Matthew McCullough's Remember Death marked me deeply. Ever since I watched my father die in front of me in June of 2004, death has been more than a distant threat; it's been stitched to my shadow. When I learned that McCullough was coming out with another book, Remember Heaven, I picked it up right away, and I'm glad I did.

We all struggle with a strange sense of amnesia: we don't just forget our past; we forget our future. We find ourselves so wrapped up in the present that we don't let our promised future break into ordinary moments and color the room. That's not just a shame; it's a distortion of truth. Remembering heaven is really about remembering hope, and it's easy for us to let that slip. "Hope matters," McCullough writes. "We can't live without it. But what we hope in matters even more. We need a hope strong enough to bear the weight of our lives in the meantime. And that is precisely what we have in the hope of heaven" (2).

Summary

McCullough takes this hope of heaven and applies it to several areas of Christian life: joy, inadequacy, our battle with sin, anxiety, suffering, grief, the mission of the church, and our longing for more. Throughout the book, he is keen to remind his readers that our hope in heaven is a living reality meant to influence and uplift our common struggles. "Concrete, unshakable, life-giving hope is the birthright of every Christian, and this hope is meant to touch every part of our lives" (5). The problem, he notes, is that we don't really view heaven or hope that way. We treat heaven more like an insurance policy: it's there when we need it, but we don't think about it and pray we never have to use it.

Scripture, he argues, never treats heaven that way. Instead, it portrays heaven as an abundant inheritance that we can draw on right now. This is tough for us to grasp, especially those of us raised in the church, because heaven is so familiar as a "distant promise" that we don't truly believe it can do anything but carry us off into the clouds, making us "heavenly minded but of no earthly good." If that's the way we view heaven, then it makes sense for us not to think about it.

With pastoral sensitivity and warmth, McCullough leads readers through the themes of daily experience to show how important it is to not only remember heaven, but to draw on the hope that it gives to us, even as we face adversity, anxiety, sorrow, sin, and a host of other problems.

Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book.

Favorite Quotes

• "Only in God's presence can we be satisfied because only there will we fully have and forever hold what we love" (31).
• "Living in a modern, capitalist society, it is absolutely crucial for us to know that our dissatisfaction problem is not one of possession—I'm not happy because I haven't bought that. The problem is one of proximity—I'm not satisfied because I'm not yet in the presence of God" (33).
• "Pride is the poison our culture doles out as medicine. The standard prescription for dealing with inadequacy is to find what you're good at and lean into it. Build up your confidence in where you're exceptional. This poison only feeds the problem it means to solve. It sickens individuals. It corrupts societies. And it ultimately leads to death" (52).
• "It's one thing for me to say that all you need is Jesus. It's another thing to say that all I have is Christ. He's not my base layer. He's not the bottom rung on a ladder I hope to climb" (54).
• "There is no true peace without hope and no true hope without heaven" (74).
• "Sometimes feelings of anxiety can be a sign that we're too attached to what we can lose and not as attached to what we can't. Sometimes our anxiety is a sign that we have anchored our lives to a future God has not promised us" (84).
• "If you're going to carry on without losing heart, you need to know that heaven is where you are going, and suffering is how you will get there" (94).
• "God himself is the essence of heaven's joy. He is what we will love best about where we are going. But for now his glory is veiled by the sin in our hearts and challenged by the alluring competitors in the world around us. And we're always tempted to turn God into a means tosme other end. To fully enjoy what heaven is going to be, we need to have our palates refined. We need to acquire a taste for who we have in him" (97).
• "Love is costly but often uncomplicated" (133).
• "One of the most distinctive things about us humans is the resilience of our longing for more life in a better world" (145).

Should You Read It?

Yes, I believe this is a needed book for contemporary readers and a perfect pairing to McCullough's Remember Death. Remembering heaven is going to take a lot of practice and encouragement. Let this book be the first step for you.

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