Believers commonly envision their hope as spending eternity in heaven.
But the resurrection of Jesus gives us a hope that’s even greater.
As my friend Andrew Sandlin puts it:
The Christian hope isn’t that we’ll live forever in Heaven. The Christian hope is that we’ll live forever in resurrected bodies in a resurrected city on a resurrected earth with a resurrected Lord and resurrected saints.
This enlarged hope of a renewed cosmos is significant for the way we live our lives.
If our hope is solely heaven, we can easily spend our days looking forward to it as a way of escape from this troubled world.
But if our hope includes a transformed creation, we can envision a future where we live with new bodies alongside renewed people in a new and glorious city.
And this vision helps us give greater thought to how we regard our bodies and other people as we carry on in our city today.
We, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Pet. 3:13).