ays.

If that be true, and I do not think it can be effectively denied, then
the next step is a very plain one, and that is that for the perfect
possession of God, which is heaven, the same thing is needed in its
perfection which is required for the partial possession of Him that
makes the Christian life of earth. And just as here we get Him for ours
in proportion as we give up ourselves to be His, so yonder the
inheritance belongs, and can only belong to, 'the saints.' So, then, one
can see that there is nothing arbitrary in this limitation of a
possession, which in its very nature cannot go beyond the bounds which
are thus marked out for it. If heaven were the vulgar thing that some of
you think it, if that future life were desirable simply because you
escaped from some external punishment and got all sorts of outward
blessings and joys, felicities and advantages, hung round the neck, or
pinned upon the breast, as they do to successful fighters, why then, of
course, there might be partiality in the distribution of the
decorations. But if that possession hinges upon our yielding ourselves
to Him, then there is not an arbitrary link in the whole chain. Faith is
set forth as the condition of heaven, because faith is the means of
union with Christ, by and from whom alone we draw the motives for
self-surrender and the power for sanctity. You cannot have heaven unless
you have God. That is step number one. You cannot have God unless you
have 'holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.' That is step
number two. You cannot have holiness without faith. That is step number
three. 'An inheritance among them that are sanctified'; and then there
is added, 'by faith which is in Me.'

It is clear, too, what a fatal delusion some of us are under who think
that we shall, and fancy that we should like to, as we say, 'go to
heaven when we die.' Why, heaven is here, round about you, a present
heaven in the imitation of God, in the practice of righteousness, in the
cultivation of dependence upon Him, in the yielding of yourselves up to
Him. Heaven is here, and by your own choice you stop outside of it.
There must be a correspondence between environment and nature for
blessedness. 'The mind is its own place,' as the great Puritan poet
taught us, 'and makes a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' Fishes die on
the shore, and the man that drew them out dies in the water. Gills
cannot breathe where lungs are useful, and lungs cannot, wh