What is reality?

As I started my week of renewing and refreshing with the Lord I was reading a fiction/fantasy book that challenged me about what is reality.  We have so often accepted a reality that is not influenced by God's Kingdom but more by our experience of this world.  Heaven is not just the "sweet by and by" but actually a place and a superior reality to this one, since Heaven created earth not the other way around.  Since the gospel boldy states that not only have we been united with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection (Romans 6) but also His acension (Ephesians 2:6).  In the verse in Ephesians we are told that we are "and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus", this is not future tense but past tense.  Amazing that this is something already accomplished through the finished work of Jesus Christ and by His grace in the New Covenant, this is all part of being born again.  What a low view of ourselves we have compared to this radical truth which is the gospel.  I can see how unbelief is our primary problem, which so limits our experience of our inheritance in Christ.  Since our spirit is now seated (which is a position) in heavenly places in Christ, does this amazing work of God have a function or is it merely a honorary title.  I believe that the Word boldly declares that our "citizenship is in Heaven" (Philippians 3:20), I don't often think of a citizen of a country as just someone who visits there but a daily resident.  Since I am a daily resident of heaven then to have experiences of heaven would be normal for us as believers.  But I am caught in this contrast between two worlds, one in which I often feel painfully normal (or below normal), and another where I am told I am someone amazing who through the Holy Spirit can do amazing things.  Everyday I am giving this feedback on a moment to moment basis that I am merely human and not extremely special.  I believe disappointment has a lot to do with shutting down our dreams and hopes of who we are in Him.  I began to see through the Holy Spirit highlighting it in my heart that when I was disappointed so many times then I began to stop hoping (as a child).  In our dreams we dream of being someone better than we are now, we dream of our needs being more than met.  When you live in an earthly reality where you needs are rarely met and you live with the daily pain of unmet needs, you begin to accept this as normal.  As a child I dreamed of a father who would love me unconditionally, teach me how to be a man, believe in me with his strength, and fill the holes in my heart that were so painful.  But after a season I began to lose hope and then give up all together.  Then my hope was reignited through the accepting Christ and the Gospel.  Yet when my beginning experience of the love of God began to fade, others around me seemed to be okay with a God who loved them from a distance.  Either they were okay with it or they had the love of God that I so desired.  I see that in heaven there is no limit to the love of God poured out on us (Ephesians 2:7), yet why do so few seem to experience what is clearly written in the Word.  Sometimes I feel as though I am going to explode with tension between these two realities, just like the character in the book "White" by Ted Dekker.  In this book Thomas Hunter is torn between a reality where good and evil are clear and so is God, then an earthly reality where things are hidden.  Thomas Hunter believes he is dreaming in both realities but soon learns to draw strength from God (called Elyon) in the one reality, to change the earthly reality that is unfolding into disaster.  I feel like Thomas Hunter.

In His Grace,
Bret