“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.” --Ecclesiastes 3:11

The Bible makes it clear that our Creator has written eternity in our hearts. With the light and longing He has given every one of His creatures, we find ourselves yearning for the good things to be found only in His heaven.

In fact, from childhood on, we hunger for “a better, that is, a heavenly country” (Hebrews 11:16). And Christians who are schooled in the Bible can feast on and trust in the promises of God, can delight in the previews He has provided of the perfect and everlasting kingdom awaiting His children.

It’s all there for anyone who cares to look.

Unfortunately, those who can’t be bothered have to settle for poor and very fleeting substitutes.

Some pursue the peace of God in pills or meditation, being deceived into equating numbness or thoughtlessness with “the peace that surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) provided by the Lord to all who have repented and trusted in Christ.

Some look for miracles in magic, for love in sex, for joy in the endless pursuit of happiness or achievement or the admiration of men.

Some try to satisfy their longing for “a heavenly country” by traveling to increasingly exotic locales ... by acquiring things from houses to clothes, cars or money ... or by immersing themselves in hobbies and entertainment.

Some seek rest for their spirits in another time, studying history or frequenting museums or visiting spots like Rothenburg, Germany or, closer to home, the Renaissance Fair.

Some devour books from fairy tales to fantasies, finding in Oz and Wonderland, Narnia and the Hobbits’ Shire, something more enchanting or beautiful than we can find here in the midst of our day-to-day routines.  

It’s true that there are some who love darkness, who want a world that embraces their most evil thoughts and deeds, who actually prefer the Johnny Depp vision of Wonderland to Lewis Carroll’s.

But others want just the opposite: abundant light and space, bright colors, happy songs, talking animals and dancing flowers, perfect pleasure and endless good health, all in a land free of sorrow, villains and fear.

Such people long for, in short, all that heaven offers – with one notable exception:

The righteousness of Christ.

It’s interesting that the one thing shared by all these alternate realities is a lack of His righteousness – in fact, His complete absence.

We don’t want to be told what to do, you see. We are finding our glimpses of our hearts’ “heavenly country” in things He condemns or disparages. We don’t want to be distracted from what we think will take us “there.”   

And there’s the rub.

The only place that will satisfy the longings of our hearts forevermore cannot be reached apart from righteousness. As Jesus said, “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33).  All these things – not some, not for a few moments, but forever.

Here’s the rest of the story: There’s only one way to reach this place. We can’t get there via any manmade route, but only through the person of Jesus Christ.

How about you? Are you still seeking to satisfy the yearnings of your heart through earthly pursuits? If so, why not make today the day that you set out on the only way to all your heart longs for?

Feeling weary? Discouraged? Hard pressed, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down, as the apostle Paul described in 2 Corinthians 4? 

It's time to put things in perspective. For Christians, this beautiful song may be the perfect remedy! 

It's been well over 40 years since I've been able to celebrate Father's Day, my own beloved Daddy having died when I was just 17. But I'm far from alone in having suffered a life-changing loss at such a critical age. I'm probably far from alone, too, in having let that singular event shatter what little faith I had in God and the afterlife. 

If you're a Christian with a loved one who has suffered a devastating loss, don't assume that he or she will share an impending spiritual collapse with you. Anticipating and answering the question "How could a good God allow this?" may mean the difference between a lifetime of atheism and saving faith. 

Consider my experience, recounted in this excerpt from my spiritual memoir, Heaven Without Her: 

"What exactly are you supposed to do when that fairy tale has ended, when happily ever after is no more? No one had warned me about this.

“'Now do you understand how important it is to believe in God?' Mom asked me a few days after the funeral, as she helped pack my things for my return to school.

"We were in the big bay-windowed middle bedroom of the house on Quincy Street, the room that had finally been deeded over to me a few years earlier, when Andy had officially grown up and left home. It was a bright and cheerful room with flowered wallpaper and window seats and bookcases holding everything from a complete set of Nancy Drews to respectable collections of the Black Stallion and Tom Corbett Space Cadet series.

"I didn’t respond. It was hardly the time or place to discuss religion, in my opinion; as far as I could see, this God of hers had failed her big time.

"She sighed softly, sat down on the bed and gazed out the window.  I concentrated on arranging my best dress neatly in the red suitcase, one of the set my parents had given me just a few months earlier as a high-school graduation gift.

“'I’m so sad,' she said finally, almost to herself.

"Indeed, she looked as though she had been weeping for days, although I hadn’t seen much of it; women of her era apparently kept their grief to themselves, so she had done most of her crying in the privacy of their bedroom.

“'But I know that your father is in heaven now,' she added, returning to the task at hand by folding my favorite pair of Plushbottoms jeans, 'and it’s better there than anything we could possibly imagine. And I’ll be there with him one day. We’ll all be with him again.'

“'I suppose,' I said, letting her have her little fairy tale. But in my heart, I refused to buy into it. I knew there was no proof that any of it was truer than what the Brothers Grimm had imagined. After all, science had shown that there didn’t even have to be a God at all. Hadn’t the theory of evolution been proven the mechanism that brought everything into being? And if there was no God, there would be no heaven, which meant my dad had probably just plunged into non-existence, which in turn meant that I would never see him again and that life was, in the end, futile.

"Thanks to thoughts like these, I didn’t handle the aftermath of my father’s death any better than I handled the fact of it.  I used it as an excuse to turn my back on my hometown boyfriend and friends and just about anyone and anything capable of reminding me that there had even been such a dream of living happily ever after, somewhere out there."  (Heaven Without Her, pp 14-15)

Have you noticed lately that so many seem to be unable to think past their foregone conclusions?

I’m surely as guilty as the next person. Just ask me, and I’ll tell you that the mainstream media promote socialism, that abortion is murder, and that psychiatric drugs can be a recipe for temporal and eternal disaster. To be honest, I’m not terribly interested in hearing arguments to the contrary, unless they’re fueled by facts – and so far I haven’t heard the opposition propose anything that's even in the ballpark. 

But I don't believe that foregone conclusions are a problem, as long as they’re the product of careful, fact-centered analysis. It’s only when those conclusions are based on careful, feeling-centered analysis that they become dangerous.

For instance, say I believe that gun control is desirable because guns scare me. This is my foregone conclusion, and anything that threatens it will have to be ignored -- including the fact that the worst gun violence occurs in the most heavily gun-controlled cities … and that the 20th cenutury’s worst mass murderers, from Mao and Stalin to Hitler, launched their reigns of terror by disarming their populations. No no no, I wouldn't let such pesky facts challenge my conclusion! 

George Orwell understood how it works: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. 

But as pressing as issues like these may seem at the moment, they are merely temporal; in 500 years, they won’t matter to any of us or even to our great great great great grandchildrn. The foregone conclusions that are truly dangerous are those that impact our eternities.

Consider, for example, the Bible. Some believers say it's an acronym for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, and I think that's exactly right. Demonstrably inspired and inerrant, it covers the history of mankind from beginning to end, and advises us in no uncertain terms what is required of those who want to spend eternity in heaven with God. 

But lately, I've been hearing even professing Christians say that the Bible is largely irrelevant today. The subject might be divorce or homosexuality, abortion or the amassing of fortunes, or anything in between. It doesn't matter, these observers insist; the Bible has nothing to say to us on such issues. 

Why? Because it was written a long time ago and was meant for another time, of course!  And no, they certainly don't want to discuss it; they already know in their guts that they're right. Foregone conclusion confirmed!

But here again, such a conclusion is based not on facts but on feelings; any objective reading of the Bible's 66 books will make it clear that all of these issues are addressed thoroughly, along with every other question that has ever puzzled mankind. And there's nothing to indicate that God's position on any of them has changed over the last 2000 years. 

People simply don't want to listen, and their feelings-based foregone conclusions tell them that listening to any arguments to the contrary is a big fat waste of time.

You can see how eternally dangerous this might be. The Bible makes it clear that, although the prerequisites for salvation are simply repentance and trusting in Jesus Christ, the true child of God will in the process be born again to new life; he will find his life radically altered according to God's revealed will. 

But how exactly do you change according to His will when your foregone conclusion is warning you to ignore the only book He has ever written? 

Is it in fact possible to get to heaven without knowing what He has said in His word?

That's up to God, not me. But consider that Jesus said you must be born again "to see the kingdom of God," and that the apostle Peter said we are born again "through the word of God which lives and abides forever." 

Does that sound like it might be wise to study and obey what God has said in His word, rather than shrugging it off as irrelevant?

I think so. But for whatever reason, most people don't want to hear it. Guess it's easier to simply trust in a foregone conclusion, no matter how shaky its foundation may be.

If not all worldviews can be true – if not even two of them can be (see the last post in this blog) – then which if any is the real deal? That was the question confronting me in the year 2000. My research had already convinced me that there is a creator god. But which one?

James Sire’s book The Universe Next Door had made it abundantly clear that there are really only two basic worldviews: those that say the ticket to heaven is being a good person, and the one that says the ticket to heaven is Jesus Christ. In short, there’s Christianity, and there’s everything else.

I wanted to believe something in the “everything else” pile, thinking that Christians (except for my mom) were a pretty boring lot. My rationale was this: All these other religions said that it’s being a good person that gets you into heaven. My mom had been a great person, as had my dad and Granny, and I was planning on becoming one ASAP. So an "everything else" worldview would solve my problem forevermore.

To find the perfect match, I set up a series of mental buckets. I labeled each one with the name of a major “everything else” worldview, from the Baha’i Faith and Islam to the New Age and beyond. I then set out to gather the evidence for them. My plan was to drop each proof into the appropriate bucket and then, at some as-yet-unspecified date in the future, to sift through all these proofs and proclaim one the winner in the truth department.

Except that, hard as I searched, I found not one shred of evidence for any of them.

“Because we have a holy book” sure doesn’t cut it. Who doesn’t?

“Because it works” is equally unremarkable. They all say that.

“Because there are so many of us” is almost laughable, given how often the majority of people are dead wrong.

Finally, I had to admit that “everything else” has, at best, no relation to truth. Which left only the opposite category standing: Christianity.

Almost reluctantly, I turned to the Bible – and was blown away by the evidence I found for its truth, particularly in the realm of science and prophecy.

It’s been 14 years since I set out on my quest, 13 since I arrived at the only possible conclusion. If you haven’t already reached this conclusion yourself, please let me know what’s standing in your way; your eternity may well be at stake, and I may be able to point you in the right direction.

I was an atheist when I set out an a quest for eternal truth 14 years ago, in the wake of my mother's death. It took me only a few months to be persuaded, by science, that there was indeed a creator, a god of some sort. But figuring out which god was the real deal was a more difficult matter.  

The "coexist" bumper sticker implies that any religion is as true as the next one. And indeed, that was the premise that I started from. 

Fortunately, I stumbled upon an invaluable book very early in this phase of my research. Entitled The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, this volume provides an overview of every major worldview and religion. Included are deism, naturalism, eastern pantheistic monism, and New Age philosophies, as well as existentialism and nihilism -- the latter very familiar to anyone who was a college student in the '60s or '70s, and depressingly prominent in our culture today.

Author James Sire does a masterful job of summarizing the key beliefs of each one. As I studied his book, three things became abundantly clear: 

• These worldviews contradict each other in all their key tenets.
• That means they cannot all be true, according to the law of non-contradiction.
• In fact, not even two of them can be true.

For me, this was an astounding realization. It gave me hope that absolute truth really might exist in spite of what my professors taught back in the 1970s, and that it might be knowable -- even by someone like me, a long-time atheist whose entire belief system was crumbling. 

The "coexist" crowd's message may simply be that we should all just get along, that what we believe really doesn't matter as long as we're kind to each other. But I was about to discover that kindness does not exist apart from truth -- and that the most loving thing we can do for others is to lead them to the truth. 

Which one's the real deal? Find out here.