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Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven
Exploring the Hope of Our Eternal Future with Christ
If we are not in Christ, this life is the best we will ever experience. If we are in Christ, this life is the worst we will ever experience. But amid the hurry and distractions of this life, we’re only dimly aware of the celestial bliss just around the next bend in the road.
In Finally Home, Dane Ortlund plunges into the word of God and the wisdom of the saints to help us rightly think about heaven, and to draw strength from our coming future more deeply than we ever have before. Writing with the same pastoral warmth and enchanting prose that mark his well-loved books Gentle and Lowly and Deeper, Ortlund speaks directly to the heart, providing insights into what our eternity with Jesus will be like. Finally Home is a timely invitation to lift our focus from the turmoil of our broken world to the wondrous surprises of our eternal home, where the Lord Jesus Christ himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Rev. 21:1–5).
A Vision of This book prompts readers to wonder at what awaits us in heaven and the joy of dwelling with Jesus foreverFrom the Author of Gentle and Lowly (Over 1 Million Copies Sold): Written by Dane Ortlund, this book is marked with the same pastoral warmth and enchanting proseWisdom from Figures Throughout Church Including Thomas Goodwin, Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Lewis, Richard Baxter, and others Explores passages throughout the whole Bible to arrest readers with the heavenly realities inevitably awaiting believers
If we are not in Christ, this life is the best we will ever experience. If we are in Christ, this life is the worst we will ever experience. But amid the hurry and distractions of this life, we’re only dimly aware of the celestial bliss just around the next bend in the road.
In Finally Home, Dane Ortlund plunges into the word of God and the wisdom of the saints to help us rightly think about heaven, and to draw strength from our coming future more deeply than we ever have before. Writing with the same pastoral warmth and enchanting prose that mark his well-loved books Gentle and Lowly and Deeper, Ortlund speaks directly to the heart, providing insights into what our eternity with Jesus will be like. Finally Home is a timely invitation to lift our focus from the turmoil of our broken world to the wondrous surprises of our eternal home, where the Lord Jesus Christ himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Rev. 21:1–5).
A Vision of This book prompts readers to wonder at what awaits us in heaven and the joy of dwelling with Jesus foreverFrom the Author of Gentle and Lowly (Over 1 Million Copies Sold): Written by Dane Ortlund, this book is marked with the same pastoral warmth and enchanting proseWisdom from Figures Throughout Church Including Thomas Goodwin, Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Lewis, Richard Baxter, and others Explores passages throughout the whole Bible to arrest readers with the heavenly realities inevitably awaiting believers
264 pages, Hardcover
Published October 6, 2026
About the author
Dane C. Ortlund
115 books805 followersDane C. Ortlund (PhD, Wheaton College) is chief publishing officer and Bible publisher at Crossway. He serves as an editor for the Knowing the Bible series and the Short Studies in Biblical Theology series, and is the author of several books, including Gentle and Lowly and Edwards on the Christian Life. He is an elder at Naperville Presbyterian Church in Naperville, Illinois. Dane lives with his wife, Stacey, and their five children in Wheaton, Illinois.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Want to Read
March 26, 2026Quite literally freaking out about this one
September 17, 2026
This will be on a very short list of best books I've read this year, and right now I can't imagine how anything else could top it. Combine a top-flight author with the most important subject of all time, and you have a rare but true instance of a "book that could change your life." Or, better--"book that should change your life."
The chapter titles are short, but they give you a good taste for the book: Fleeting. Better by Far. Him. The House of the Lord. Clean. Eternal Kindness. Sorrow and Sighing Shall Flee Away. Eden Restored. Physically Immortalized. Reversal. I Go to Prepare a Place for You. Transposition. Clothed in Glory. Judging the Angels. All Wrongs Righted. A World of Love. Loved Ones? Calmed. Face to Face. Forever.
Ortlund has a clear mission to bore into his readers the reality of eternity. He marshals biblical arguments and the depth of Puritan piety to make his points ably. His illustrations and metaphors are legion and actually helpful. His love for Christ is unmistakable and contagious.
Read this book and get your eyes fixed on what really matters.
The chapter titles are short, but they give you a good taste for the book: Fleeting. Better by Far. Him. The House of the Lord. Clean. Eternal Kindness. Sorrow and Sighing Shall Flee Away. Eden Restored. Physically Immortalized. Reversal. I Go to Prepare a Place for You. Transposition. Clothed in Glory. Judging the Angels. All Wrongs Righted. A World of Love. Loved Ones? Calmed. Face to Face. Forever.
Ortlund has a clear mission to bore into his readers the reality of eternity. He marshals biblical arguments and the depth of Puritan piety to make his points ably. His illustrations and metaphors are legion and actually helpful. His love for Christ is unmistakable and contagious.
Read this book and get your eyes fixed on what really matters.
October 3, 2026
4.5 Star
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
Excellent and encouraging. Mostly every chapter offers insight to the age to come and eternal life. I found a few ideas stretch too far into speculation…those were less helpful. Definitely recommended to encourage the believer and to help the reader understand eternity in Christ.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
Excellent and encouraging. Mostly every chapter offers insight to the age to come and eternal life. I found a few ideas stretch too far into speculation…those were less helpful. Definitely recommended to encourage the believer and to help the reader understand eternity in Christ.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Disclosure: I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
Finally Home is a book for which brevity does not come at the expense of depth. In 20 chapters, Pastor Ortlund guides the reader through the landscape of life and death, exploring crucial concepts to develop a more biblical understanding of life, death, and the afterlife–or, maybe more accurately, the life we were meant to live in the first place. Ortlund offers a very sobering outlook on the vanity of our fleeting, worldly lives. However, with great pastoral care, he encourages us with the biblical promise that, in a “theology of reversal,” suffering does not go unpaid but is recompensed with glory. The glorified saint will be a transposed version of their former self, lifted to a new plane of perfection and restored to what they were made to be before the fall. I found one of the most surprising, and intriguing, aspects of the book to be Ortlund's overarching focus not on heaven per se but on our actual final resting place–the new heaven and earth. (Heaven is only an intermediate state.) Chapters 8 and 9 were among the most striking. Ortlund presents a very insightful account of this destination, which he humorously terms “Eden 2.0,” as well as the glorified resurrection bodies that will call it home. These aspects of the Christian faith are sorely lacking in our contemporary understanding of the Bible, and I am grateful for Ortlund's treatment of them. I was also impressed with his treatment of the more mystical concepts of the beatific vision and the experience of eternal life in chapters 19 and 20. While this book will touch the heart of every reader differently, the impression it left on me was an unexpected sense of the “earthiness” of the afterlife, living in and experiencing the world through perfected resurrection bodies as glorified saints, transposed from the fleeting existence of worldly life to a place of incomprehensible eternal beauty, calm, and rest in Christ--the final temple that has no walls. This is a very different vision of heaven than the flat and flimsy image I had in my mind before reading this book. Thank you, Pastor Ortlund, for your courage, candor, and sense of humor in handling such a sensitive and crucially important topic. Focusing daily on how we are to live here and now as Christians is important, but we must also not miss the forest for the trees and fail to see the point of it all: living the resurrection life with Christ at the end of history.
Finally Home is a book for which brevity does not come at the expense of depth. In 20 chapters, Pastor Ortlund guides the reader through the landscape of life and death, exploring crucial concepts to develop a more biblical understanding of life, death, and the afterlife–or, maybe more accurately, the life we were meant to live in the first place. Ortlund offers a very sobering outlook on the vanity of our fleeting, worldly lives. However, with great pastoral care, he encourages us with the biblical promise that, in a “theology of reversal,” suffering does not go unpaid but is recompensed with glory. The glorified saint will be a transposed version of their former self, lifted to a new plane of perfection and restored to what they were made to be before the fall. I found one of the most surprising, and intriguing, aspects of the book to be Ortlund's overarching focus not on heaven per se but on our actual final resting place–the new heaven and earth. (Heaven is only an intermediate state.) Chapters 8 and 9 were among the most striking. Ortlund presents a very insightful account of this destination, which he humorously terms “Eden 2.0,” as well as the glorified resurrection bodies that will call it home. These aspects of the Christian faith are sorely lacking in our contemporary understanding of the Bible, and I am grateful for Ortlund's treatment of them. I was also impressed with his treatment of the more mystical concepts of the beatific vision and the experience of eternal life in chapters 19 and 20. While this book will touch the heart of every reader differently, the impression it left on me was an unexpected sense of the “earthiness” of the afterlife, living in and experiencing the world through perfected resurrection bodies as glorified saints, transposed from the fleeting existence of worldly life to a place of incomprehensible eternal beauty, calm, and rest in Christ--the final temple that has no walls. This is a very different vision of heaven than the flat and flimsy image I had in my mind before reading this book. Thank you, Pastor Ortlund, for your courage, candor, and sense of humor in handling such a sensitive and crucially important topic. Focusing daily on how we are to live here and now as Christians is important, but we must also not miss the forest for the trees and fail to see the point of it all: living the resurrection life with Christ at the end of history.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 1, 2026
There are some really encouraging and eye-opening insights from Ortlund, especially early on although this is the weaker of his books - often times relying too much on assorted anecdotes and a neverending stream of quotes from other more substantial theological works. For an overview and primer on heavenly doctrine, this is a great devotional work otherwise there’s less than more that I walked away from this book by Ortlund. Nonetheless, I appreciate his pastoral heart and tone throughout all of his writings.
September 29, 2026
A humbling and comforting book. Dane has a way of writing that feels poetic, rich, and timeless.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews