I remember so vividly my desire to share Jesus with my children, especially as young children. Certain concepts I wanted them to catch with clarity and a childlike excitement. God loves them and wants them to be HIS kids. God is the one who created all the flowers and bugs, and rain and sunshine, and US!! The whole world was PERFECT when God first created it, and then the people God first made started making wrong choices, and doing what THEY wanted to do – just like us.......... But God STILL loved those people just like He still loves us, so God had a plan. He had a son named Jesus, and it sounds awful, but God chose, and His son Jesus chose, to let Jesus die on a cross so God would not have to punish us for our sins. Jesus was punished instead of us, on the cross. WHY??? Remember? God loves us, and He loves us even when we do things wrong, and He still wants us to be HIS kids. And with big tears in His eyes, God knew the cross was the only way for us to become His kids. But HE LOVED US, AND HE GAVE HIS SON JESUS, so WE could be His kids.
And we keep teaching, and being good examples, and praying for our kids, and then, prayerfully, what we most long for with our own children, happens. They come to understand God’s love and God’s gift, and they ask Jesus’s gift to be big enough for them, and they become God’s children as well as our own. And even with the ups and downs of being our children in a messed up world, we are delighted because we now KNOW our children are God’s kids. And then in the midst of our joy, and our dreams, something happens, and our child is now in the literal Heaven-centered presence of the God who loves him, and as we walk our journey of grief, the assurance we most want is that my child is running, playing, dancing, fully engaged in delighting in fulfilling in Heaven the potential God has for him. Our grief though can sometimes shadow the God who loves us, and we hear voices and lies we would prefer not to hear. Those voices and lies though need to take us back to God and to the truth of His Word.
2 Corinthians 5 begins with the words that most comfort my heart. For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. ..... we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. In “who” we are on this Earth as children and as adults, the essence of “who” we are is called our spirit, and God is the creator of our spirit, but He also gives us an earthly body to live in. As believers, when our earthly death happens, our spirit immediately leaves our body, and enters the very presence of God in Heaven. And God has a home for our spirits in Heaven – eternal bodies that God Himself has made. So, our children in Heaven have eternal bodies, right now, that God has made.
And in studying God’s Word, we realize that the body we had on earth is buried, but some day when Jesus comes back to Earth, that body will be resurrected and reunited with our spirit in Heaven! To be true to Scripture the body resurrected at that time is reunited with the spirit that it separated from. But again, to be true to Scripture, the body God first clothed the spirit with in Heaven, since it is an eternal body, must in some way, be united with the resurrected body.
And the essence of all I have written is a powerful promise for the grieving mom. Yes, we will grieve, but our own spirits can be saturated with the truth that our child is literally in Heaven, clothed in a body God has given, fully healthy, delighting in all the perfections of Heaven, worshiping the God who loves him, and waiting too to be re-united with the earthly body she once had.
O Father, thank You, thank You, thank You.........................
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: 2 Corinthians 5:1-5; 1 Corinthians 15:50–54)
