How Eternal Life Changes the Way We Live Today

Jennifer Rothschild [introduction]: The purpose of Christ’s sacrifice is not just to bring us to heaven someday, but it’s to bring heaven to earth on this day, that the kingdom of God would come here on earth through us.

That everywhere we step, we eradicate a little chaos. Everywhere we walk, we bring a little light into the darkness. We bring heaven to earth today.

So when we live with a true biblical, heavenly mindset, it anchors us in eternity and allows us to live well here on earth today.

Ellen Krause: Welcome back to the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. I’m Ellen, your host. It’s easy to think of heaven as something that’s far off in the future, a wonderful promise for someday, but not something that changes how we navigate anxiety, grief, disappointment, or the ordinary moments of everyday life.

But throughout Scripture, and especially the New Testament, we see that when God’s people face suffering, uncertainty, or discouragement, He often lifted their eyes to eternity.

So what if thinking more about heaven doesn’t make us less engaged with life here on earth, but actually helps us live with more hope, purpose, and joy right here where God has us?

Today, we are so grateful to be joined by Jennifer Rothschild. Jennifer is a Bible teacher, speaker, and best-selling author who has encouraged countless women to delight in God’s Word and trust the Lord through every season.

Jennifer, thank you so much for being here! I’m so excited to have this conversation with you.

Jennifer Rothschild: Me too, Ellen. I already told you, and I’ll say it to our friends, you can’t get a better combination to me than Bible and coffee. So this is awesome.

Ellen Krause: Absolutely. We are fueled. Well, Jennifer, you have a unique perspective on life. Having been blind since the age of 15, tell us about losing your sight and how it influenced your perspective on eternity.

Jennifer Rothschild: Well, yes, I lost my sight when I was 15. So growing up, I could see just fine. And therefore, you know, I loved everything I could see. I happen to have been an artist. Well, I call myself that—who knows if I really was—but I loved to draw. I loved art. My mother was a beautiful painter. It just was beautiful to me. The world was beautiful.

But I lost the majority of my sight at 15. The nature of the disease that I have, retinitis pigmentosa, meant that I would continue to lose eyesight because it was degenerative until eventually my world became darker and darker. And now here I am later in life, and things are black.

So obviously, blindness has shaped my perspective in ways I could have never anticipated. I knew Christ before I lost my sight. I’m so thankful, because when Jesus says He is the light of the world, y’all, He is the light of my world.

Like, without the hope of Christ, yeah, there’s just no way. There’s no way I could have made it through blindness, just inherently made it through blindness, but also made it through blindness without thriving. I mean, truly have a thriving life.

And I know it’s because of Jesus. There’s no other reason it should be. So that doesn’t mean I don’t have hard days. That doesn’t mean I still don’t grieve different seasons of life with blindness.

Ellen Krause: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Rothschild: But I truly believe—I said it when I was 15 years old, and I still say it today—that it is well with my soul.

It is not well with my circumstances. But with full integrity, I can say it is well with my soul, and that is because of Christ.

Ellen Krause: That’s so, so beautiful. And it’s the posture that all of our hearts should have, right? Whether we can see or not.

Jennifer Rothschild: We wanna have, yeah. Yeah.

Ellen Krause: Yes. Well, Jennifer, there’s an old phrase that you had mentioned in your writing that says someone can be so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good.

Jennifer Rothschild: Right.

Ellen Krause: What do you think is meant by that, and how does it contrast with your way of thinking?

Jennifer Rothschild: Well, we can be so, like the old phrase says, heavenly minded, thinking of heaven, that we’re not living on earth in a way that honors Christ or the intent of our heavenly calling.

Because, you know, sometimes we think, Ellen, how kind of Jesus, right? That He would die to bring us to heaven someday. And it is true, He is going to bring us to heaven someday.

But the purpose of Christ’s sacrifice for us is not just to bring us to heaven someday, but it’s to bring heaven to earth on this day, that the kingdom of God would come here on earth through us.

That everywhere we step, we eradicate a little chaos. Everywhere we walk, we bring a little light into the darkness. We bring heaven to earth today.

That’s the real intention of Christ’s sacrifice for us because there is this beautiful concept of heaven that it, yes, it’s not yet. But it’s also already. It’s also now.

And so when we live with a true biblical, heavenly mindset, it anchors us in eternity and allows us to live well here on earth today.

And so the hope of heaven is not just a not yet, can’t wait to get there someday, but it’s a—it is now—the hope and peace and promise of heaven. I get to live it now with a perspective about then that changes my today.

Ellen Krause: And that really does change the everyday sort of ordinary aspects of life.

Jennifer Rothschild: Big time.

Ellen Krause: As you’ve studied Scripture, Jennifer, and what it says about heaven, what’s one misconception that you think Christians often have?

Jennifer Rothschild: I think the primary misconception that most people have, and sometimes people who call themselves Christians have, is that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell.

And the truth of heaven is this: not good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell, but people who have received Christ as Savior go to heaven.

Okay, so in John 14, Thomas, one of His disciples, who has walked with Jesus, says to Him, “Well, how do we know where you’re going? And how do we know the way?”

Jesus says, “Here’s the way to my Father’s house, to heaven. I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life. No one, not good people, not bad people, no one comes to the Father except by Me.”

So that is the greatest misconception and the truth that clarifies it. The good people go to heaven? No, it’s those of us who have chosen to put our faith in Jesus that He is the way.

Ellen Krause: Yes.

Jennifer Rothschild: That’s who goes to heaven. That’s the beauty of the gospel.

So that’s the first misconception that a lot of people have.

And sometimes people who’ve grown up in church and say, “Yeah, I’m a Christian.” You know, to really be a Christian means we have trusted Christ as the way to heaven, not our good works. So that’s first.

But then just a general misconception we have as believers—and this is what I thought, to be very honest.

“Okay, when I die, I’m gonna go straight to heaven and I’m gonna get this glorified body that can do anything, and I’m gonna fly with angels.”

And now, here is the misconception there. It is not that when I die, I immediately go to heaven.

That is truth. When we are in Christ, when we die, we immediately go from what the Bible calls death to life. And to be absent from this body is to be fully present with the Lord.

Yet, according to biblical teaching, we will be in what scholars call the intermediate state, or what I call in easier terms, the present heaven, fully alive in the presence of the Lord. But we don’t have a quote-unquote glorified body as the Bible teaches, not yet.

We have an embodiment, we don’t know what it’s like, but we know we are fully alive, more alive than we even are now, because we know as we are known. We are fully alive in the presence of the Lord.

Yet, someday, when Jesus returns and all things are made new, and there is the forever heaven of the new earth, that’s when those of us who are in Christ receive this resurrected, glorified body that is like our Savior’s body, like Jesus’ body, that allows us to live in the perfect Eden of the new earth, in what I call the forever heaven.

For me, that was a misconception. I just didn’t understand that. But what the Bible teaches us about heaven is so much greater than what we can even imagine.

Ellen Krause: Yes. Thank you so much for clarifying both of those misconceptions, which I would completely agree with you are very common.

And I know as a believer, it wasn’t until I had really examined the Scriptures more carefully that I began to understand what you alluded to there as far as when Jesus comes back again and we get our new glorified bodies. So that’s so helpful.

Well, let’s talk a little bit about how eternity helps us in hard times. When we’re going through difficult circumstances, I think a lot of us instinctively want God to just change them, you know. “I don’t want to go through this.”

Jennifer Rothschild: Yeah, right.

Ellen Krause: But so often in Scripture, we’re instead pointed to the hope we have in heaven with Jesus. Why do you think God does that? And how does that hope actually change the way we live today?

Jennifer Rothschild: Yeah, it’s so hard to speak for the individual reasons why God allows that in individuals’ lives. But if I were to put the echo of what I hear through Scripture into simple phrasing, it would be this: we’re made for far more than longevity. We’re made for eternity.

And so even like in Romans 8:18, Paul talks about the suffering that we deal with right now. And there’s some people listening right now, they’re in the middle of cancer. They’ve just lost somebody they love. They have a chronic disease that makes them every day just have to face perseverance that wears them out. I get it.

And Paul says in Romans 8:18, and I’m blown away by this: he says, “I consider that this present suffering…” Which I love that he considers that it is suffering because it is. But he says this is not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed.

It’s hard here. But Paul is saying, “It’s hard, but it’s not worthy to be compared.” The suffering here, it is light, it is temporary, according to 2 Corinthians 4. But even though it hurts and it’s heavy, when we do compare it, we recognize that there’s such a beautiful glory to come.

So if I can let the reality of the eternal truth of who I am in Christ, what He has prepared for me then, and how it can anchor me now, then it helps me get through and recognize that there’s still hope. There is hope.

Because death, suffering, sorrow, it’s not the end of our story. It’s not. In some ways, it’s this comma that transitions us and prepares us for the forever story of our life, which is the beauty of eternity with Jesus, which will far outlast the past, the suffering we feel here and now.

Ellen Krause: Absolutely, absolutely. Jennifer, you’ve written a beautiful devotional. And the subtitle of your devotional is How the Life to Come Changes Your Life Right Now. And that’s really what you’re talking about, right?

Jennifer Rothschild: Yeah.

Ellen Krause: And I think some of us wonder, how do I actually do that? You know, in practicality, what does it look like to keep heaven in view as we’re going through day-to-day lives?

Jennifer Rothschild: It is hard to make this very practical, Ellen. I really get that. So let me give you three words that begin with the letter L, okay? If I can remember them. Let’s just put those in our daily lives as practical ways to live heaven now, okay?

Think of your longings, think of your loss, and think of your loves.

Okay. I long, man. I long to have my sight restored. And so on those days when I feel that ache of longing, I can’t wait to see color. If I could just see, I know that I would, you know, decorate this room this way, or I would draw this picture of a blue flower.

If I could just see, if I could just see, I long for that sight.

Well, instead of letting that longing be this dead end of, well, that’s just life here on earth, I let my sense of longing be a pathway.

What I long for now, I know I will receive in heaven. And so I’m gonna let the promise of what I will receive in heaven satisfy my longing today, knowing that I am made for heaven, that earth is short and heaven is long.

So my longing is going to point me there.

Ellen Krause: Mm.

Jennifer Rothschild: Okay. I think of the loss I experience. The loss you experience, the loss we all experience. I lost my precious dad. I love my daddy. He was my hero. He went to heaven.

Ellen Krause: Mm.

Jennifer Rothschild: I feel his loss, even now, every day. I have a dear friend who just lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly. I can’t imagine what Lori’s feeling right now.

And I pray that Lori can take that loss, just like I take the loss of my dad, and not feel the emptiness of it, but see it as a launch pad.

Okay, I’m gonna feel that loss. But I’m going to see how it points me to the beautiful reunion in heaven someday.

Ellen Krause: Yes.

Jennifer Rothschild: Think of what you love. I love, I’m just going to be honest, I love small things. I love dark chocolate. I love coffee. I love to feel the petals of a blue flower. I love these things.

I don’t need to look at those at the period at the end of a sentence, like, well, this is all, that’s all there is.

No. If I love something here, this is just a shadow of what is to come. There is a greater substance I will experience. Okay?

So all of those three things that I mentioned—your longings, your losses, the things you love—look at each of those as not the point of heaven. “Yay, my longings will be fulfilled.” “Yeah, my loss will be recovered.” “Yes, the things I love will be better.”

No, don’t look at those as the point. Look at those as pointers.

Everything that we experience here is pointing to a greater reality, to the point, the exclamation point of heaven, which is not just a place, it’s a person, is Jesus.

So that’s a very practical way to just take ordinary things and feelings and emotions and the shadows of what we experience here and let them become pointers that constantly gravitate our heart to the point of heaven and help us to live heaven now and change today.

Ellen Krause: That’s so helpful, so beautiful, so it really gives us sort of this point of focus.

Well, Jennifer, sometimes people become fascinated by questions about heaven itself, but Scripture reminds us that our greatest hope is being with Christ, as you alluded to when we started this whole thing.

How do we keep Jesus at the center of our longing for heaven? Because I know for me personally, sometimes my mind goes directly to meeting up with people that I’ve lost.

Jennifer Rothschild: Mm-hmm.

Ellen Krause: And I have to remind myself, Jesus, this is what it’s all about.

Jennifer Rothschild: Yeah. Well, let’s be honest, Ellen. I’m glad you said that, because let’s be honest, it’s hard.

Because when I first started writing about heaven, honestly, the reason I was so fascinated by it was because I thought, okay, that’s the place I get my sight. That’s the place I get to be reunited with my dad.

Period. It was a very Jennifer-centric version of heaven. And of course, those are good things that we long for.

And I’m being very candid about that because we do that a lot, and I want to be candid also to dispel any shame.

Of course I’m gonna feel that way. But I don’t want to stay that way. I want to use those emotions and those longings, like I said earlier, as pointers.

So, yeah, experience that and then let it point you to the bigger truth.

What is the bigger truth? I long for wholeness. Where am I gonna get my wholeness? Christ and Christ alone. I long for complete union, being known and knowing. Where am I gonna get that? Christ and Christ alone.

So, Ellen, if I want to keep Jesus the treasure of heaven and Jesus the center of heaven, well then I need to experience Jesus as the center of my life.

Jesus as the center of my heart. Why? Because where my heart is, there’s my treasure going to be. And where my treasure is, there is my heart. Like, you can’t separate the two.

So, quite honestly, there is no formula. If I want and you want to make Jesus the treasure of heaven, then I want to make Jesus the treasure of my life today.

And then the question of making Jesus the treasure of heaven becomes a non-issue. Because if He’s the treasure of our life now, He will be the treasure of our life forever.

Ellen Krause: So beautifully said and so true. And I find that the more I spend in God’s Word, with the entire overarching storyline of the Bible pointing to Christ, you can’t help but begin to make Jesus your overall center and focus.

Well, many people are experiencing seasons of grief and personal struggle. Was there a particular time for you, Jennifer, in your life when hope of heaven became especially precious?

I know through, like, in your devotional, you’re so authentic. You give such insight into examples in your life. Can you share one of those with us?

Jennifer Rothschild: You know, there are times when I think we all feel the ache more deeply. I think with blindness, I have the constant drip, drip, drip of loss and grief. And sometimes grief is more acute.

But I’ll never forget the day I was in the kitchen with my daughter-in-law, and it’s interesting how grief showed up in a way I didn’t expect it.

It was Thanksgiving. I was trying to prepare the meal. I didn’t want her to help me because I wanted to serve her. And goodness.

Ellen, after about, you know, 10 minutes of me having one mishap after another, like forgetting which way I put a saucepan and then I burned my arm, forgetting I left a door open and banging into it. I mean, it was just thing after thing, and it was just so frustrating.

And my darling daughter-in-law was like, “Can I help? Can I help?” And I kept saying, “No, no, I’ve got this.” Clearly, I didn’t. But finally, after this one particularly poignant bump on my face with the microwave door, I was so embarrassed, you know, and frustrated.

And she just says to me, “Blindness must be so hard.”

And I remember when she said those words to me, I was standing in front of the microwave, in front of my range top, and I had this sense of, yes, it is so hard, and I hate it. And I can’t wait for it to be over. And I’m tired of it being the boss of me and keeping me from doing what I know I could do.

I mean, there were just a million emotions that washed over me.

But then at the same time, I just felt like I heard the echo of heaven in my heart. And I looked over to Caroline where she was seated, and I said to her, “Yes. Blindness is so hard. But earth is short and heaven is long.”

And I’m telling you, Ellen, the Lord has just used that phrase in my life so many days when I am feeling the acuteness of the grief or just the fatigue of the constant undertow of the grief.

Earth is short and heaven is long.

And it’s what I’m praying for my friend Lori, even now, because I hope it helps us to be people like we learned from the Apostle Paul who grieve with hope.

We’re supposed to grieve. We’re supposed to feel it. But we won’t grieve with despair. We will grieve with hope because we know the earth really is short and heaven is long.

Ellen Krause: You know, that reminds me of something that I learned a long time ago in thinking about this idea, and that is life is but a dot on a page, and heaven is the line that never ends, you know, the unending line.

Jennifer Rothschild: Beautiful, yeah.

Ellen Krause: And so when you can kind of put it into that perspective, that yes, I am experiencing grief or loss or some difficult circumstance, but knowing that this is only temporary, right? And all of eternity is forever certainly does—

Jennifer Rothschild: Thank you, Lord. Yes. Thank you, Lord.

Ellen Krause: Help us reframe that.

Jennifer, as you were writing this devotional, was there any passages of Scripture that especially captured your heart?

Jennifer Rothschild: Yeah, a hundred percent. Second Corinthians 4:16–18, I alluded to it earlier. Paul has talked about our situations in this life, on this side of eternity, and he says, “Therefore we do not lose heart,” because we have an eternal perspective.

Though outwardly we’re wasting away, inwardly, daily, we’re being renewed, and our light and temporary troubles are working within us a far greater weight of glory.

Because what we see here and now is temporary. So therefore, we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Because what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

I mean, there’s so much there, so much encouragement. I love that there’s an acknowledgement that what we experience here is hard, but in light of eternity, it’s temporary.

And so we’re gonna fix our eyes, not on what we can see here. We experience it, we deal with it, yeah, we don’t dismiss it, but we cement our eyes on the unseen because that’s where our hope is, and that’s eternal.

Ellen Krause: Amen. Amen.

Jennifer Rothschild: Amen.

Ellen Krause: Great verse, too. If you haven’t already memorized it, that’s a great verse to memorize.

Well, as we get to closing up here, what would you say to the woman listening whose circumstances feel heavy and she needs hope?

What’s one truth about heaven that you hope she carries after listening to this conversation?

Jennifer Rothschild: You know, I would tell her what my six-year-old son told me so many years ago. His name is Clayton, and we were playing a game. And, you know, with his mom being blind, that’s kind of hard to do. And this new game was not going well. I was knocking over game pieces, and he had been asking a lot of questions about healing.

He had even been praying that God would heal my eyes. Just so precious.

So he finished cleaning up the game, and he was super quiet. And he said something that so surprised me, just out of the blue. He said, “Mom, I don’t think God is going to heal you here on earth.”

And I was so struck by that because I knew how much he wanted my healing. I asked him why, and he said, “Because if God healed you here on earth, you might love earth more, and heaven is best.”

He was six years old.

That’s what I would say to the woman right now who’s feeling the weight of life and hoping for the hope of heaven. I would say it with the profound wisdom of a child who was six when he said it to me and gave me such hope.

Maybe God is not going to heal you here on earth. Maybe God is not going to fix it here on earth.

Because if He did, you might love earth more. You might think that earth is all there is. And heaven is best.

So I promise you, every longing you have will be met. Every prayer for healing you have will be answered. Because someday you really will pass from death to life.

You will step fully into what I call your glorious unending. And the beauty of heaven, it’s going to transcend any darkness here of earth. And you’re really going to understand, yeah, I get it now. Heaven is best.

Thank you, Lord, for not meeting everything I needed on earth because You were saving the best for last.

Ellen Krause: I love that little golden nugget of wisdom that God used to speak through your son to you. That’s incredible and just so encouraging for all of us.

Well, Jennifer, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your just incredible devotional called Heaven for Today?

Jennifer Rothschild: Well, you can find anything you need to know about me at Jennifer Rothschild dot com. And of course, I’m at all the socials.

But if you want to find specifically about the Heaven for Today Journal, it is HeavenforToday dot com.

Ellen Krause: Very good. Well, we will make sure we include those links in our show notes.

Before I let you go, Jennifer, I’m hoping that you’ll share with us. So we always ask our guests a couple questions here. And knowing that you’re blind, I would love to hear your interpretation of your answers.

So the first one is, what is your go-to Bible, and what translation is it?

Jennifer Rothschild: Well, the translation I am just the fondest of is the New American Standard Bible. And I especially love the 1995 translation.

But then, of course, just for reading, I do appreciate the NIV. But I listen on U Version, on my app, on my iPhone, because it talks to me, and I also listen to the Dwell Bible app.

Those are my two favorites.

Ellen Krause: That’s awesome. Okay. Well, you already answered my other question then. Your favorite app or website for Bible study tools. So U Version and—

Jennifer Rothschild: Yeah. Now I do, I will say this, Ellen.

They are both amazing. And when I study, because of lexicon and other things like that, I love blueletterbible.com. That’s also a super helpful study resource.

And I’ll tell you one more because I love these people and what they do. Gotquestions.org. They do such a good—

Ellen Krause: Yes.

Jennifer Rothschild: Job of aggregating content and making it easy to find quick Bible answers.

Ellen Krause: They sure do, they sure do.

All right, last one here. Tell us about how a blind person would go about journaling. Is that something that you like record on a voice recorder, or how does that work?

Jennifer Rothschild: I do it a couple of ways. One, I will sometimes do voice memos on my phone. But most often, because my computer software allows my computer to talk, I can hear everything, I will often just type out my journaling.

And when I file them, I either file them based on the book of the Bible I was journaling about or the content, the topic I was dealing with.

So, yeah, that’s how I do it. And mostly I stay topical rather than within the books themselves.

Ellen Krause: Gotcha, gotcha. Wow. Okay, that’s so cool.

Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Your encouragement to lift our eyes to the hope that we have in Christ while faithfully living the lives that He has given us here today has been such a gift. And we’re just so grateful that you’ve been here.

Jennifer Rothschild: Thanks, Ellen. For me too. Thank you.

Ellen Krause: And to everyone listening, thank you for being here with us. If this conversation encouraged you, we’d love for you to leave a review or share a comment and honestly send it to somebody that you know could use this encouraging message from Jennifer.

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time on the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. Have a blessed day.