Sermon Tone Analysis

Heaven

Redemption

Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor

September 28~/30, 2007

 

 

Today we begin our new series on Heaven, both what it will be like then, in eternity (which is a long time!) and what difference it makes in our lives now.

If you know Jesus Christ, you will spend far more time in heaven than here, so we are going to see what the Bible says about the life after this one.

This is a series based on what the Bible teaches about heaven; I say that because there is so much written about heaven lately from the perspective of people who claim to have been there or had near-death experiences, which are interesting experiences—but I don’t base my faith on people’s interesting experiences.

I base my faith on what God has revealed in this book, so that will be our focus.

To get us started off right, we found a teacher on video from a few years back that did a pretty incredible job trying to capture in a nutshell what heaven will be like, so let’s watch the screens together.

Show video.

That video is like a dog that is so ugly it is cute; it is so bad it is good.

Now just try to erase everything you just heard.

Yet, it does a great job illustrating how we so often get our notions of heaven so wrong…so much so that who would really want to go there?

What picture of heaven did you grow up with?

At times I’ve pictured each of us with little chubby angel bodies and wings flying around with harps for eternity.

Sounds fun.

A few times in my life well-meaning but highly frustrated Sunday School teachers trying to get us to sing or listen to a lesson taught us that we better get used to singing songs like that because that’s what we are going to do forever in heaven.

We are going to spend all of our time worshiping God.

As a 10 year-old-kid, that sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it?

An eternal church service.

That just made me pray that God would let me live a really long time down here.

It’s kind of like the Far Side cartoon of this guy with angel’s wings on a cloud who has just gotten to heaven, and the caption says, “I should have brought a magazine.”

Growing up, I honestly thought, “Okay, so right now heaven sounds really boring, but maybe when I get older I will change my mind, kind of like enjoying classical music or something.”

But if heaven is an eternal church service, as I’ve gotten older that only seems more boring, not less.

And yet, I would also read the Bible about how people like Abraham and Paul were so excited to get to heaven.

They couldn’t wait to get there.

And I figured it was because they are so godly, they like boring stuff…that the more godly you get, the more you like what seems boring when you are not so godly.

Or maybe God will give us a new desire to want to be in a forever church service.

But maybe the reason these guys so looked forward to heaven is because they knew something I didn’t, that they have perspective that we have missed.

As I’ve studied what the Bible says about heaven, what it will really be like, I realize that is indeed the case.

We just finished a series called /Twisted/, and we could have easily thrown our view of heaven into that series because we tend to get it so twisted around that it is nothing like the real thing.

And that is good!

Because heaven is not an eternal church service, with us floating around in diapers and a harp.

In this series, we are going to have our view of heaven twisted around 180 degrees to a much better and much clearer picture.

Today we are going to get started replacing what we think we know about heaven with the much more compelling picture provided in God’s Word.

But before we jump into specific passages in the Bible like Revelation 21-22, we’ve got to understand the over-arching story of the Bible and of the world.

If we don’t understand the bigger picture, then the specific pictures provided in the Bible make no sense.

I think that is the main reason people have gotten it so wrong.

There is this big story going on throughout the whole Bible, and heaven is the conclusion to that story.

But you can never understand the conclusion if you don’t understand the rest of the book, the rest of the story.

So, let’s begin at the beginning, in the world as it was in the very beginning, recorded in the book of Genesis.

In Genesis, God creates man and woman, Adam and Eve, and they are in paradise, called Alabama…or the Garden of Eden.

That is the environment God created you and me to live in, paradise, a perfect environment.

What was life like for them?

They had a perfect marriage, kind of like Christy and me.

They lived in a world of complete harmony with each other, with God, with the animals, with the environment.

It was a place of responsibility without frustration…a world unstained by sin and foreign to the concept of death and disappointment.

They walked with God and enjoyed a personal, up close relationship with their creator.

God created humanity to live on a perfect earth, and yet there was one caveat.

Their own free will…because God gave them the choice to obey him or choose sin, and unfortunately they chose curtain B. They chose sin, and when they fell head over heels into sin, creation and this whole earth fell along with it.

When sin entered this planet, along with it came the promised curse.

All of creation was tainted, and all of life was stained with sin and death.

From that point, this planet was no longer paradise but something far less, the ruins of a once perfect environment.

We now live on a cursed earth, which means that every part of life is stained, and we feel it every day.

Life here is just messed up.

Romans 8 talks about the curse,

 

Slide: __________ ) Romans 8:19-22

 

/19//The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.

//20//For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope //21//that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

//22//We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time./

All of creation was subjected to frustration, a Bible word that means futility.

The world got broken by sin.

That’s why every part of life is sometimes good but never perfect, and often just messed up.

Here is what happened in the curse, and why all creation groans awaiting the time that God will make the world right again:

 

Slide: __________ )