“The Christian hope is not, despite popular impressions, that we will simply ‘go to heaven when we die’.  As far as it goes, that statement is all right; after death those who love God will be with him, will be in his dimension.  But the final Christian hope is that the two dimensions, heaven and earth, at present separated by a veil of invisibility caused by human rebellion, will be united together, so that there will be new heavens and a new earth.
Heaven isn’t, therefore, an escapist dream, to be held out as a carrot to make people better behaved; just as God isn’t an absentee landlord who looks down from a great height to see what his tenants are doing and to tell them they mustn’t.  Heaven is the extra dimension, the God-dimension, of all our present reality and the God who lives there is present to us, present with us, sharing our joys and our sorrows, longing as we are longing for the day when his whole creation, heaven and earth together, will perfectly reflect his love, his wisdom, his justice, and his peace.”
~ N. T. Wright, Following Jesus