resource I need until it comes.' That is living from heaven; that is declaring that it shall be on earth as it is in heaven.

So instead of sinking into depression and worry, you rejoice and keep learning until the job arrives. Because you will get a job — that much is settled. What is not settled is whether you will be ready for what God has next when it comes. God did not take your job; the enemy did. But God is undoing the enemy's work by preparing you in the waiting.

The trap of asking who is to blame

Jesus lived from heaven constantly. When the man born blind was brought to him, the people immediately looked at it from earth's point of view: 'Who sinned, this man or his parents?' What is it about us that our first instinct is to hunt for someone to blame? Who is to blame that the church is not growing? Who is to blame that my children are struggling, that my marriage is strained, that my finances are in disarray? The problem with that thinking is that it fixes your eyes on earth rather than lifting them to heaven. One writer even called blame-hunting a kind of divination, the art of searching for who is at fault. Jesus refused it. He said, in effect, it does not matter whose fault it is; here is what counts — I am here to destroy the works of the devil, and this too will bring glory to God.

So change the question. Instead of asking who is to blame that the church is small, ask how a church of five people can turn a city upside down, because heaven has declared it. Instead of asking who is to blame that your children are disadvantaged, ask how children like these can rise to the highest places, because heaven has said they and everything God has given you are for signs and wonders to their generation. Instead of asking who is to blame that a marriage is hard, declare that this marriage, with all its challenges, will outlast even seemingly perfect ones, because what God has joined together no one can separate. Let your mind be filled with what heaven has said, not with what your eyes report on earth. This is why we cannot treat Scripture lightly, for the primary place to find the mind of God is in his word.

There was a brother among us facing a terminal illness, and it troubled me that all our attention had fixed on the diagnosis. What is heaven saying? And the word we received was this: every day he is alive is a day of victory and rejoicing. Consider that since his diagnosis, countless people without any such illness have died, and he has not. So for all of us, every single day we are alive is a day to rejoice — diagnosis or no diagnosis. That is what it means to read your life from heaven rather than from earth.

Intimacy is the doorway

How do we come to live this way, from what we do not yet see rather than from what we do? Scripture says that as we look at the unseen, at the mirror that reflects what is happening in heaven, we are transformed from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18, 4:18). And the doorway into that is intimacy with God. Intimacy is friendship and fellowship, a closeness in which we truly see into his heart. When you make heaven your priority, the priorities of heaven become established in your life. God called Abraham his friend (Isaiah 41:8), and it was because Abraham knew God's heart that he had such astonishing authority with God. He lived from there.

The greatest place to live from heaven

Perhaps the most important application of all touches the reason so many of us have not yet seen breakthrough. It has to do with sin, with our mistakes and failures. We look at our lives, at the sickness or the strained finances, and somewhere at the back of the mind we quietly believe we are suffering because of our sins. You can tell it is there by how often prayer begins, 'Lord, if there is anything in me that offends you, forgive me,' and only then do we feel free to ask. That is not living from heaven; that is living from earth, from a consciousness of our own inadequacy, imagining that God relates to us based on our performance.

But here is what is written in heaven about you: all your sins, past, present, and future, paid in full. All the punishment, all the consequence, all the condemnation for every failure — Jesus has paid it all. Believers have sung for generations that our sin, not in part but the whole, has been nailed to the cross, and we bear it no more. Jesus became sin so that God's anger toward our sin fell on him instead of on us. In truth, it was not the nails that killed Jesus; it was our sin, which he had taken as his own. So living from heaven means we can say, God does not put us to death for our sin; rather our sin was put to death in him.

The moment you accept by faith that this payment is for you, it is yours forever. So when you see sin show up in your life, you can say to it: you are trespassing here, you do not belong, and I will not suffer your consequence, for Christ has already paid, and I bear it no more. This is what it means to be born again — to start afresh, no longer held accountable for the sins you have committed. Whatever season you are in — your spiritual life, your finances, a workplace that leaves you drained — stop reading it from earth. Lift your eyes and ask what heaven is saying, receive the finished work of Jesus, and begin to live, right now, from above.