Daily
Devotional

When you read stories to your children or grandchildren, a beautiful ending is always the best part. Is it possible that fairy tales were fashioned by people who read the Bible without completely understanding it, yet wanted to somehow believe those wonderful promises of God?  

Consider these examples. Cinderella, who starts out being mistreated by her stepsisters, is delegated to wearing rags and cleaning the cinders from the dirty fireplace. But she ends up marrying the prince and living in a castle. Snow White is so beautiful that her stepmother becomes jealous and orders a servant to take Snow White into the forest and end her life. But the servant cannot kill her, so he leaves poor, frightened Snow White to wander in the forest, where she stumbles upon the cabin of the seven dwarfs. In the end, again, the handsome prince rescues her and they live “happily ever after.”

Those are fairy tales. They reflect life, not as it is, but as we would like it to be. And yet, they may contain some grains of truth. Someone must have heard about Heaven!  

“Happily ever after” is not unrealistic. We read in God’s word that, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Let your imagination stretch out there and think of all the things you would like Heaven to include. You will fall far short of picturing the least of the blessings! God can come up with blessings that we do not even think of or expect.

This present world is full of sadness, injustice, and violence. As Christians, we are blessed to have the Spirit of the Lord to protect us from and help us through the heartaches of life, but how much better it will be when these troubles are gone forever! The Bible says, “The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). That sounds like “happily ever after” to me, and it’s no fairy tale!