Reality or a Dream?

Summer’s Delight

As a young family we always looked forward to summer vacation trips to upstate New York where my parents lived. As we crossed from Kentucky into Ohio, we enjoyed stopping at a certain rest stop, taking our shoes off, and walking in soft cool grass. We were also just a few more hours from Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

Grandma and Grandpa’s house was basically an island surrounded by fields of corn and wheat. Brittni and Jesse were certain that there would be fresh chocolate chip cookies, cool evenings, the smell of freshly cut grass, lightning bugs, and lots of cousins!

The rest of the week would be filled with lots of laughter, sleep overs, and a few short tears from clashes between cousins. The kids built forts, played in the creek, and explored the back 16 acres. Hot chocolate was served in the evening and breakfast was made to order every morning.

Going to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s was a taste of heaven!

The Father’s Home

Heaven is God’s home. We ought to be excited about Heaven and realize that the best memories here on earth are just a taste of the goodness to come.

Romans 8:18–19 NIV

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.

The glory that awaits us will cause every suffering that we’ve ever experienced to be forgotten. Too often we forget the “For God so loved the world” that we are afraid of getting to Heaven. We say things like, “If I make it to Heaven”. We try to measure our good works and hope that there are enough to get us into Heaven. Don’t forget that “Our Father, who art in Heaven” loves us so much that He is eagerly awaiting the day when we will be in Heaven.

True, it blows our minds! This morning I would like to expand our thinking about Heaven beyond the golden streets and pearly gates. I want us to embrace some of the greatest thoughts we will ever consider. A famous Christian writer over a century ago made this declaration:

I shall rise from the dead … I shall see the Son of God, the Sun of Glory, and shine myself as that sun shines. I shall be united to the Ancient of Days, to God Himself, who had no morning, who never began … No man ever saw God and lived. And yet, I shall not live till I see God; and when I have seen him, I shall never die.[1]

Heaven is not a dream; it is a reality!

Heaven Matters!

As I considered the concept of heaven this week, I was stopped by the first sentence that I read about heaven, “The abode of God”. There is a lot to consider about heaven but, for me, it begins and ends with the fact that the Lord is there. Remembering that it is God’s home, let’s consider Heaven together.

Life is About More Than Simply the Natural

We’ve all been guilty of it. We have taken the best moments of this world and tagged it to what heaven must be like.

- This Bell Blue ice cream is heavenly!

- Heaven must be like this beautiful park or tropical island.

- Being with a lover is heaven (in fact there is a country song that makes this better than heaven)

It is hard to avoid. We live in the here and now. We are taught to be ‘in the moment’. Stephen Eyre put it this way:

Think about it. We begin our education at age five or six and attend school six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, until we are eighteen, twenty-two, or older. We learn about physics, biology, math, chemistry; in short, we study the physical side of life. In our educational experience, heaven may not be denied. It is just ignored. Consciously or unconsciously, we get the point: matter is all there is; there is no other world![2]

When we compare the heavenly with the earthly, we are insulting heaven! C.S. Lewis challenged this thinking -

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.[3]

Certainly, there are things in this world that are good, but they are not heavenly. We can’t and shouldn’t trust in them. Instead, they are best understood as things that have created in us a longing for heaven.

Reality began and will end in the supernatural!

We Need an Enthusiastic Belief in Heaven

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. – Malcolm Muggeridge

In just the Gospel of Matthew, the concept of heaven is recognized over 70 times! Approximately ¼ of the parables that Jesus taught included Heaven in the lesson.

The world does all that it can to extinguish the idea that Heaven can exist:

1. Instead, we are told that we should make our place on earth, our heaven.

2. We are told that any interest in heaven is escapism, and our belief is dulled.

3. We are told that our death in this world is the height of tragedy when actually, for the Christian, it is the beautiful continuation, a greater awakening, of a relationship with God.

Death is not the termination of paradise. It is the entrance to paradise. I like what Sam Alberry says about the Return of Christ, another piece of the joy of Heaven:

The day of Jesus’s return will be a wedding feast—and Christians are invited to it not as guests, but as a bride. None of us will have to sneak into heaven through the back door—we’ll be walking up the aisle. - Sam Alberry[4]

Revelation 19:7–9 NIV

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.” (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God’s holy people.) Then the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!” And he added, “These are the true words of God.”

Heaven is Universally Desired

C.S. Lewis maintain that the hunger for heaven is the secret subterranean [deep] motivation that everyone has and that it is present in everything we do.[5] I read a story about a man who yearned for Heaven even before he knew Christ as his personal Savior. Douglas LeBlanc tells the story of his father:

One of my fondest memories of Christmas Eve is singing “Angels We Have Heard on High” alongside my father when I was about nine years old. Dad was a shy man, so he normally would sing hymns very softly. On this night, though, he sang it full bore, off-key, and with the deepest yearning that I had ever heard in him. Dad was drunk that night.

He was a melancholic, battered man, a World War II army veteran who saw many of his friends blown to bits. He sought refuge in alcohol, which made life pretty frightening for Mom, my older brother, Randy, and me. But in church I saw the gentle Cajun who grew up Catholic and who still feared God.

Only a few years after this Christmas Eve service, my brother became a Jesus freak. Dad began reading the Bible to help my brother realize how far he had stepped off the deep end into religious extremism. Within a year Dad realized that my brother had found a relationship with Jesus that Dad had not discovered. So Dad surrendered to Jesus.

Then his drinking simply stopped. He still struggled with anger. We still argued about the length of my hair, my failure to practice the piano, and my halfhearted efforts at homework. Still, I began associating Dad more with love than with fear.

I spent nearly every Christmas with Dad until his death in 1992. We sang “Angels We Have Heard on High” together many times, but somehow my keenest memory is of Dad singing it with such yearning. Now, when I sing this carol, I know a small measure of the yearning Dad felt when I was a boy. I close my eyes and imagine Dad in heaven, singing along at the top of his redeemed lungs, feeling drunk on his adoration for God.[6]

Of course, the Christmas Carol “Angels We Have Heard on High” is about the announcement of the entrance of Jesus into the world. It pictures the angels singing and the mountains repeating the chorus. It celebrates the shepherd’s gladness and joy and finally ends as we look into the manger at Jesus.

The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history…the unifying testimony of the human heart through history is belief in life after death. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal-that this world is not all there is. - Randy Alcorn from his book Heaven

I love how LeBlanc saw the yearning of his father for Jesus and now can celebrate his father, now departed, but with Jesus in Heaven.

Deep inside each of us, God has placed a desire for Heaven.

The Weight of Glory

Some may say that the popular notion of heaven does not excite them. If even the clearest diamond, the best gold chain, or the glassiest of seas does not entice you. You are okay! C.S. Lewis admits that the imagery of jewelry and such is not attractive to him. But he realized that Heaven is, of course, beyond our experience. To understand it we are given only the things that we do experience. “…(H)eaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of Nature,…”[7]

Five promises about Heaven:

1. We will be with Christ – 1 Thess 4:17

2. We will be like Him – 1 John 3:2

3. We will have our own “glory” – 2 Cor 4:17

4. We will be feasted and/or entertained – Psalm 126:1-3

5. We will have some sort of official position in the universe – 2 Tim 2:11-13

The first one would have been enough, but let’s talk about the glory of the believer. Now we understand glory to be ‘glowing’ or ‘fame’. Nobody here is too excited about glowing. And fame seems prideful. But listen to this. This glory is not fame we receive from others. It is fame that we receive from a good, merciful, and gracious Heavenly Father. The same that says, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

Imagine that Heaven is the place where the Heavenly Father expressed His pleasure with you and me, His creations who were designed to please Him! Sadly, we spend time thinking about God and worrying. Instead, we should be thinking about what God thinks of us!

Psalm 8:3–5 NIV

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.

“What is mankind that you are mindful of them…” God’s love for us is not a ‘bait and switch’. It is genuine and beyond anything that we have ever experienced. Check this out:

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.”[8]

Are you kidding me!? As I was writing this I was thinking of our engineer, Ashley. I know he spends years with his team developing a product. Imagine the day it fires up! I can only imagine his joy as it works perfectly, just as designed. Now imagine the Creator of you and me as He delights in his work, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

That is the glory of the believer. This is not a dream; this is reality.

What is Your ‘Why’?

Is your motivation for heaven a selfish one or an affection for the Father? Philip Yancey reminds us that if we “ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, “Be good.” Jesus’ stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, “Help!”

One of the most moving parables of the Bible is the story of the father whose son took his inheritance and walked away from his father. The parable tells us that he went away and spent his money recklessly, pleasing himself without any thought of his family until one day he finds himself broke and fighting with the hogs for scraps of food. It was then that he came to his senses and realized that even the servants of his father’s house lived better. So, he headed back home, not to be a son but to be a servant. However, he didn’t truly understand the Father’s love. Jesus described how the Father saw his son from a long distance and began to run to him…

How do you see the Father’s love for you?

The Father embraced his son, through the family coat on him and placed a ring on his finger. He ordered that there be a feast and a celebration. His son had come home.

Is Heaven a reality or a dream?

If you’ve come home, it is reality. It’s more than we can imagine. It is a supernatural delight!

[1] Donne, John. https://thepastorsworkshop.com/sermon-quotes-on-heaven/ [2]Eyre, Stephen. “C.S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell”. www. Cslewisinstitute.org. Accessed September 14, 2023. [3]Lewis, C.S. https://thepastorsworkshop.com/sermon-quotes-on-heaven/ [4] Why Bother with Church? And Other Questions About Why You Need It and Why It Needs You. [5]Qtd. Eyre, Stephen. “C.S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell”. www. Cslewisinstitute.org. Accessed September 14, 2023. [6]Craig Brian Larson and Phyllis Ten Elshof, 1001 Illustrations That Connect (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2008), 378. [7]Excerpt From: C.S. Lewis. “The Weight of Glory.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-weight-of-glory/id6450249995 [8] Excerpt From: C.S. Lewis. “The Weight of Glory.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-weight-of-glory/id6450249995