Psalm 24:3-6. Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart; who does not give his soul to what is false; and who does not swear deceitfully. That person will receive blessing and vindication at the time of his salvation. This is what the generation of those who seek God are like.

This sounds pretty easy - just four things that we need to get to heaven: clean hands (that is, don't be in a state of sin); a pure heart (that is, have the desire to be good); to not lift our souls to what is false (that is, to not be putting something else higher than God - don't have idols); and to not swear deceitfully (that is, be honest). These are the kind of people who will be in heaven, and frankly they're the only kind of people with whom I would want to spend eternity.

This is what we should be striving for, but we all know how difficult any one of these things is, much less all four! I find that a frequent examination of conscience helps a lot - it helps me to catch deviations from these things before I go too far and become the kind of person that nobody would want to be with for eternity.

Also, I have been thinking a lot about the word "generation" in the Bible lately. Jesus used it a lot. In today's Gospel he said that this generation would not pass away before his Second Coming. That is one reason his disciples were convinced that he would be back in their lifetimes. But "generation" in the Bible obviously doesn't mean what we mean by it. I think there is only one generation - all of us. Humanity as a whole is Jesus' generation (and when you really think about it, we are all his generation, all human beings from the beginning of time were "generated" by God). Thus, Jesus was saying that humanity will not pass away before the Second Coming. And here in this Psalm, the generation who will attain heaven are those who seek God, those who behave as described. This is true throughout time, not just in David's generation.

I think we all want to be in an eternity where all people are like those described here. If these are the kind of people we want to be around, we should try to be those kind of people ourselves, so they want to be around us for eternity!