INTRODUCTION
I have read that there is a community of
Christians in Africa, where—whenever one of their members dies—they don’t say, “He
has departed,” or “She has departed” but always, “He has arrived” or “She has
arrived.”
In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul compares this earthly
body to a tent. And he compares the body we will have for eternity to a “house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens” (v1).
Then he goes on to write, “For while we are still in this tent, we
sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further
clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (v4)
I will admit that we don’t know much about
heaven. How could we? It will be a different world.
Last Christmas Eve we brought a blind woman
to church with us. She was born blind. She had never seen anything.
At our service we had candles. Colored lights
shone around us. There was a lot of talk about how Jesus is the light of the
world.
I wondered: How can Chris imagine what light
is? How could I describe it to her?
I couldn’t think of a way. To a blind person
light and color is simply unimaginable.
That’s why it is so hard to imagine heaven.
We couldn’t understand if someone described it to us.
But there are some things we know for sure.
And this afternoon I want to talk about some of the things we know for sure
about our Eternal Home.
I. When we get home, we will be changed.
A. We will be beautiful! Jesus said, “The
righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew
13:43).
One of the hard things about growing old is
that we are not as good looking as we used to be. This may be even harder for
some of you who were especially beautiful when you were young.
The most famous early New England poet was a
lady named Anne Bradstreet. At the end of Anne Bradstreet’s life she had
tuberculosis and had had horrible lesions on her arm. He son, Simon, reported
that her nurse thoughtlessly remarked that she had never seen such an arm. Her
son said, “My most dear mother answered, 'That arm shall be a glorious arm!'”
Someday we will all be beautiful beyond our
wildest dreams. We will be more than beautiful: we will be glorious. But we won’t be vain because everyone will be glorious. We
will be occupied with admiring each other. I don’t think there will be any
mirrors in heaven.
B. We will be changed because we will be more real than we ever were on this
earth.
We will not be ghosts. We will not be able to
see through one another.
Sometimes when a person’s health has declined
a great deal, people say, “He’s just a shadow of his former self.” On earth,
even at our best, we are but a shadow of the self we will be in glory.
C. We will be changed because we will be perfect.
There will be no more struggle with sin.
We will be free to fulfill our destiny as
obedient, worshiping children of God.
We will be set free from our selfishness, our
self-centeredness, our anger, envy, grumbling, all our hateful habits.
We will be free to be what God always intended
us to be…and it will be wonderful!
We will be perfect and we will dwell in the
Paradise of God.
II.
When we get home, we will be full of
joy!
A. Psalm 16 ends this way:
Thou dost show me the path of
life.
In thy presence is fullness of
joy.
In thy right hand are pleasures
forever more.
Jesus speaks of the destiny of the Lord’s
faithful servants as “entering into the
joy of the Lord”(Matthew 25:23).
In an old book I found this quaint comment: “Here some drops of joy enter into us,
but there we shall enter into joy.”
B. The story is told of a lady who read
somewhere that eating oat bran muffins would help her to live a long life. So
she ate oat bran muffins every day and lived to be a hundred. When she got to
heaven, all her friends had been there a long time. They were having such a
good time that she was heard to mutter, “Oh why
did I eat all those oat bran muffins?”
In our family we like that story because our
mother ate bran muffins. She said they tasted like sawdust, but she ate them
because they were healthy. When someone told her that story, she laughed so
hard that tears came into her eyes.
Incidentally, my mother also lived to be a
hundred.
III. When we get
home, we will dwell in love!
A. A Christian lady in a nursing home asked
me almost every time I came: “Do you think we will know our loved ones in
heaven?”
I told her: “Of course we will know each
other in heaven. We will live in a city. You don’t live in a city alone. Jesus
told us to love one another. We begin on earth to learn to love. In heaven we
will learn to love perfectly. We will love one another for all eternity.”
B. Jesus compared the coming kingdom to a
banquet. At a banquet, we have company. We’ll see our friends and make ever so
many new ones.
Jesus said, “I tell you, many will come from the east and from the west and sit at
table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew
8:11).
Jesus told his disciples: “As my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you that
you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom…” (Luke 22:29-30).
IV. When we get home
to heaven, we will see Jesus and worship
him!
A. This is the most important part.
The last verse in Psalm 17: “As for me, I shall behold your face in
righteousness. When I awake I shall be satisfied with beholding your form.”
St. John wrote this: “Dear friends, we are God’s children now. It does not yet appear what
we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we
shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2)
B. We will worship in heaven.
We will do many things besides worship.
I think we will play…tell stories…create
works of art…listen to music…have conversations with angels and saints…
We will be always learning, always growing, always
making new friends, always having new experiences.
We will meet Jesus face-to-face. He will talk
to us.
Worship will be the high point of our
experience in heaven.
I don’t know whether we will have sermons,
but we will have singing—we will sing with the angels
In the Old Testament book of Zephaniah we
read that God himself with sing: “He
will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival” (Zephaniah
3:17).
For those who love Jesus, worship will be
exciting.
Our worship will be more excitement than the
excitement teenagers have at rock concerts—that’s a kind of worship...
More excitement than fans have at a football
game—that’s a kind of worship too.
Charlotte’s father was from Wales. The Welsh
people love to sing.
Little towns in Wales have choirs.
Coal miners and factory workers have choirs.
When we visited Wales, we visited a
Presbyterian church where the congregation was singing in four-part
harmony—like a choir—from words-only hymnbooks!
Welsh-Americans have hymn-singing festivals
here in the United States. Charlotte and I have been to a couple of these
festivals.
Now, as you know, I can’t sing well at all,
so in church I don’t sing loud. But at these hymn singing festivals there are
hundreds of people. The sopranos sit together, the altos sit together, and so
with the tenors and basses.
I sat in the tenor section surrounded good
singers. I sang as loud as I wanted and no one looked at me. I felt like I was
singing as well as anyone because I couldn’t hear myself. The thought came to
me: “Why, this is like heaven!”
I’ve never had more fun.
We will need our new and stronger, glorified
bodies to contain all the joy that will be ours whenever we worship in heaven.
Then we will truly “enter into the joy of the
Lord.”
CONCLUSION
Let me finish with a beautiful picture of our
Eternal Home from the last book of the Bible, the next –to-the-last chapter: Revelation
21:
Then I saw a new heaven and a
new earth;
for the first heaven and the
first earth had passed away,
and the sea was no more.
And I saw the holy city, New
Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from
God,
prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband;
and I heard a great voice from
the throne saying,
“Behold the dwelling of God is
with people.
He will dwell with them, and
they shall be his people,
and God himself will be with
them;
he will wipe away every tear
from their eyes,
and death shall be no more,
neither shall there be mourning
nor crying nor pain any more,
for the former things have
passed away.”
And he who sat upon the throne
said,
“Behold, I make all things
new…”
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