From Here To Eternity

I'd like to ask you to turn, if you would, please, to Revelation chapter twenty one.

As Scott indicated, and if you've been around for the last several weeks, you are probably aware of the fact that we are examining Scripture in a lot of different places in Scripture to talk about a very important subject.

It is life, death, and life after death.

This topic is prevalent throughout all of Scripture.

And so we're gathering from various portions in Scripture, bringing it together in a topical way, a little bit different from how we normally just take a book of the Bible and move through it.

But it's prevalent throughout all of Scripture.

You will die.

I've tried to help you admit this in a variety of different ways.

I probably have irritated some of you, and in this case I would say, oh well, by suggesting that we learn to conjugate the verb to die.

I die, you die, he, she, and it dies, we die, you die, and they die.

It is very, very pertinent for all of us.

And this matter of life, death, and life after death is very practical.

When God speaks to us about these matters, he does not give us revelation and truth in order to satisfy our curiosities.

And boy, are we curious, and rightly so, especially about things to come that we've not yet experienced, and we do know it may just be in the middle of the night that we admit it that we're going to die.

And so when God speaks to us about these things, we are rightly curious about it.

But there is more than that.

God reveals truths about death in particular and what happens after death in order that we might know how to live now.

We will not know how to live well unless we're able to take this phase of life and put it in a much broader context, because this life is not just about this life.

It is also about the life to come.

So what I'm suggesting is that we need to think and think biblically about life and death and life to come for very practical reasons.

So we want to try to open up the scriptures, expose them, and apply them practically in our lives.

Now, there's this is the third of a series of messages.

And these are not just separate, distinct, discrete, unrelated topics with one another.

This is not a linear, but rather kind of a, well, we're not talking here the way Paul talked in Romans, for example.

Love Paul, you can outline Paul.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

This is more the way John, the gospel writer, and the writer of the book of books of 1, 2nd, and 3 John Revelation, the way he wrote, and it was more take an idea and then talk about it and talk about a number of other things, and then a few verses later, a few chapters later, he comes back to it where these recurring themes.

All of these topics interact with each other in dynamic ways.

So if all you're getting is what you hear today, then you won't have a broader context to put it in, and it won't have, Lord willing, the same impact.

What I'm trying to do in these messages is to expand our thinking, to think about things we may not normally think about, and also to think of scripture and scripture passages and biblical concepts that we may not always think about.

So I'm trying to mess with your mind.

More importantly, God is messing with our minds.

He's wanting us to transform our minds and begin to think differently than the way we are used to thinking.

So we started out and we talked about the elephant in the room, just the reality of the brevity of life and the proximity of death.

We looked last time at death in particular, matters of life and death.

Death, what is it?

It's always a separation.

Wherever you read death in scriptures, think separation and ask yourself, separation of what from what?

And there's many different kinds of death talked about.

We looked at three, not three, three, uh, in particular.

Physical death, a separation of our bodies, the material part of who we are, from the rest of who we are.

We are not just soul and spirit encased in a body that is insignificant.

No, we are together with our material and our immaterial natures, together, God created Adam and Eve from the dust of the ground and breathed into them the spirit of life, material and immaterial.

That's what it takes to make a human being.

And death, physical death, is a separation of those two, a temporary separation as a result of sin.

And we will talk next week a great deal about resurrection.

You don't just talk about resurrection, I hope, on Easter.

In fact, we're not going to look primarily at 1 Corinthians 15, the controlling important passage, because there's much more about that.

But we look forward to a restoration, a resurrection, a putting back together that which death has torn asunder.

That's the resurrection of our bodies.

There's also spiritual death, also a separation, a separation of the creature from his creator, particularly the creature man, man who was designed by God with a capacity to relate to him, to have fellowship with him, to be in constant relationship with God.

And sin causes a break in our relationship with God.

It separates us spiritually from God.

That's spiritual death.

On the day that you shall eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Genesis chapter 2, verse 7, you shall surely die.

Genesis 2:7

Immediate spiritual death, a separation between Adam and God.

And then in Adam's case, 630 years later, or something like that, the separation of body and soul.

It's always death.

And then we touch briefly and we'll look at that with the final message here.

The eternal death, or the second death, or ultimately, as we saw it briefly last week, spiritual death confirmed forever.

So we're trying to get a hold of some of these concepts.

I touched last week at the end, and we'll touch on it again, that just as life before birth was not all there was to life, so life after this phase of life is also part of life.

We have life in the womb, there was a time of development and a time of growth, followed by a dark and painful passage called birth, that led to this phase of life.

And there's a parallelism between birth and death, the process of dying, because this life, just as life in the womb didn't exist for its own sake, although there was real life there, this life doesn't just exist for the here and now.

If all we see is the here and now, we miss a great deal about life.

And at the end of this life, there is another dark passage.

And that leads to the next phase of life.

And if we don't understand that, then we will not understand life now.

So there's a lot of concepts here that we're looking at.

What I'd like to do at this point is to fast forward to the final state of humanity, to what we would call eternity, rightly call it eternity, and our existence in eternity.

And then I want to walk back and ask what happens between now and then.

But before we can say what happens between now and then, I want to make sure we're understanding what the then is.

So I'd like to have you turn to Revelation 21.

I want to read just a few portions of this.

Don't have time to read the whole thing.

But I want you to understand that what is revealed about heaven and about eternity, heaven is a real place.

It's not just a state of existence.

You will see in this passage that it's a place, that God has prepared a place for us, just as God prepared a place for Adam and Eve in the first two chapters of the Bible.

In the last two chapters of the Bible, there's a restoration of what this was to be to what it shall be once sin is finally and ultimately taken care of.

But it is a place, a real place.

Eternity is really forever and ever.

And it's the new heaven.

You do realize there's a new heaven coming.

And a new earth that is our final eternal and heavenly home.

And that is not here yet.

Alright?

So just in, and if this is new thought to you, a lot of what I'm going to say this morning may sound like something bizarre.

The only reason it would sound bizarre is that in our Christian circles we have a very biblically truncated view of heaven and what is to come.

So I'm trying to expand that and capture some of the major things that God says about the future.

So, Revelation 21, let me just read the first several verses.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

Wow.

How much time have we spent thinking about a new heaven and a new earth?

Maybe that's part of our problem.

We've not really taken very seriously what God has yet to do.

Future things, things to come.

I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

There's going to come a change in heaven and on earth.

There's going to be a renewed, a resurrected, a restored earth and a new heaven.

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 loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

So there's something coming down from heaven, and it's in the context of that new heaven and new earth that he says, Behold, the throne of God is with man.

He, God, will dwell with them, mankind, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be no more mourning, shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

And in the unfolding of Scripture, what's described here is not yet occurred.

It is yet future.

Okay, that's what I want you to begin to wrestle a little bit with.

Chapter 21, verse 9, the second half through 11.

So come, I'll show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb, and he carried me in the way in the Spirit to a great high mountain, and showed me the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.

Verse 22 to 27, and I saw no temple in this city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.

The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

By its light all the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day.

There will be no night there.

They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.

Nothing unclean will enter anyone who does what is detestable or false.

Chapter 22, verses one and following.

Then an angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God.

And parenthetically, this is not all just abstract, metaphorical, figurative, mythological kind of talk.

He's talking about a real place.

He's talking about things that are just as real as Adam and Eve and Paradise in Genesis 1 and 2.

So also is there a real place.

And verse 2, in the middle of the street of the city on either side of the river, the tree of life.

Isn't that interesting?

Where have we seen the tree of life before?

Well, back in the original creation, the tree of life was there, a physical literal tree in a literal garden with literal Adam and Eve.

That's what we believe.

That's what the churches believe throughout 2,000 years.

And we believe that a real, a real Eden and real people and a real tree.

And now at the consummation of all things, a real heaven and a real presence of God with his people in a real place, real people, and the tree of life once again appearing there.

There's this tying together of all things with a very concrete, tangible understanding of heaven.

So what I'm trying to do is paint a big picture this morning and say some things that I believe with all my heart are clearly in Scripture.

There's a lot of things we can imagine, and we have lots of questions about this that we can't answer, but we can say what God has said.

And I think what we need to understand, what I want to draw from this, what I want to challenge you to open your minds to accept, is that when we die, what we immediately experience is not what we've just been talking about.

Try it.

Follow along.

It's not yet the eternal state.

There's many more things that are going to happen on earth and with you and me between when our bodies are laid in the grave and when this which we read about for the eternal heavens on a new heaven and a new earth when all of that takes place.

This is not our immediate experience.

Many more things will transpire between our death and what Revelation 21 and 22 talk about, both things in heaven and things with us.

And we're going to start talking about that today, and we'll be talking about that further in the coming weeks.

Our true home is a renewed, we could say, resurrected earth, just as our original place of God's intent was a true earth that was deeply, deeply impacted by sin, and there's a whole story of redemption.

And redemption goes beyond simply the forgiveness of our sins, and don't take that in a wrong way.

What Scott was talking about of being overawed with the justice of God and the fearful matter of the reality of judgment, from which we, by virtue of the cross, have been saved.

There is yet a future in which we will be in a new heaven and a new earth, a resurrected earth, with new resurrected bodies, with God having come down to us.

We talk about going up to heaven.

The picture here is that heaven comes down to us.

Heaven is almost always the place where God is.

God comes to dwell among his people.

And just as he walked with Adam and Eve in the garden in the cool of the day, so we will fellowship with him forever in a renewed and resurrected earth with renewed and resurrected bodies.

This may sound like Looney Land.

And if so, all I would say is maybe we haven't read the scriptures quite clearly enough.

We think somehow or another that heaven is this airy, fairy thing where we sit on clouds and have a bow and we can shoot arrows or something.

That's not the way scriptures portray it.

Well, we do need to ask ourselves how we should understand the word heaven and the concept of heaven.

And just as last week we talked about death and what the scriptures mean about death and the variety of ways, so there is a central idea about heaven, and there are various ways that that is used.

The etymology or the origin of the word heaven has to do with something that is high and lifted up, is like the heights or the ridges, the mountains around.

It has that high and lifted up kind of a sense to it, and it is used then in various ways.

I'll just mention three out of a number of the ways that the Bible talks about heaven, and you will recognize them immediately.

First of all, there's the atmospheric heavens, the sky above where the clouds are, where the rain comes from.

We read in Genesis 7, verse 11 that the windows of the heavens were opened and the rain fell for 40 days.

Genesis 7:11

Well, he's talking about the atmospheric heavens.

Just like in the heavens today, it's significantly overcast in Grand Forks.

Okay?

Well, that's just one of the ways that the scriptures use the term heaven.

Okay?

So when we see it, it doesn't always mean that final eternal state.

Another use of heaven, which is closely related to the first, is the celestial heavens, and that's simply the level above the atmosphere, a level above the clouds.

It's in Genesis chapter 1, verse 14, God made the firmament to separate the light from above and from below and all of that.

Genesis 1:14

And it's the celestial realm where the sun, moon, stars, planets are located.

It's very similar, but it's yet higher, as it were.

And typically, when we read the word heaven in Scripture, we see it and understand it to be the abode or the dwelling place of God.

When Jesus said we should pray to our Father in heaven, he wasn't talking about the clouds where the rain comes from or the planet Jupiter.

He was talking about where God is.

Now we quickly get into linguistic and conceptual problems when we talk about God being in a place.

But that's where, that's the way it's revealed in Scripture all the way through.

God is somewhere.

He's bigger than just the somewhere, but there is God.

There is an abode or a dwelling or a place where God is.

It's the place that Jesus came from and to which he returned at the ascension.

Jesus said that in my Father's house there are many dwelling places.

That is not just metaphorical speech.

There is a Father's house, and he, Jesus, went to prepare a place for us.

Place.

We originally had a place that we were to be, and that was a real place in the Garden of Eden.

There is a place prepared for us, in fact, many places.

If it were not so, would I not have told you?

I go away and I will come again and I will take you to be where I am, that we may be there together forever.

There is a place in heaven for us as believers.

Real tangible place.

When Jesus turned to the repentant thief on the cross, he said, Today you will be with me in paradise.

A place.

Just as paradise was the garden, so also there is a paradise future, and there was a present place where the repentant thief who died the same day Jesus died went to and he was immediately with Christ.

When we die, when we die, absent from the body is present with the Lord.

So we will go and we will be with Jesus.

Alright?

We will be with Jesus in a place wherever.

That's what James, John was talking, Jesus was talking about in John.

Places for us.

We were meant, we were created as creatures for a place.

And our ultimate destiny is in a place.

One writer put it this way: to say that God dwells in heaven is not to say that he is contained there.

See, this is where language and our world of experience, we're limited to time and space.

And God enters into, created, and enters into time and space.

But to say that God dwells somewhere doesn't mean that he doesn't then, that he's not elsewhere.

And I can't explain that.

And frankly, my rational attempts, your rational attempts, science rational attempts, philosophers' rational attempts to explain that which is outside of our experience are doomed to fail, and we need a word from the outside.

And that word from the outside causes our minds to expand.

So one writer said to say that God dwells in heaven is not to say that he is contained there, but it is uniquely his home, the center of operations, a place where his throne resides, where the most perfect worship of him occurs.

It transcends the normal time-space dimensions.

It is a real place where people with physical bodies will dwell in God's presence for all eternity.

That's what I've been saying all since I stepped up here this morning.

It is also a realm that surpasses our finite comp concept of what a place is.

Just because we don't understand it fully, just because we've not experienced it fully, doesn't mean it's not true.

How arrogant can we get to assume that what we can make sense of is all that is true?

There needs to be a creaturely humility on our part.

Just because you don't understand it, that doesn't mean you should automatically reject it.

That's what the world does.

The world who has no real revelation and words from God.

And we do by God's grace.

So this means that heaven may be, and I would say is more than a place, a physical place.

It's not less than a physical place.

Heaven is more than simply a physical place.

The scriptures suggest that heaven is not less than a physical place.

Try to explain that?

I can't explain everything that is clearly revealed.

I guess what I would say, assuming that what God has said is true, wow, what grace! What amazing grace that God, according to Revelation 21, 3 and 4, that heaven is coming down to earth, a new heaven and a new earth, and we will dwell with him, or as it actually says, he will dwell with us.

What grace.

And in the consummation of all things, that is what yet is to come.

In the meanwhile, here on earth, we've kind of gotten ahead of ourselves.

We're talking about that which is to come in the consummation of all things, our eternal home on the new earth, and some of the things that will take place when all of that is changed.

But what I really want us to think about is what happens for us between now and then.

What happens with you when your body is laid in the grave?

What happens between now and then?

And we can only begin to understand that when we have a better concept of what the then is.

So let me try to stand back and look at things from a 30,000-foot level.

I came across a quote from Wayne Gruden, who has written a good book on systematic theology.

And he says the following: Christians often talk about living with God in heaven forever, but in fact, the biblical teaching is richer than that.

It tells us there will be a new heaven and a new earth, an entirely renewed creation, and we will live with God there.

There will also be a new kind of unification of heaven and a new earth.

So between now and then, well, bear with me.

Stand back, take a few deep breaths.

Let's try to sketch what we can know about the sweep of history, the history of redemption.

And it begins in creation and the Garden of Eden.

It ends in eternity, shown toe for us as human beings in existence with God forever in the new heaven and the new earth.

You will notice that there's two chapters at the beginning of the Bible that address the one, and two chapters at the end of the Bible that address the other.

Book-ended in that is what God is doing to restore what sin has torn asunder.

And there are two major events in the history of redemption.

There is that which we look back to, the first coming of Christ, and there is that which we look forward to, a second coming of Christ, the first Advent and the Second Advent.

When we look back, it's fairly easy because we have some sense of history.

When we look forward, it's harder to make sure we're rightly understanding what is to come.

But it's not like God hasn't said anything about what is to come.

Now, when we start talking about looking forward, we get into issues about which there's significant differences of opinion, talking about eschatology, talking about last things.

I understand there's different ways of looking.

I'm just telling you what we as a church see and understand as part of the Evangelical Free Church of America.

There is a view of the future which has always been at the core of this local church and still is.

I don't want to fight about it.

I don't want to create controversy.

But my goodness, if we're going to talk about life, death, and life after death, how can we not talk about things to come?

You've got to put it in its suite.

When we look back, it is pretty clear.

The Genesis accounts, the Old Testament portions, the Gospels.

But let's just look back for a moment at the Old Testament.

God intervened in human history, and he chose a people, Israel, his chosen people.

He made covenants with them.

Some of the covenants or agreements were conditional.

If you do this, I will do that.

And some of the covenants were unconditional, not conditioned by our response.

He promised a land, he promised a king or kingdom, he promised a throne.

And much of that was unconditional.

And there are all kinds of promises of what God would do in Israel.

In addition to that, there are all kinds of indications that God is going to deal definitively with the problem of sin.

And we know that from what we now look back on as the cross.

It wasn't so clear in the Old Testament.

There's a progressiveness of revelation.

But there was a sacrificial system which was kindly given to the nation Israel to make it clear there is a way to deal with sin, and the way that sin is dealt with is by a substitute, a sinless substitute, as pictured by the animal sacrifices.

Pointing, pointing to the substitutes which we have been celebrating today, all looking forward to what was to come.

So we look back at the second or the first Advent, and there's more revelation.

There's from the Gospels up to Revelation 19, I probably should actually say Revelation 20, between the first Advent and the Second Advent, where we believe that God was doing something that Paul described as a mystery, something that wasn't completely clear, hadn't been fully revealed in the Old Testament, but has been revealed now.

God had chosen a given people to be his people with a given purpose and a given past, given present and a given future.

But what we find in the New Testament is that God has chosen from among all nations individuals through the cross to come to faith in Christ to become a new expression of the people of God, the church, which we believe is distinct from Israel.

Israel is not the same as the church.

There is a past, a present, and a future for the nation Israel, and we have 2,000 years of past, we have a present, we have a future for the church.

That's how we understand this.

And then there comes a time in which the Lord shall return and bring to conclusion that phase.

Before that, we read in scripture of apostasy, we read in scripture of a rapture where God removes the church, we read in scripture of a tribulation, a great tribulation such as never has been seen before, a climactic final battle of Armageddon, and then comes the reign of Christ, the millennium, a thousand-year physical reign of Christ on the kingdom, on the throne of David, where he will rule for a thousand years.

We are what is called premillennial.

That means we believe we exist in this time period before the millennium.

That goes to the heart of our understanding of God and his outworkings.

That's who we are as an evangelical free church, that's who we are as faith evangelical free church.

We are pre-millennial, before the millennium.

Now, there's lots of things that there is room to be seen in different ways.

I don't want to get into those, don't want to get controversial here, any more controversial than I am anytime I stand up and open my mouth.

But we need to say this there is a future, there is a millennium.

And it is after the millennium when what God began in creation, he renews and restores and resurrects.

And just as our intent originally was to be on the earth with God, walking and talking, or God walking and talking with us in the cool of the day, so that is our future destiny.

So, very practically, when the believer dies, what happens?

Well, if we understand the grand sweep of things, and if we understand the future and the reality of a new heaven and a new earth, we'll have to conclude there's many things that happen between when you are laid in the grave and when the new heavens and the new earth are constituted, which is our real and eternal home.

What happens, we know what happens to our body, it lies in the grave, it rots in the grave.

I hate to say it that way, it's just the truth.

Decomposes, dust to dust.

And we look forward with certainty to the sure and certain reality of the resurrection of our bodies.

And we're going to be talking about resurrection, physical bodily resurrection.

And just as we look forward to that, we look forward to a resurrection of the broken and earth that is subjected, as Paul says, to futility, Romans 8.

We ourselves, together with all creation, having been subjected to futility, we groan, we groan yet for the longings, the fulfillment of the longings of things yet to come, says the revelation of the sons of God.

That will take place in its ultimate and final state in the future.

When we die now, we go to be with Christ.

Absent from the body is present with the Lord.

That couldn't be clear in 2 Corinthians 5, 8.

Absent from the body is present with the Lord.

But there's a whole lot of things that happen as we are present with the Lord.

And it's helpful for us to put this in perspective.

Our verbiage, our terminology, our vocabulary falls short and doesn't help us very well.

People have suggested a distinction between the state we're in when we die in the present heaven and the eternal state in the eternal heaven.

The present state of heaven is not what it will be, according to Revelation 21, 22.

And where we go when we die now is not on the new heaven and the new earth.

But we're present with Jesus.

Now, what does that look like?

What does that feel like?

What should we think about that?

I don't like this terminology, but terminology fails us.

All I know is that there's a whole lot more to come for us and for our world than what we often think about.

So where grandma is now is in the intermediate state.

Where you will go when you die is not the final state.

Okay, that's what I'm trying to say.

And then ask ourselves the question: what in the world do we do with that?

When the believer dies, he or she enters the intermediate state, awaiting the resurrection of the body.

We understand that.

What I want you to understand is we're also awaiting the eternal state with the resurrection of the old earth, and we will be in the eternal state, in the new heavens, in the new earth, with God forever.

So we are waiting when we die both for the resurrection of our bodies and if I can say it this way, the resurrection of the earth, which is what we were made for.

One person says it this way: the eternal heavens, the new earth is our true home, the place where we will live forever with our Lord and with each other.

The great redemptive promises of God will find ultimate fulfillment in the new heaven and the new earth.

Now, all about that has not been revealed, but some things have been revealed sufficient to give us some clues about what that might be like.

And I do not have the time to even run through all of these.

If you are interested, I would say write these down.

If you're really interested, I would encourage you to consider a book that some of you are familiar with.

If you're not, I would encourage you to get familiar with it.

We have copies of this in the library.

And in pages 41 or 44 to 71 or something, there's a discussion about the intermediate state, the intermediate body.

I think a lot of what is there in that book, Heaven, by Randy Alcorn, is worth noting.

These passages provide us with some clues.

Not much is really said concretely about the intermediate state.

When most of what is said about heaven has to do with that which is yet future to when we die, the new heavens and the new earth.

But some things are stated.

It's interesting that in 2 Corinthians 12, Paul was taken up to the third heaven and he had, he saw some things, and he talked and he had some experiences there.

So there is a place where people interact with each other, where there's tangible, touchable kinds of things.

Revelation chapter 6, we have an account very brief about people, a group of martyrs who were beheaded during the time of great tribulation and in our heaven now, in heaven now, and a little bit is described about them that we might be able to draw some conclusions from.

Revelation 6 · chapter mention

Jesus promised to the repentant thief, the fact that there is Revelation 2.7, the tree of life.

It still exists, and it apparently still exists in the present heaven.

We know it will be there in the final heaven.

Maybe Luke chapter 16, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, perhaps.

Luke 16 · chapter mention

That gives us some clues about the intermediate state.

All I can say with for me as I study this, a significant measure of confidence for me personally, is that it is temporary.

We will be conscious.

We will almost certainly be aware of some of the events on Earth.

We will be in a physical place.

Perhaps we'll have some kind of an intermediate body.

You almost get that impression.

What I know for sure is that it will be better by far than now.

Better by far.

But it will not yet be everything that God has promised for us and will give us.

When at last there will be no more tears, at last there will be no death and dying on earth.

At last there will be nothing to cry about.

But until the restoration of all things, there is still great sadness here on earth, and I believe we'll have some sense of what is going on, and there will be a sorrow not exactly like what we experience now, but there will come a time in which there will be nothing more to be sorry about, as everything has been brought to conclusion.

No more death and dying on earth, the full consequences of the fall will be removed.

And so on.

I think Randy Alkorn in that book does a pretty good job of distinguishing between what we can say for sure based on revelation and what we might be able to conclude by inference.

That's an important thing to do because there's a lot of this that is not clear.

But there is more that is clear than we probably realize.

And all I want to do is point you in a direction of seeing that there's so much more to come for you and for this earth, and that's when we will finally and ultimately be home.

Now, what in the world do you do with that?

Well, I would suggest it's not given just for our curiosity.

It's not given just so we can write books about it or fill our notebooks.

It's given that we might live now.

I would say two things.

One, I would say we do not live now seeking heaven to escape life by dreaming of heaven.

That's the pie in the sky by and by.

That's the being so heavenly minded that you're no earthly good.

My friends, that's not our problem.

We are not so heavenly minded, we're no earthly good.

We're mostly clueless about heaven.

We don't talk about it, we don't think about it.

But when we do, it's not to escape, it's not to escape the realities of this life, but it's for the future certainty of reality of life to come that we are enabled to persevere.

We are drawn from our current experience with longings, longings, desires which do not find fulfillment in this life.

They were never intended to.

What we put our hope in in this life and what we attach the trailer hitch or the trailer, we look for trailer hitches, and we try to attach them to all kinds of things because we have unfulfilled needs in this life.

And some of that is appropriate, but they will never fulfill.

This life will never fulfill that which you most deeply desire: your marriage, a sunset, success, wealth, accomplishment, whatever.

It is never enough.

It will never fulfill the deep longings within, because those longings were intended to draw us forward with the realization that we live as strangers and aliens now.

This is not our home.

This is not what we are looking for.

We are looking for another place and another time and another reality, and that is yet to come.

You will have found in the bulletin a poem.

I've included it, I've made reference to it a time or two before, and I'll make more references.

I want you to take it and I would challenge you to really read it and meditate on it.

There is something about poetry and imagination and images that gets us out of our current way of processing things.

We tend to process emotionally quite differently than we process cognitively.

And if we're not careful, we are so used to reading the Bible cognitively that we don't know how to deal with our emotions and the inner life sufficiently.

Now, there's thousands of things that could be said about that.

But Robertson McQuilkin was the president of Columbia International University in North Carolina, and as he was president, his wife went through a losing battle with terrible early onset Alzheimer's.

He lost his wife over a period of about 10 years, and he stepped out of ministry for that time.

And in the process, he did an awful lot of meditating, and he had a creative poetic streak about him, and he he wrote this poem down.

I just give it to you and I urge you, it may not mean a bloomin' thing to you, but it means a great deal to me because it puts into words some of what I read in Scripture.

So I'm just going to touch on certain parts of it in the first section.

It's sundown, Lord.

We're looking for the sunrise.

It's sundown right now.

The shadows of my life stretch back into the dimness of years long spent.

I do not fear death, for that grim foe betrays himself at last, thrusting me forever forward into life.

I don't fear death.

I fear the process of dying.

But the process of dying thrusts me, disengages me from this life, and forces me into the life ahead, just as the passage through the womb forces us into the next life.

Life with you, unsoiled and free, but I do fear, I fear that the dark specter may come too soon, or do I mean too late, that I should end before I finish, or finish, but not well.

Oh, there's volumes of thoughts that this is putting into words.

And I can identify with the things that he is concerned about there.

Turn the page over the last segment.

This outer me decays the body.

I do not fret or ask reprieve from the decay of the body.

The ebbing strength but weans me from Mother Earth and grows me up for heaven.

We were not meant to live here forever.

This body in its present state is not forever.

We disengage from this life, and our decaying, ebbing, debilitated bodies prepare us and draw us away from this life, and that is to be embraced, not held off as though dying is the worst possible thing, and we have to then frantically do anything possible to sustain us for a few more days or a few more weeks.

Even if medicine can do that, it doesn't automatically mean that that's a big help for us, because we will sooner or later die.

And as we understand what is to head, we can die in a different way.

Not, not, not trying at all cost to hang on to that which we cannot keep.

Recognizing that God in His wisdom weans us away from Mother Earth, from this phase of life, and grows us up for heaven.

I do not cling to shadows cast by immortality.

I do not patch the scaffold lent to build the real eternal home.

I do not clutch about me my cancun, vainly struggling to hold hostage, a free spirit pressing to be born.

There is something within you that is pressing to be born.

It's something for which you were created, it's something for which you have deep desires.

We attach our desires in places and sometimes misplaced.

But what is coming, what is coming is what you were made for.

And what I'm saying is understanding it doesn't cause us to just simply try to escape this life.

But we live this life, it's good and it's bad, shaped, formed, informed by the reality of life to come.

That I believe is that's why I'm talking about life, death, and life after death.

This is just one more step in the process.

We have a bunch of other things to say.

I hope you'll have the courage to come back.

In the meanwhile, let me ask you to stand for the benediction.

Now, my friends, in light of what we have been saying, go into the world in peace.

Have courage.

Hold on to that which is good and honor all men, strengthen the faint-hearted, support the weak, help the suffering, restore the wandering, comfort the grieving, and share the gospel.

Love and serve the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit, and may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all.

Go in peace.