Homesickness is the distress caused by being away from home. When God brings people into His family, their home becomes heaven instead of earth, and they keep longing to get home. Instead of being a child of their time, beholden to the culture and values of this world, the believer can’t help showing by their tastes and mannerisms and colloquialisms that they belong somewhere else. Their thoughts turn frequently to their Father in heaven, their Elder Brother preparing their place there, and their Comforter preparing them for their place. As citizens of a better place, they walk and talk, eat, sleep and breathe heavenly. In the following updated extract, James Durham gives six characteristics of the lifestyle or “conversation” of those who are citizens of heaven.

I would like to show you how a Christian may be said to have (and should have) his “conversation” or “citizenship” in heaven.

Our heart is in heaven

First, in respect of the inward holy frame and divine set of his heart. The Christian should be heavenly in that. Free from those distempering passions that the people of this world are subjected to (even enslaved to and harried with), the Christian should not have his affections dragging along on the earth, nor his delights or desires taken up with things that are earthly. Instead he should be mortified to and weaned from all those things.

Unlike those who are on all occasions tossed up and down with their moods and with every wind of temptation, the Christian should be so calm, composed and sober, settled and fixed in a heavenly frame of spirit that words of reproach would not much trouble him, nor crosses and afflictions much disquiet him. He should have such composure and sedateness of spirit that he would be much above the levity and unstayedness that worldly people are under the power of, and he should endeavour to be purged from those impure mixtures of self-interests that reign in the worldly.

Our work is in heaven

Secondly, in respect of our work, as Christians we should and may have our “conversation” in heaven, when we are much in the exercise of those graces, and in the practice of those duties, that we will be occupied with in heaven.

We are to be much in love to God, taken up with delighting in Him.

We are to be much in communion with God, holily impatient when we don’t have Him, or have to live without His company.

We are to be much in the study and searching out of His perfections.

We are to be studying to have the heart fixed, as if it was a pillar in His house, and not to go out from Him.

We are to be much in admiring and adoring the free grace and love of God, and to be in a holy manner ravished with the contemplation of these.

We are to be much in the work of prayer, and much in the work of praise, saying, “Worthy is the Lamb to receive glory, honour, dominion, etc,” joining with the four beasts and four and twenty elders, saying, “Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty!”

We are to be much in prizing and valuing God, in setting out and commending Him.

We are to be in all duties willing and cheerful, doing God’s will cheerfully and with alacrity.

We are to be much in longing for the sabbath, to converse more closely with him, longing often for privacy and quiet opportunities to pour out our hearts before Him.

And we are to do all this with holy coveting to do it better, praying that his will may be done on earth, as it is done in heaven.

Our distinctive character is from heaven

Thirdly, believers may be said to have their “conversation” (and you are called to have yours) in heaven in respect of a heavenly walk, and as having a heavenly impression on all your lifestyle — to be walking as it were in heaven, and as if “Holiness to the Lord” were written on your foreheads.

This is a very comprehensive point, which includes things like the following.

(1) The heart is fixed in meditating on God and His law, on spiritual and heavenly things. There is a sublime and divine strain of mind, which does not debase itself to pursue vanities, but keeps in a close and constant pursuit after communion with God and conformity to Him. As David says, “When I awake I am still with thee” (Psalm 139), labouring to leave the heart and mind in heaven when you lie down, and seeking to find it there when you rise.

(2) Your affections, love, desires and delights are in heaven, or heavenly.

(3) Your words savour of heaven, “ministering grace to the hearers.” You endeavour to have your words weighty and grave when you are commending God and His grace.

(4) Your hearing of the Word, and your praying, carry much of a heavenly stamp and impression on them. You hear, as if God were speaking to you directly from heaven, and you pray, as if you were actually before His throne.

(5) In your everyday life, as in eating and drinking, and relaxing, and following your lawful callings and employments, even the most menial and laborious of them, you have a different end in view than the people of the world do, for you make your main end to glorify God. And your heavenly and divine way of going about these things is the kind of way that may be convicting, edifying and attractive to onlookers. You are not predominantly influenced by selfish whims, plans or interests, looking only, or mainly, to what may please or profit yourselves, but levelling all at the glory of God, and the edification and good of others, as well as your own.

Our business is in heaven

Fourthly, we may be said to have our “conversation” in heaven, when we have a holy commerce and trading (as it were) with heaven, the way a man may trade in France or Spain. To have converse in heaven is spiritually to trade there — to have faith and hope exercised in and about heaven, to send many prayers and desires to heaven, as so many empty vessels, and to be in the lively and longing expectation that they will return full and richly laden — and to make many visits to heaven.

It means to be busy in all these, neither seldom, nor transiently, and only by fits and starts, but frequently and with more persistence. Even if they should sometimes return either with seeming loss, or with very little gain, yet you keep up the trade and traffic, seeking to make up our loss by a new voyage there (for not everyone makes profit equally quickly).

Our residence is in heaven

Fifthly, we may be said to converse in heaven, by our abiding (as it were) in heaven. This is one of the highest steps of a heavenly “conversation.” How it is that a believer, while on earth, can abide in heaven?

1. By having your heart in heaven, where your treasure is. For, as the Lord says, “where a man’s treasure is, there his heart is.” The man, as it were, dwells there, and if at any time he moves away a little, he leaves the most of his stock there, and leaves his heart as an overseer. So, though the Christian is discoursing, buying, selling, eating, drinking, etc., yet in all these, his heart may and ought in some way to be in heaven.

2. By having your faith in heaven, and, as it were, never coming out of it.

3. By having your love in heaven, folding your two arms around the Lamb and Him that sits on the throne, holily reluctant to have them loosed from those sweet soul-solacing and soul-satisfying embraces.

4. By having your hope in heaven. This is “an anchor cast within the veil,” and makes the soul safe and sure amidst the greatest tempests of outward trouble, as a ship rides safely when she has cast anchor on firm ground, so that there is no fear she will drive.

When these four — the heart, faith, hope, and love — are in heaven, we may say that your best half is in heaven. Your tethering stake is loosed, and much of your tabernacle taken down, and in a good measure you are fit, ready and ripe for your dissolution and for heaven. In this sense you are called and obliged to “have your conversation in heaven.”

Our enjoyments are in heaven

Sixthly, a believer’s “conversation” is in heaven when his contentment, delight and satisfaction are in heaven — when all that you desire, all that you delight in, all that your soul feeds on, and all that you are comforted with, is in heaven. You don’t have a good day, or even a comfortable good hour, except what is given you from heaven.

This is not only to be abiding with God but to be delighting in God — having the peace of God that passes understanding guarding the heart, and His love shed abroad in it, and having all that sustains life coming from heaven. As it says in Colossians 3:3, “our life is hid with Christ in God.” The believer is affected with nothing, feeds on nothing, and is satisfied with nothing so much as with what comes from heaven. He wakes, he sleeps, he rests there.

This is to live in heaven, and to be heavenly in our conversation. This is what you are called and obliged to. As believers you are of different nature to others, and as believers you are called to a different, more divine frame of soul in your work and walk, in your thoughts and words, in your outward duties, and your inward graces, in your commerce and trading, in your contentment, delight, and satisfaction — to be heavenly in it all.

Why is it so difficult to be heavenly?

Does anyone here say, “This is a very hard task!”

I answer, first, Can it be hard to be in heaven? No, it’s the definition of easiness, for Christ’s yoke is easy and His burden is light, and to the extent that our conversation is in heaven, to that extent we have true spiritual rest and repose of soul. It is what we leave behind in the world that makes the difficulty to get our spirits hauled up to heaven, and to be kept there. The difficulty is here, but the more our heart and the mind are there, we have really the more ease.

Second, I ask, will you shift, deny or decline a duty, because it’s difficult and hard? Certainly it’s hard to corrupt nature, yet notwithstanding all the difficulty of it, the Apostle Paul with his fellows and followers managed it to a good degree, and we too may attain it through grace, according to our own capacity. Is not this the way to heaven which our Lord calls “strait,” and which “only few find”? And yet, if we would only give it a try in good earnest, we would find it to be not so very strait or unpassable as we imagine it to be. We would find it accompanied with such delight as would much sweeten any hardness in it, and we would get an insight into the heavenly mysteries, and a look at our names written in heaven and in the Lamb’s book of life, and we wouldn’t lack one hour’s feeding on and being solaced by these delights for all the delights of the men of this world. Since it’s only hard to corruption, it should be something we endeavour and pursue all the harder.

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