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The View from Heaven


            There’s something very important that we need to remember about God, according to the prayer Jesus taught us to pray.  We need to remember where He is—He is in heaven. 
            When we pray to God our prayers will fare better if we orient ourselves to God’s perspective.  His viewpoint is from heaven.  Ours is limited to earth.  We have gravity, landfills, wars, rape (dare I go on?) to block our view.  He sees all of that and more, but seeing it does not block His view of what is possible.  He is not limited by gravity, landfills, wars, etc. 
            When we pray to our God Who is in heaven, we are not praying to a god who is detached from earthly limitations.  He is well aware of the painful realities that He never wanted for us.  They break His heart more than ours because they never were a part of His loving, good plan from the beginning—yet when these painful realities became a part of the life He gave us, He gave us the remedy in His Son, Jesus Christ. 
            Our God is in heaven.  Jesus isn’t asking us to see God as separate from us as much as He wants us to see that we do not have the same perspective on our lives as He has. 
            Try to open your heart to the God to whom Jesus wants you to learn how to pray.  Close your eyes right now.  Take a deep breath, then pray these words:  Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name.  Stop there.  Imagine God, your Father, in heaven; does it prompt you to want to hallow His name?  Rather than feeling pity for yourself and whatever you are going through, do you find that it helps put your life in perspective?
            Now begin to imagine the expanse of heaven and earth.  We have no idea where heaven is or what it is like.  It is one of those realities that we believe is real and we know is a part of our future—but it is too amazing to be spoken about in any great detail.  Although Paul went there, he couldn’t describe it in human language (2 Corinthians 12:2-4 (ESV): I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.)  When John the disciple wrote what he was able to put into words about heaven and the future events, we got the book of Revelation, which can never be fully fathomed.
            Suffice to say that heaven is BIG.  I think that is the point of praying to God Who is in heaven.  It is about recognizing that there are some parts of what you are experiencing right now that do not, nor ever will, make sense if your only perspective is earthbound.  You must think of God in heaven if you are going to learn how to pray the way Jesus prayed.
Copyright © 2011.  Deborah R. Newman www.teatimeforyoursoul.com.  All Rights Reserved.
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  1. AnonymousOctober 25, 2011 at 11:31 AM

    Great post! Don't be surprised if you read about it in my blog soon.

    ReplyDelete

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