A Great Place to Be

	The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them.

—Psalm 34:7

We often think of heaven as being so far away, but perhaps it is only a thin veil that separates us from the other side and from our loved ones.

The Bible tells the story of Elisha and his servant, who found themselves surrounded by their enemies one night. The panicked servant woke up the sleeping prophet and said, "Alas, my master! What shall we do?"

So Elisha prayed that God would open the servant's eyes. And sure enough, the servant looked up and saw that "the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha" (2 Kings 6:17). That servant saw the angelic armies of God.

The psalmist David was speaking of the eternal world when he wrote, "The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them" (Psalm 34:7).

When Stephen, the first martyr of the church, addressed his accusers, we read that "he, being full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and said, 'Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!' " (Acts 7:55–56).

Stephen was torn between two worlds: heaven and earth. And that is a great place to be. As C. S. Lewis said, "A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things that a Christian is meant to do."

The apostle Paul wrote in Colossians 3:2, "Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth." We need to think more heavenly thoughts. We need to think more about heaven.

~Greg Laurie~