Abundant Entrance

“A Christian on his deathbed spoke these words: ‘I shall be satisfied if I can but creep into heaven on my hands and knees.’

We can easily understand the spirit which prompted those words; he felt his service was as nothing compared with his need for God’s mercy. At the same time there is another sense in which the words are not rightly applicable to the Christian, or Peter speaks of our having an abundant entrance given us in the everlasting kingdom (2 Peter 1:11).

“In keeping with this, Paul constantly emphasized the Christian life with words such as wealth, riches, abundance, and he prayed that Christians might be ‘filled with all the fullness of God’ (Ephesians 3:19). “Paul was not satisfied with a bare entrance into heaven. His desire was that both he and his converts would have the fullest possible Christian life here below, and then enter fully into the joy of the Lord above. This is the true Christian life—the life of fullness, power, depth and reality.”

W. H. Griffith Thomas