2 Corinthians 5:6-10

It is the clear vision of what will happen to us after we die that gives us the courage to face death.  

While our earthly lives continue we have the comfort of living in our earthly “homes,” our physical bodies.

But while we are at home in our bodies we experience an imperfect union with Christ.  He lives in us.  We sense His presence.  We experience His strength, His comfort, and His guidance.  But our experience of Christ, as wonderful as it is, falls short of the constant state of ecstasy that we will experience in His presence in heaven.

As our heart understanding of God's truth has ripened into the absolute conviction of unshakable faith, we have reached the point where the course of our lives is directed by what we believe in our hearts and not what we experience of the world through our physical senses.

Sometimes our physical senses record the facts that our lives are being threatened and our bodies are being beaten, but what we believe in our hearts gives us the courage to endure because, to us, the bottom line is very simple.  If they kill us we have to live as disembodied spirits for a time but we immediately enter into the perpetual ecstasy that can only be found in the uninterrupted presence of Christ.

Christ has become the focus of our lives and the desire to please Him influences everything we do.  We want everything we do whether in this life or in the life to come to bring a smile to His face.

We must never forget that when we leave this life we will, at some point, have an “exit interview.”  We will have a personal encounter with Jesus Christ where His sits in judgment and evaluates the way we lived our lives.  There will be rewards for everything we did that brought a smile to His face and regrets for all of the missed opportunities to serve Him as we should have.