Who Goes to Heaven?

There are only a handful of times when I've been late in blogging, and most of those were due to technical difficulties or other circumstances beyond my control. This time, I'm glad that I was prevented from blogging this morning. What I was going to blog about was probably going to be dumb, but now I really feel like blogging about a theme I picked up in church today - a theme which had nothing to do with the talks or the lessons - which I might have forgotten if I wasn't about to blog about it right now.

Sinners go to heaven.

This seems to contradict several teachings in the scriptures, including all those that warn about the consequences of sin and speak of the immutability of Eternal laws. Yet, it must be true, or heaven would be an endlessly desolate place. Besides that, we have scriptoral evidence of some people having died and gone to heaven, and if anyone (besides Jesus) went to heaven, that group certainly included its share of sinners.

We are all human. Being human, we all make mistakes and bad choices, including sins. We are all sinners. And yet Jesus, in His infinite mercy, invites us to Come Unto Him anyway:

Come unto Jesus, ye heavy laden,
Careworn and fainting, by sin oppressed.
He'll safely guide you unto that haven
Where all who trust him may rest.

Come unto Jesus; He'll ever heed you,
Though in the darkness you've gone astray.
His love will find you and gently lead you
From darkest night into day. 

Hymns 117, verses 1 and 2

 Although we've all gone astray and wandered onto paths of darkness, our Savior is more than willing to welcome us back and earnestly invites us to come as we are. We're not perfect. None of us are. But heaven isn't a place full of perfect people who have never done anything wrong. It's a place full of people who may have done a lot of things wrong, but who did at least one thing right: They repented. They got down on their knees, told their Heavenly Father they were sorry, and vowed to make a sincere effort to not repeat their poor choice. Maybe they kept their vows, and maybe they didn't. Maybe they slipped up again. But if they did, they must have repented again, and God must have forgiven them again. Even though they were sinners, God forgave them and welcomed them back into their heavenly home.

When Jesus prayed for us in Gethsemane and died for us on Calvary, He didn't just suffer for our sins. He "bid the prison doors unfold," and "called upon the sin-bound soul to join the heav'nly throng" (Hymns 182, verses 3 and 2). That song, We'll Sing All Hail to Jesus' Name, was the song that got me thinking about this. Even though I'm a sinner (a generally good person, but yes, a sinner) and I know that I'm not worthy of the great blessings God offers to His faithful followers, this gives me hope that He may extend those blessings to me anyway. And that makes me want to keep His commandments - not to earn my salvation (it's a little bit too late for that), but to show my thanks for His mercy.

I typically think of heaven as a place with saintly and angelic people in it, and I thought that, if I were there, I'd feel a pang of guilt, remembering my sins, and I'd think that I didn't deserve to be there. Now I'm wondering if it's not the case that everyone there will have those same feelings. It's funny that the people who believe that they're wonderfully righteous often aren't as righteous as they think, and the people who truly are fairly righteous are willing to humbly admit that they aren't righteous enough. I think that we'll find a lot of people like that in heaven. In fact, we'll probably be among them.