living and dying

If we have lived properly—indeed, one might say, if we have died properly—

throughout our life, we go straight to heaven after death.

For we are called to die to our old selves, and live in the life of Christ 

Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.52 Baptism, then, is a rebirth, but it leaves the roots of the old life still within us, so that really it is only the beginning of a process of putting off the old man and putting on the new, which will only reach its normal and natural end with our death.