Connect360: The Currency of Heaven

• Lesson 2 in the Connect360 unit “Heaven & Angels: Our Eternal Home and Its Heavenly Hosts” focuses on Hebrews 11:1-6.

If faith is heaven’s currency, what is it that we must exchange for this valuable currency? What is the “exchange rate,” if you will? We must exchange sight (how we navigate this world) for faith (how we understand heaven).

The Bible says, “We walk [live] by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). It is a short and simple phrase of few words, but it is not so easy to implement. We humans have five physical senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and touching. We rely on them to interpret the world around us.

Of these five, our sight is the major sense and the one we lean on the most. For all heavenly transactions, however, we must be willing to exchange living by sight for living by faith. Sight says, “Give me proof of heaven, and I’ll believe.” Faith says, “I’ll believe without any proof.” And that is what makes faith so rare and valuable in a world that demands evidence before it will commit to trusting anyone or anything.

Remember, the great saints listed in the Roll Call of Faith in Hebrews 11 died without seeing heaven, but you can be sure they died believing they would see heaven one day. Even if they did not know it by that name, they saw heaven with eyes of faith and died with the full assurance they would enter the city God had prepared for them.

If you have lost loved ones who put their faith in Christ as Savior and Lord, they also died without ever seeing heaven with their own eyes. But by faith, these Christians died believing with all their hearts they would see it and join Jesus in eternity.

In other words, faith is powerful, and it is such a driving, positive force throughout our lives. It grants us the full assurance (11:1) that when we die, we will indeed arrive at our final destination and one day enter the heavenly city God prepared for us.

And yet you still may be the kind of person looking for some scientific proof of heaven. You will never find empirical evidence of heaven in this world. If you are waiting until you see God to believe in him, you have a surprise in store. You will certainly see God, but it will be too late then to believe.

It is not that Christian faith asks you to suspend your intelligence in order to believe. It is not irrational; it is suprarational. You must exchange your sight for faith if you want to live in heaven one day. You simply cannot go there depending on your eyes of sight, like you can when you are reading a map on this world to reach your intended destination. You cannot put in GPS coordinates and reach the county line of heaven. If you want to go to heaven, you have to do so by relying solely on eyes of faith.

To learn more about GC2 Press and the Connect360 Bible study series, or to order materials, click here.