How important is the incentive of Heaven in your faith journey?

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dallas_r said:
Our #1 incentive should be obtaining His infinite love (which is wide open to us).
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Which is precisely what will be in heaven.

The Council of Florence taught that there will be degrees of blessedness in heaven.

To use an analogy not of my manufacture, each of us is like measuring cups. Each cup can hold only so much and no more. In like fashion, each soul will be able to behold this or this much of God’s glory and no more. Yet each soul is perfectly full.

So, that does bring me back to the OP’s query. Does that affect my day to day life? You will be surprised, but the answer is “yes”.

For I have a tendency to say or write things that shouldn’t have been said or written. Sometimes I am able to stop myself and remind myself that the amount of God’s glory reflected in me in paradise will not be as much as it could have been. I remind myself of this, too, when I keep going long without the Sacrament of Holy Confession, then the Holy Eucharist. For it is the teaching of the Church that the Holy Eucharist increases in us sanctifying grace, to use the Latin Church’s terminology.

I want to be in that land filled with milk and honey that God promised to Moses, and I am not at all embarrassed to say it.
 
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I want it, but it’s not really important. I don’t deserve it.

I thought that our souls are cleansed in purgatory. Does that mean that sin permanently damages our souls?
 
Our souls are cleansed in purgatory. Using the analogy of the cups I mentioned above, you can have a clean cup or a filthy one. Purgatory cleans the filthy ones, that is, the ones still usable (or souls not condemned). However, the cup sizes, if you will, may be different if we do not make use of all the resources God gives us in this world to “enlarge our cups”, that is, grow in sanctity in this life.

Nevertheless, each of us will be perfectly happy just like this or that cup is perfectly full.
 
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Ah. Well that’s just made things more complicated. I want a big cup, so I can see all the God I can! Yet, that feels selfish.
 
i think the alternative to heaven is pretty bad

trying to make my way to the hea-venly wardroom banquet
 
Maybe, by the grace of God, I’ll join them. God deserves all my love and I’m doing Him a disservice if I don’t aspire to sainthood.
 
goodcatholic said:
I might say that if I really loved God, I would just be grateful for my life now and still do my best to please Him, no matter what reward there is in the next life.
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I think I would say this. There are those quaint colloqualisms about how those who frequent gardens or books are already partly in heaven anyway. Not only are they quaint but true. (I had a bookmark that said that, either books or gardens, can’t remember which - I have heard both) There are many blessings in this life, though I firmly believe they come from God, and that they continue in another world and are meant to draw you to God, not life in the world. The other odd one kind of like this is the one about fear of damnation motivating people on their faith journey. I don’t get that either. Other extreme.
 
Personally, heaven isn’t something I think much about. I mean, it’s nice to know that at the last day I will go somewhere wonderful with all my brothers and sisters, but I feel like getting hung up on the hereafter can be detrimental to living a spiritual life in some ways. God doesn’t want us to follow Him out of the desire for heaven or the fear of hell, but to do so out of love and as good stewards of the world and the lives we have been given. So, I think it’s better to try and cultivate righteousness for its own sake and for the good of others. And, sometimes, I feel like that’s good enough. Even if there wasn’t a heaven waiting, I think I could die happy if I knew I had done my best with what I was given.
 
shazirah said:
God doesn’t want us to follow Him out of the desire for heaven or the fear of hell, but to do so out of love and as good stewards of the world and the lives we have been given
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But Jesus in his teaching, to urge people to follow him, spoke only of rewards in Heaven, and punishments in Hell, and he almost never made people follow him just by pure, totally gratuitous love. So Jesus would have counseled something that does not please God?
It reminds me about 30 years ago, I asked a priest if it’s good to practice virtue and follow the commandments because of the reward promised, he said NO, that love should to be the only motive. I had abandoned all the good resolutions I had taken, because I could not motivate myself with a totally free love.
It was a mistake on the part of this priest, in fact to act out of pure love is perfection. But we must not say that if we do not act by pure perfection it is bad or it is useless.
It is enough that one is in a state of grace and one acts for a motive of Faith to perform a meritorious act. This motive of Faith may be the fear of punishment, or the desire for reward. But if this motive of Faith is a motive of pure charity then we are in perfection, so we have a greater merit.
 
I would worship God even if there was no afterlife. I do it because I love Him and because He deserves it.
 
drac16 said:
would worship God even if there was no afterlife. I do it because I love Him and because He deserves it.
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Congratulation, you are already a living saint! But what is false is to say that to follow Jesus by being motivated by the reward of Heaven is not good, because Him Himself asked that we follow him for this reason.
And finally we must be humble, Peter had sworn he was ready to die rather than deny Jesus and we know the rest. We are weak and inconstant, faced with a trial or a temptation, it is possible that the only way to come out victorious is to exercise our Hope (the thought of the reward) and not our Charity.
God has given us three supernatural means to overcome temptations or trials:
  • The Faith (the thought of Hell)
  • The Hope (the thought of Heaven)
  • The Charity (the thought of the love of Christ)
Depending on the circumstances, one or other of these means must be used
 
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The desire of Heaven (which is the second glorious mystery of the rosary) is fundamental, the one who claims not to have it is in my opinion certainly handicapped somewhere in his life of Faith. Not to desire what God himself wants for us means that we have an imperfect charity, because God wants us to be in heaven.
According to the testimony of many mystics, many go on in Purgatory for not having desired Heaven in their lifetime. And in my opinion it’s justice, because why give something to the one who never wanted it? Heaven did not interest you, so stay in Purgatory for as long as possible
 
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It’s one of the reasons why God made us, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t be important.

“God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.”

The concept of the beatific vision and being in company of God and all the angels and saints just sounds wonderful beyond compare. I don’t see how you could just love heaven and not love God too, because heaven is where you spend time with Him and love Him for all eternity. I also don’t see what’s wrong with having that incentive and wanting that reward, only because God wants it too – even more than we do. He wanted it first! 💗
 
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