There's Hope For TodaySample

I don’t know why there is so little preaching about heaven these days. I suspect it is because we are so comfortable here that heaven doesn’t captivate as it should. The most effective Christians in the short history of the Church have been those who have been a little pre-occupied with heaven. C. S. Lewis said, “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.” Most of us have heard the prayer written by the celebrated theologian Reinhold Neibuhr commonly called the serenity prayer: “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Stumbling across the full text of Neibuhr’s prayer, I was taken with that part that is rarely known – or heard: “Living one day at a time, accepting hardship as the pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it: trusting that you will make all things right, if I surrender to your will, so that, I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with you forever in the next.” Neibuhr understood that serenity without eternity is an impossibility.