The Heart of the Andes by David Jeremiah

Thursday, June 29

The Heart of the Andes 

For our citizenship is in heaven…. 
Philippians 3:20 

Recommended Reading Philippians 3:17-21

In the mid-1850s, the Christian painter Frederic Church traveled to remote areas of South America where few North Americans ventured before that time. He took sketches all along the way, and when he returned home he painted a masterpiece—The Heart of the Andes. Church’s painting included a simple wooden cross in the foreground. The response to this massive landscape was immediate.

Mr. Church erected his painting in a giant canvas tent in New York City and charged 25 cents to see it. By looking at that painting, viewers felt they were getting a glimpse of a faraway land that excited their imaginations. Today it hangs in New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When we study the subject of heaven in the Bible, we’re looking at the pictures God has painted for us of the land to which we’re going. The more we study that land, the more we’ll begin behaving now like its citizens. Those who focus their gaze on heaven become more zealous, more loving, more industrious, and more evangelistic. The air of that place begins to get into our spiritual lungs, and we become tough-minded optimists.

Let’s live like citizens of heaven!

We are pilgrims passing through, on our way to another country, another land, another city. And we behave ourselves on earth as citizens of that future, glorious, eternal city.
Ron Rhodes