2 Corinthians 5:1–8 Mark Buchanan once observed, “Our deepest instinct is heaven. Heaven is the ache in our bones, the splinter in our heart.” That’s why even the most brilliant experiences on earth: the love of family, the beauty of music, and the warmth of friendship, are both wonderful and wounding. They are foretastes of glory, but not the fullness. They awaken in us the memory of a world we’ve never seen but somehow remember. The reason for our longing is not mysterious. Scripture explains that God once made the world perfect, a paradise where man walked with God in unbroken fellowship. But sin shattered that perfection. The curse descended. Thorns grew where fruit once flourished. Death entered where life once reigned. Humanity was exiled from Eden, and every sorrow since has been a reminder of that loss. Paul captures this longing in 2 Corinthians 5:1–8: When Jesus told His disciples, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2), He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Heaven is a place: a tangible, physical reality where God’s glory fills all in all. It is not a cloud-like dream or endless abstraction, but a renewed creation where we will dwell in resurrected bodies, made perfect and incorruptible. Yet as glorious as that place will be, heaven’s joy is not ultimately found in its wonders, but in its center. And the center is Christ. That question presses itself upon every soul: Are you ready for home? One day, perhaps sooner than we think, the moment will come. The tent will be folded up. The journey will end, and as C. S. Lewis said, “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” When it does, the ache will end. The longing will cease. Every homesick tear will turn to laughter. Every groan will give way to glory. We will step inside, behold His face, and say with trembling joy,
If you have ever pressed your face against the glass of an aquarium, watching fish glide gracefully through their little world of water, you’ve likely admired the colors, the movement, the beauty of it all. Yet if you paused long enough, you might also have felt an ache; a sense that something about this scene isn’t quite right. The creatures before you were not made for glass walls. They were made for the depths; for the open, boundless sea.
That image helps us understand something essential about ourselves. We too, live within limits that do not suit the deepest part of who we are. Though we were made for eternity, we now live in a temporary world. Though we were created for glory, we now dwell in frailty. Deep inside, our souls sense the confinement of this fallen existence. It is as though something within us whispers, “You were made for more.”
That whisper is not illusion; it is revelation. God Himself has placed that longing there. Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares, “He has set eternity in the hearts of men.” That is to say, God has written the ache of forever into the very fabric of our being. We were created to dwell with Him, to behold His glory, to live in unbroken fellowship with our Creator. No wonder the things of earth can never truly satisfy us. No wonder every success eventually feels hollow, every possession loses its shine, and every joy carries the faint echo of something greater. We were made for another country.
The Ache of Eternity
C. S. Lewis explained it this way: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” This yearning, this restlessness, is universal. Every culture and civilization, from the Egyptians to the Native Americans, has carried a sense of the world beyond, a belief in life after death. That is no accident of anthropology; it is evidence of divinity. Humanity’s persistent hope in the eternal is the fingerprint of the God who made us for Himself.
But that hope, if misdiagnosed, becomes destructive. Our homesickness for heaven often gets mistaken for hunger for something else. So we overwork, overconsume, overindulge, and overspend. All to fill a void that only heaven can satisfy. The human heart is forever searching for the Garden, though it may not know its name.
The Loss and the Promise
The typhoons that devastate communities, the wars that scar nations, the diseases that ravage bodies; all of these testify that something is broken, and that the world is not as it was meant to be. Even the most personal griefs: the funeral of a loved one, the fading of health, the ache of loneliness, are reminders that we are far from home. Our souls cry out for paradise restored, for Eden made new.
But the gospel proclaims that paradise will be restored. Through Jesus Christ, the curse will be reversed. By His death, He conquered sin; by His resurrection, He conquered death. He has secured for His people a future home, not a vaporous, imaginary heaven, but a new creation. Revelation 21–22 declares, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people… He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.”
That is the future for which our hearts yearn, a real world, redeemed and radiant with the glory of God. It is the world for which we were made.
Groaning for Home
“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God… eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling.”
The contrast between tent and building is deliberate. A tent is temporary, fragile, easily torn, an apt picture of our present bodies. But a building is permanent, strong, enduring, a symbol of our resurrected, glorified life to come. And while we remain in this tent, we groan. We feel the weight of mortality, the limits of flesh, the pull of eternity.
That groaning is not complaint; it’s hope. It’s the homesickness of the redeemed. Paul says we are “of good courage,” because though we are absent from the Lord now, one day we will be “at home with the Lord.” (v.8) What a phrase! At home with the Lord. Heaven is not merely escape from pain, it is reunion with the Person for whom we were created.
Peter echoes this truth when he calls believers “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11). The people of faith in Hebrews 11 confessed that they were “strangers and exiles on the earth,” looking forward to “a better country, a heavenly one.” The people of God have always been pilgrims. Our tents are pitched here, but our citizenship is elsewhere (Philippians 3:20). That dissonance, the feeling that we don’t quite belong, is not something to fix, but something to understand. It is our compass pointing home.
A Real Place, Prepared by a Real Savior
The tragedy is that so many Christians have lost their appetite for heaven because they’ve adopted an unbiblical picture of it, an eternal church service in the clouds, devoid of color, creation, or beauty. But Scripture paints heaven as the most alive, vibrant reality imaginable: a garden more lush than Eden, a city more glorious than any empire, a kingdom radiant with righteousness.
As Alcorn puts it, “The best of earth is just the beginning. The new earth will be everything we love about this world, purified, magnified, and made eternal.” That’s what Jesus meant by place. It’s the real world made right, where righteousness dwells, and where the Lamb Himself will be our light.
The Center of Heaven
Paul said in Philippians 1:23, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” He did not say, “to go to heaven,” but “to be with Christ.” Because to have heaven without Christ would be to have light without the sun, music without sound, life without breath. Christ is heaven’s joy. All the blessings of the new creation flow from His presence.
Samuel Rutherford once wrote, “O my Lord Jesus Christ, if I could be in heaven without You, it would be a hell; and if I could be in hell, and have You still, it would be a heaven to me.” That is the heart of every true believer. The longing for heaven is not the longing for comfort; it is the longing for Christ.
John Piper once asked, “If you could have heaven, with no sickness, no death, no conflict, and every pleasure you’ve ever known, but Christ were not there, would you be satisfied?” For the born-again believer, the answer is always no. We yearn for heaven precisely because we yearn for Him.
Are You Ready for Home?
Heaven is not automatic. It is not earned by decency or religion. It is received by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone. As J. C. Ryle warned, “How little fit for heaven are many who talk of going there when they have no real acquaintance with Christ.” If you do not love Him now, you will not love heaven then, for He is the center of it.
But the good news is that heaven’s door stands open to all who repent and believe. Christ Himself is the Door (John 10:9). He has prepared a place for His people and sealed them by His Spirit. Those who belong to Him will one day be called home.
Until that day, our groaning continues, but it is the groan of hope. Every disappointment in this life is a reminder that something better is coming. Every sorrow is a signpost pointing home. Every act of faith is one more step toward the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God (Hebrews 11:10).
The Day the Door Opens
“At last… I’m home.”