Why It’s So Difficult To Set Our Minds On Things Above

Paul commands us to set our minds on things above (Col. 3:1–4), and one reason for this instruction is that it’s so much easier not to. All sorts of diversions come more naturally. I don’t have to tell my kids to finish their ice cream. I do have to command them to take five spoonfuls of their cauliflower soup.

Focusing on heaven is more like eating cruciferous vegetables than eating ice cream. It’s better for us. It’s more nourishing. It builds our strength and our resistance to all sorts of infections. But it’s sometimes less attractive than other options competing for our attention and our affection. Apart from the work of God’s Spirit in us, the affections of our hearts and the allure of our environment will constantly set our minds on things on earth.

We’re relentlessly biased toward false hopes we can see, touch, and control—hopes that can’t satisfy us, can’t save us, and can’t possibly outlive us. This was the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. It was the story of Israel wandering through the wilderness. It was the story of Israel forced into exile. And it’s our story. How do you stay focused on what’s unseen and eternal when what’s seen and temporary is so present and powerful?

Richard Baxter and the Heavenly Mind

This is the driving concern behind one of the most important books on heaven ever written: Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. Baxter was a pastor in 17th-century England during the bloody years of the English Civil War. Surrounded by that carnage and following a near-death experience of his own, he worked out a process for meditating on heaven as a spiritual discipline.

Baxter was stunned by how little his flock seemed to care about the life to come, despite the obvious difficulty of their lives here and now. The problem, as he saw it, wasn’t that Christians denied there’s such a place as heaven or even doubted they might be there someday. The problem was the gap between the head and the heart: “When truth is apprehended only as truth, this is but an unsavory and loose apprehension; when it is apprehended as good as well as true, this is a solid and delightful apprehending.”

Apart from the work of God’s Spirit in us, the affections of our hearts and the allure of our environment will constantly set our minds on things on earth.

We need a sense of heaven’s goodness in the heart before the truth we profess will shape our lives. By nature, we have no trouble seeing what’s good about power, sex, fame, or money (and what it can buy). But it takes discipline to see the goodness in what isn’t yet seen—to see God’s promise for our future as good as well as true.

Meditating on heaven, Baxter argues, is how we use our understanding to warm our affections. It throws open “the door between the head and the heart.” The meditation he tries to model is “simply reading over and repeating God’s reasons to our hearts and so disputing with ourselves on his argument and terms.” It involves using our judgment to compare the world’s allure to the promises of heaven until the scale tips toward the latter from the former.

My goal is to do for the friends that I pastor now in the 21st century something like what Baxter did in the 17th century for his readers. We face barriers to meditating on heaven, however, that Baxter couldn’t have imagined 400 years ago.

We’re More Insulated from Death

Our lives, on average, are far more insulated from misery than the average Englishman in 1650, with far more opportunities for wealth and comfort. Beginning in the late 18th century and accelerating ever since, life expectancy, net worth, and quality of life have skyrocketed throughout the West. I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t trade places with anyone from the 17th century. But our unprecedented prosperity can radically distort our perspective on this world.

In Baxter’s time, death lurked beneath every sniffle. Life expectancy was roughly 35 years. Now it’s more than twice that length. Modern medicines, skillful doctors, and remarkable technologies make it seem like there’s always something more to be done, some other way to push back death to another day.

In Baxter’s time, most people died at home, in the same few square feet in which their families spent their lives. They walked to church through the graves of people dear to them. The ever-present reality of death gave an ever-present incentive to look up and beyond the shadows of life on earth.

Now, when someone does come to die, it’s more often than not in a sanitized medical facility, completely isolated from where we live our lives. It’s become easier and easier to live most of life as if death is someone else’s problem. And without an urgent awareness that life is just a breath, it makes sense that we’d set our minds on squeezing as much as possible from this world here and now.

We’re More Secular

Compared to Baxter’s time and place, we live in what some philosophers have called a “secular age.” I don’t mean that we all deny God’s existence. I mean that in our day-to-day lives, we don’t have to assume his existence the same way they did back then. We don’t feel as vulnerable to forces beyond our control or recognize our radical dependence on a reality beyond ourselves.

We live surrounded by stunning human achievements, from high-rise buildings to space-traveling rockets to artificial intelligence we created to outpace our own. Our lives are mediated through all sorts of technologies that filter our work and our play and even our relationships. And compared to Baxter’s preindustrial world, we enjoy an unimaginable degree of control aimed directly at our pleasure and comfort. If I want to, I can have blueberries delivered to my door with a couple of hours’ notice in the middle of February.

In a world like ours, even Christians can easily lose sight of the fact that every meal, just like every breath, comes from above. It takes effort to remember we’re wholly dependent on God, we answer to God for these lives he’s given us, and therefore we ought to look to him in everything.

We’re More Distracted

Perhaps no barrier to heavenly mindedness is more influential day-to-day or more typical of our modern context than the smartphones we carry around in our pockets, lay on our desks while we’re working, then plug in by our pillows while we’re sleeping. I recently saw a cartoon from The New Yorker featuring a headstone with the image of a smartphone etched near the top. The epitaph had just two lines:

50% looking at phone
50% looking for phone

By some estimates, adults spend as many as 4–6 hours per day scrolling on their phones. When you consider how much of that usage happens in spurts, spread out here and there in the middle of whatever else we’re supposed to be doing, we’re spending all our waking moments drawn to our phones. That makes it tough to set our minds on anything at all, much less on things above and things to come.

How we spend our moments is how we spend our lives. Do you want your life measured by how many fantasy football titles you won? Or how many limited-time deals you grabbed? Or how many likes you got on that family photo? Or how many days in a row you nailed the Wordle challenge?

John Stott once preached to a crowd full of eager young students interested in giving their lives to international missions. He reminded them to remember who they were, as citizens of heaven and pilgrims on earth, and to be wary of how quickly we can fix our eyes here below:

I read some years ago of a young man who found a five-dollar bill on the street and who “from that time on never lifted his eyes when walking. In the course of years he accumulated 29,516 buttons, 54,172 pins, 12 cents, a bent back and a miserly disposition.” But think what he lost. He couldn’t see the radiance of the sunlight, the sheen of the stars, the smile on the face of his friends, or the blossoms of springtime, for his eyes were in the gutter. There are too many Christians like that. We have important duties on earth, but we must never allow them to preoccupy us in such a way that we forget who we are or where we are going.

I’m sure it has never been more difficult to set our minds on things above than it is right now. But the stakes are as high as ever. We have much to lose if we don’t and so much to gain if we do.