An Open Heaven Reality

Hi, this is Dave Olson. I'm the senior leader of

Heartland Church located in Ankeny, IA.

I hope the following message challenges, encourages and

ultimately changes you. Thanks for joining us.

All right, let's get into the word this morning.

If you want to turn with me, go ahead and turn to Hebrews

Hebrews 12:18

chapter 12, verse 18, Hebrews chapter 12.

Hebrews 12 · chapter mention

And so we're going to be looking at, I'm going to continue in the

theme that we've been looking at thus far that the last number of

weeks. I'm going to try to find my

notes if I can here. So we've been talking about the

last few weeks on how the Book of Revelation, the, the

Revelation chapter 3 and 4, how John hears from the Lord.

Revelation 3 · chapter mention

He's giving a message to the Church of Laodicea and he and

the Lord calls attention. He said, behold, I stand at the

door and knock. If any man would open the door,

I will come in and I will eat with him and him with me.

I'm going to feast with you. And so if you hear his voice,

there's a knock, there's an invitation to a feast.

There's more than what you're just hearing in the moment.

If we'll, if we'll give, give our attention to that.

There's more. We used to have a saying that we

used to say a lot that if you, if you sense his presence and

you give way to it, he'll come more.

There's a sensitivity that our walk with God requires of us

that we lean in and we're we're sensitive to what he's doing.

And so he tells us there's this, he's knocking on the door.

Then a few verses later, John says, Behold, I heard a voice

and I looked up and there was an open door and the Lord said,

come up here and suddenly, behold, he was in the throne

room. And all through that, that

passage again, the Book of Revelation is apocalyptic

literature. Apocalyptic literature isn't

what a lot of people often think of.

It's not, it's not about cataclysm and and necessarily

even end time events. It's the record of prophetic

encounters, whether dreams or visions and, and so the, the

prophets of old, there's a long tradition in Hebrew writing of

these prophets, Ezekiel, Jeremiah.

And so Isaiah they would record and they'd leave that behind for

you and I so that you can you and I can learn from it.

And so John writes down this encounter.

And so we see the 2 doors. There was the door that we open

that God comes to us and then there's the door that he opens

and he ushers us up. He said come up here.

And so this idea of ascending is all through Scripture.

And so we need to we need to pay attention to that.

We we shouldn't just ignore that and kind of brush over that.

I was reading something fascinating this week.

I should have brought it up with me by a theologian.

I've really come to appreciate. He just recently went to be with

the Lord, but he was talking about how we have a tendency to

read the Word through our creeds and our confessions and our

denominational stance and all of that.

And while all of that is good, it's not the lens through which

we read the Scriptures because creeds and confessions were

formulated in response to a contemporary problem.

There was a problem. And so they, they developed a

creed to deal with that. This is our doctrinal stance.

It's similar to if you, I was just alluding to this a few

minutes ago with the whole thing of, of gender distinction and,

and God, God made man and woman and, you know, marriage between

a man and a woman. And if you look on our website,

we have a doctrinal statement again about that.

It's not because we feel that is, you know, that you need to

know the nature of God. And then the and and one of the

primary foundational things in discipleship is so much that

we're responding to a current cultural crisis.

So now, 100 years from now of Jesus, Terry's our great, great,

great grandkids are studying the word and they're looking for

they're looking through the lens of gender distinction and

reading the word through that. Now, you can come to some valid

conclusions, but that's not the purpose of that statement.

It's addressing A contemporary problem.

I hope I'm making sense. And So what we need to do is we

need to read the word through the lens of the people living in

that moment of history. And that's the only, that's the

only way we're going to understand the word.

And so we need to get inside their heads.

We need to know what it meant in order to know what it means,

what it meant to them, in order to know what it means to us.

And all through Scripture we see this, this idea, this thing of

ascending the hill of the Lord. We see way back in the book of

Genesis. We see the latter, the ascending

and descending, the connection between heaven and earth.

In fact, we see the very first verse of all of Scripture.

You open your Bible, Genesis 11. What does it say?

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, so he

introduces this cosmological idea.

He wants to give us a framework for the context of everything

else. He's going to do that there is a

spiritual realm, if you will, called the heavens, and there is

a physical realm called the earth, and God sets it up like

that right away. The tragedy is that much of the

church only lives in their awareness of the earth and

ignores their ignores this reality of the heavens and so

the heavens that it's a description of the spiritual or

the unseen realm all around us. It's plural in the Hebrew

heavens. Same thing in the New Testament,

and Paul says he talks about heavenly realms, plural.

And so there are spiritual realities around us that God

intends for you and I to be aware of.

We're not to be just ignorant of that and kind of relegate that

to poetry and just think that, OK, I said a sinner's prayer and

now I live in the earth and I try to be a moral person and

then I go to heaven. No, we're God never intended

heaven, the heavens and earth to operate independently.

That's why he introduces them simultaneously.

That is precisely why he created them simultaneously.

I I've had to repent of a lot of things I've taught over the

years and here's one of them. This is my disclaimer.

If you heard me say this years ago, that the spiritual realm is

more real than the physical realm because the spiritual

realm is eternal and the physical realm is is temporary.

That is not true. The heavens were created the

same time the earth was and that that is really, really

intriguing to me. Why is that?

Because God meant for them to function together.

And it was through the fall the connector between those two

realms were mankind. You and I were uniquely created

by God with the equipment to function in both realms, and we

were the connection between the two.

And in the fall, when man's spirit died, you know, the Lord

told Adam and Eve in the day that you eat of that fruit, you

will surely die. Their body began to die, but

their spirit immediately died and they lost the equipment, the

satellite dish, if you will, that can interact with the

spiritual realm. And in salvation, God restored

that equipment in what is known as regeneration or the born

again experience. Our spirit man was born again.

All of a sudden, that equipment came back online.

The red light came on. You can hear the engine running.

And we're supposed to function in that.

And we're to lean into that and understand how to be spiritual

men and women, not just people that are born again and going to

heaven someday, but we're to be men and women who are born

again. And our spirit man is now the

component, the third component of our nature that not only

comes online, but is the dominant component in our

nature. We're to be spiritual.

Second Corinthians chapter 2 talks about this.

2 Corinthians 2 · chapter mention

It it talks about the carnal Christian who's a mere infant.

And Paul rebukes them. So baby Christians are those

who, even though they're saved, they're still living for their

flesh. That is not a category of

Christianity. It's not a class of Christian.

It's a stage of Christian maturity.

And if you're still a baby Christian after five years, then

you probably need to get saved. And so when we first get saved,

we're our spirit man comes alive, but our flesh is still

dominant. And So what what do we do is we

learn to deny our flesh, discipline our soul and develop

our spirit because what God wants are spiritual men and

women. So what does that mean?

I mean, we, we throw those terms around.

It's kind of mystical, spiritual.

What does that mean? It means that our spirit man is

strong and can exercise dominion over our flesh and even our

soul, that we're no longer drug around by our fleshly desires.

It's our spirit man, we we're communing with God and we're

discerning things spiritually rather than from the flesh, Paul

said. I know no man after the flesh.

Paul evaluated all his relationships through the Spirit

and that is not only a possibility, it is what God has

called each and every one of us into.

And so this this idea of us growing up.

So in in first Corinthians chapter 2, he talks about the

1 Corinthians 2 · chapter mention

carnal man who is a mere infant. He talks about the natural man

and the Greek is the the The Greek is the Grecian word for

soul. It's something to the effect of

psychicos. It's the soul.

The soulish man would be the best English translation.

The man of the soul receives not the things of God.

They are foolishness to him. Unfortunately, some of our

translations translates it. The natural man receives not the

things of God or in the NIV, it says the man without the spirit.

That's real unfortunate because that's not what Paul is saying.

He's not saying that the guy who looks at spirit, spirit,

spiritual things as foolish. It's he's not saying that that

man does not have the spirit. What he's saying is that the

dominant element of his nature is his soul.

So he evaluates everything through his own understanding,

his own mind, will, and emotions.

And in fact, God's got to sign off on his understanding before

he'll allow God to do anything in his life.

And all I can say is good luck with that one because the Lord

calls us to go beyond our understanding, to walk by faith

and not by sight. I loved what what Pastor Drew

said this morning. We taste and then we see, we

experience and then God explains.

But if we, if we demand God you, I demand you sign off with my

understanding. You explain all this before I

follow you. What did, what did he say to

Abraham, the father of our faith?

He said, hey, leave this place and go to a place you don't know

about yet. And then I will bless you and

you will be a blessing. That is the Christian life.

And so we have to trust him and we learn over time to trust his

great trustworthiness, but that that grows us up spiritually.

And so we use these terms and a lot of times we're not really

thinking about what they mean. So the, the carnal man is still

following the, the lust of his flesh.

I remember when I got saved, the lady who led me to the Lord gave

me money for a Bible and I went out and bought a keg with the

money and felt very, very guilty over it.

The difference between before I got saved and after I got saved

was not what I did with my money, but how I felt about it.

Because before I'd have been thinking, boy, I got her, I need

to find another lady. Look at me, some Bible money.

After I got saved, I was so broken.

I sat there and just cried in my beer.

There was a bunch of bikers drinking with me, and they're

probably that weird little kid, man.

I was a skinny little dude crying in my beer.

It wasn't that I was acting different.

It was my conscience now bothered me.

I was still a man of the flesh. I was a baby Christian.

My spirit man could barely make itself known within me.

The only thing it was saying you shouldn't do this.

Oh, no. And I was feeling guilty in my

flesh. Oh yeah, dragging my spirit man

around and I oh, no, no, no. And so then as we begin to walk

with the Lord, we begin to learn we got to deny our flesh.

But then the real issue in the Christian life begins to happen.

We've got to begin to discipline our soul.

No longer follow our own understanding.

Lean not on your own understanding.

Don't be led by your emotions. Your emotions are to be like

salt. They enhance the experience, but

they're not the meal. Don't ever sit down with a

bucket of salt and eat, OK? It's not healthy.

It's to enhance the, the, the, the experience, but it's not to

be the experience. But we're taught in this world

that emotion is the goal that I want to be happy.

It's not the pursuit of happiness.

Happiness is a result and not a it's not the goal.

And so we, we need to discipline ourself and then we need to feed

our spirit man. And as we understand spiritual

realities, we begin to grow and we become spiritual men and

women that are led by the Spirit.

That's why Paul says in Romans 8, he said they who are led by

the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.

And understand when when Paul talks about sonship in the New

Testament, there's a difference between being a child of God and

being a son of God. In the Greek it's very clear the

the the child of God. It's Tecnon born 1.

The Greek for sonship is like hois.

I don't remember how to spell it like HOUISS or something like

that, but it has to do with sonship and sonship.

And the Roman Grecian mindset that Paul was writing to is

somebody that's mature and therefore can be given

responsibility in the household. And within the Roman household,

a child was a child within the house, but he was, he was

actually ruled over by a pedagogue, a male nanny that

would that would one day work for him.

So if that nanny was smart, he would treat him well, but he was

going to make him do with external pressure what he would

one do with internal discipline. That's Christian maturity, and

so there's And then what? Once he had reached at the point

of maturity, they would go through a ceremony of adoption

where there was a formal ceremony that they were brought

into adulthood and now they were given the right to use the

family name in the marketplace. And so that's why in the New

Testament, some translations will translate the Holy Spirit

as the spirit of sonship, others will translate it the spirit of

adoption. It's talking about the same

thing because Roman adoption was not the taking of a child, you

know, that didn't share the genetic code of the father and

making giving him a name. A child had the nature of the of

the father, but the the adopted son had the character of the

father and that was the difference.

And so God is wanting to grow us up.

Now, all of this is very, very important because you and I are

called to be spiritual men and women.

And we want to, we want to confront this lie that will keep

us living so far beneath what our inheritance is as sons and

daughters of God. Because we only have a mindset

for the, the, the, the seen world, that which is seen.

And God wants us to be men and women of the Spirit that are

accessing the things of the Spirit like John.

John had dreams and visions. He saw spiritual reality.

He was functioning according to that.

There are resources verses Paul says in Ephesians chapter one

verse 3, he says God, this is the King James Version.

God hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly

realms in Christ. In other words, there are

deposits of blessings that are for you and I God has reserved

them for us. There are inheritance, but

they're in heavenly realms. They're in the spirit.

It's not, it's not a physical thing.

It's not a personality thing. It's not a skill set.

There are spiritual blessings reserved for you and I and that

is not a someday thing. That's a right now thing.

And so we need to learn to access these spiritual

blessings. Now, I know we had a meeting

with the the elders the other night and we were talking about

kind of around this kind of stuff.

And I told him, I said I have this liability anytime I'm

talking about this kind of stuff.

I'm also listening through this lens, this ear.

They're thinking, what would a brand new newcomer who has never

been to Heartland, what are they hearing when I'm talking like

this? And it's this voice in my ear

that I've got a silence because it sounds so mystical.

But I'm telling you, it is thoroughly scriptural.

We are not limited to that which we see.

We are not limited to our natural skill set.

Ministry is not to be reduced to what we can do and the skills

that we can develop. There is a supernatural realm.

There is an unseen realm that God created simultaneously with

the scene realm and He wants to reunite them through you and I.

So. We see in the book of Genesis

that Jacob, he's, he's running from his brother and he stumbles

it and says he went to a place, but it was a specific place

unbeknownst to him. It was a place called Luz.

Luz loves and Jacob lays down there.

He puts a rock for his pillow and he takes a nap and in while

he's asleep, he has a supernatural dream.

Dreams are a way that God speaks to his people.

Do you know that? Not every dream.

Is a pizza dream. Not every dream is from God

either. But you know.

We, we were talking in the school this couple weeks ago and

it really struck me. I'd never, never really thought

about this, but Nebuchadnezzar, A Pagan king, has a dream and

he's ready to kill his his counselors because they can't

tell him what the dream was. He was so convinced that this

was a message from another world.

And it was, and it it struck me that this Pagan king had a

greater value for dreams than most Christians today.

Most. Believers, when the New

Testament says your young man shall see visions in your old

man shall dream dreams, it's a promise, it's a declaration from

the word of God itself. And we kind of just marginalized

that stuff. And we're, we want to take a

stand and say no, we want to resurrect those things.

We want to we want to enter into those.

And one of the primary ways in which God speaks is through the

dream stream. And Jacob experienced that.

So Jacob's laying there and all of a sudden he saw a ladder.

I love the NIV how it says it resting on the earth and

reaching into heaven. That's beautiful.

That will preach, not this morning, but resting and

reaching those two postures of the human heart.

We rest in Him and we're reaching.

It's not all rest. There's a contending and there's

a desire for more. But it's not all contending and

desiring for more. Because what will happen is you

will lose the gratitude for what you already have.

There's this thing of gratitude for what we already have,

resting in the finished work of Christ, but also reaching to

access more of what He has for us.

And we need to live in this tension.

And so there's this ladder. And that says that he saw the

angels ascending and descending on this ladder.

And then at the. Top God was standing and

speaking over Jacob, his future destiny.

And Jacob wakes up and he says wow, God was here, God is here

and I knew it not. And he calls it two things.

He gives 2 names to this place called Luz.

And it was actually it it, it became a new name for this

place. It was re renamed based on

Jacob's encounter with God. There are places in the earth

that are now identified with the encounter people had with God.

The Hebrides, Wales back in the 90s, Pensacola, Toronto.

There are places that become synonymous with an encounter

with God and this place, Jacob calls it two things, he said.

This is none other than the gate of heaven and the House of God.

He said. From an earthly perspective,

this is a dwelling place for the presence of God.

Do you know that God longs to have physical locations where

His presence dwells and people can go there and encounter God?

That is, that is a thoroughly scriptural idea all through the

Bible that God longs to have those places.

So it begs the question for you and I, how do we create that?

How do we make sure that this place, 1212 NW 36th St. in

Ankeny, IA, is that place? There are things that we can do

to cooperate to make sure that God, this becomes the House of

God. That's not just a term we use

for church buildings. There are church buildings that

are not houses of God, and there are other places that are houses

of God, but there's not so much of A church building.

It's because of the human activity in those places to

consecrate them that God begins to visit.

And he also said it's the gate of heaven.

It's an entry point for Heaven's activity into the realm of the

earth. When God can establish a place

on the earth, a physical location that is a place of His

presence, it becomes a gate or an entry point for the spiritual

realm to begin to interact with the physical realm.

We see this. Way back in Genesis and so this

place is renamed Beth El, Beth being house Elohim Beth, the

House of God. And it was Beth El from that,

from that time on. What Jacob didn't understand is

that he had stumbled into a place his grandfather Abraham

had sacrificed on it at and two different occasions and he had

created an environment through sacrifice that God was attracted

to this place and Jacob entered into it and encountered God

because of the price paid by a forefather.

I'm telling you there is a spiritual principle there that

others can enter places that have been established by the

sacrifice of others. Now that that some of you that

makes you a little nervous when I talk about sacrifice, like

wait, wait a minute, I thought Jesus paid it all.

He did. He paid everything for your

salvation. But there is a.

Price to pay for ministry that you and I must pay.

There is. There is the price for my

entrance to heaven. My reward in heaven will be

based on what I do with that on earth, and part of that is the

price I'm willing to pay, the sacrifice that I'm willing to

enact. There is a warfare to establish

those places, and a lot of people won because they don't

understand there's an ignorance about these things, about

spiritual warfare and the battle for those places that God wants

to establish his presence. There are people that are easily

pushed off their post, they're easily distracted or offended

and they'll back off and get caught up in their own struggle

because of it. It it hurts.

I get caught up and I leave the pursuit.

Andy and I were talking during the transition about Pastor Drew

when he got up here and I felt wait.

I don't know about you, but I felt wait on what he said.

And you know what? They've just recently gone

through, but there's this stand in the spirit and I felt I felt

an extra weight on his words. The enemy tries to get people

offended in the back off and we get caught up in and and I I say

that with all compassion. A lot of people have been, you

know, pushed off their post, but there is there is in the pursuit

of God. There are things that happened

that we don't understand and all of that, but we take that stand

and we keep pressing and things begin to move and places are

established as places of His presence.

There is such a thing as spiritual geography.

There are. Places that are more significant

in the spiritual realm, hovering over distinct geographic

locations. Not every household.

I'm talking family houses. Not every household carries the

same measure of God's presence. Not every.

Church carries the same measure of God's presence and it's not

it's not a competition. What I'm saying is that we we

yield and that our hunger and staying the course attracts the

presence of God. And it's so essential because

they are the regions of the earth need places where people

know if you need deliverance, if you need healing, if you need to

encounter the Lord, there is a place you can go to.

I don't know how. Many of you have been to

different locations that are in in an hour of tremendous

outpouring, but I'm telling you, there is an open heaven in those

places. It is you go in there and man,

that the voice of God is clear. It's just easy.

It's wonderful to be in those atmospheres.

So what is that? Are you just getting caught up

in the emotion? No, there is a spiritual reality

called an open heaven that we need to understand.

And there's a. Contention at the gates of those

places that when God finds a people who will stand there and

keep pressing in through thick and thin hardship and

heartbreak, they they can have a breakthrough that others like

Jacob can enter into. He didn't even understand that

his grandfather had paid the price for something he entered

into. I don't know about you, but that

stirs my heart. I want my kids.

I want my grandkids. I want my great, great grandkids

to be able to enter into something.

I want to pay the price so they don't have to.

I want them to go farther. I want them to pay the price to

go deeper. But there's more in God that's

available to us. And let me just kind of push on

this a little bit. OK, We have some other things,

but I'm telling you there is a, there is this thing called

paying the price. Don't.

Confuse your Christology and your pneumatology.

Your what? All that the studies of you know

what Jesus has accomplished and what the Spirit accomplishes.

Jesus accomplishes it for you. The Spirit accomplishes it

through you. Jesus accomplishes it for you

and you are you receive it as a gift.

But when the Spirit accomplishes it through you, you have a role

to play and that's where your reward comes in.

You're not rewarded for what Jesus did.

You are Jesus reward. But there is there are levels of

rewards given to believers in heaven and it's based on how you

respond to the purposes of God for your life.

And there's a very real enemy that will thwart that and stand

against you and you know, try to fight tooth and nail to get you

off your post. But if you will stay the course,

God will use you to make a different in the realm of the

earth. And one of those is to open up

open heavens. So we need to understand this.

This is very, very important because if we don't rightly

divide the word, then talking about paying a price sounds like

legalism. We just shut that down.

And what happens is we, we're securing our salvation, but

we're ineffective in ministry. It's the, it's that reaching

element. Now we need to be thoroughly

you, you don't want to you don't want to reach, you don't want to

get on a ladder that's reaching if it's not resting.

OK, so we need to have rest the finished work of Christ, we

solely on him. He he paid the price for me to

be right with God. But now when I'm thoroughly

resting, then I want to I want I want to experience more.

I want to do all that he's called me to do.

I want to experience all that he's given me to experience.

That makes sense. Thanks for listening to our

podcast. If you'd like to help more

people hear this message, you can get the word out by

subscribing and sharing it on social media.

If you'd like to support the ministries of Heartland Church,

you can do so at Heartland Church online.com/give.