A Place Prepared for You | Rt. Rev. Peter Buss, Jr.

Welcome to our 11 o'clock service, those here and online.

Our theme today is a place prepared by the Lord.

And we read two versions of that, one from the Gospel of John, and then earlier from the book of Deuteronomy.

First, the Lord's words to his disciples let not your heart be troubled.

You believe in God, believe also in me.

In my father's house are many mansions.

If it were not so, I would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you.

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also, and where I go you know, and the way you know.

So it shall be when the Lord your God brings you into the land which He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give you large and beautiful cities which you did not build, houses full of good things which you did not fill, hewn out wells which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant.

When you have eaten and are full, then beware lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage.

You shall fear the Lord your God and serve him, and shall take oaths in his name.

You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you, for the Lord your God is a jealous God among you, lest the anger of the Lord your God be aroused against you and destroy you from the face of the earth.

You shall not tempt the Lord your God as you tempted him in Massa.

You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God, his testimonies, and his statutes which he has commanded you, and you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may be well with you, and that you may go in and possess the good land of which the Lord swore to your fathers, to cast out all your enemies from before you, as the Lord has spoken.

Reading further from the Lord's Word, two teachings in the heavenly doctrines from the Divine Providence and the Arcana Celestia, on the Lord's providence regarding our home in heaven, and what it means to have a pray place prepared there.

The human race throughout the whole world is under the guidance of the Lord, and everyone from infancy even to the end of his life is led by him in the most individual things, and his place foreseen and also provided.

The words to bring you to the place which I have prepared means being brought into heaven by the Lord according to the goodness of life and of faith.

This is clear from the meaning of bringing to the place that is into the land of Canaan as bringing into heaven, for the land of Canaan means the church and also heaven.

Preparing heaven means preparing those who are to be brought into heaven, for heaven is granted according to their degree of preparation, that is, of their reception of goodness.

Heaven exists within a person, and the place a person has in heaven is determined by the state of life and faith that is his.

For people's place there corresponds to their state of life.

Here end our readings: Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.

Amen.

Our focus today is on a place prepared for us by the Lord in his heavenly kingdom.

Comes to us in the context of some calming words that the Lord had with his disciples recorded in the Gospel of John.

Let not your hearts be troubled.

You believe in God, believe also in me.

In my Father's house are many mansions.

If it were not so, I would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you.

As we consider then the beautiful providential leading of our Lord to a place perfectly suited for us, it's very useful to consider the homes that we live in right now, or the ones we have lived in throughout our lives.

For many of us, the comfort and blessing of returning to our home after a day's outing or work or even after a trip is a true blessing.

We enter into our own space, surrounded by our own things, and interact with the people we may live with or near us from that home base.

It is a blessing to have a home.

In the word, the Lord uses the concept of a home, or more accurately, a house, repeatedly to call to us to a life of spiritual devotion.

We heard in the beginning of the service, one thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

And these words are very similar to the conclusion of perhaps the most famous of the Psalms.

It starts, The Lord is my shepherd, and ends with, Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

And then there are the words we heard earlier of the Lord Jehovah bringing the Israelites into the promised land to give you a large and beautiful cities which you did not build, houses full of good things which you did not fill, hewn out wells which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant.

And a place prepared means, to quote, being brought into heaven by the Lord according to the goodness of life and faith.

And lotus in that same reading that preparing heaven means preparing those who are brought into heaven, for heaven is granted to the degree of our preparation.

So let's come back to these words that the Lord shared with his disciples to take away their concern of an unpredictable future, and in contrast to give them a beautiful vision of their future.

In my Father's house, which we know is heaven, are many mansions.

I go to prepare a place for you.

Within those words, there are three vital themes that we can consider today as we strive to follow the Lord to a home in heaven that is perfectly suited for us.

The first is an eternal perspective.

A reality that we're invited to live with in a healthy and a positive way is that this world is not our eternal home.

We have reminders of that in passing years, in aging bodies.

Painful saying goodbye to someone who's crossed over from this life to the next.

We know that an eternal life is certainly a galvanizing promise of religion.

We are here but for a short time compared to eternity, and every day we should be considering how we are building with the Lord toward that eternity, using the time that we have to prepare.

As we hear in the Psalms, as for man, his days are like grass.

As the flower of the field, so he flourishes, for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and his place remembers it no more.

And so we read in the heavenly doctrines what more ought anyone to have at heart than his or her life which lasts forever.

It's helpful to see this reality from the Lord's perspective, too.

We heard earlier a teaching about the Lord's providence, a comforting teaching.

It says the human race throughout the world is under the guidance of the Lord, and everyone from infancy even to the end of his life is led by him in the most individual things, and his place foreseen and also provided.

What a comfort it is to know of a loving and providential God who is working with us, leading us consistently toward a home in heaven that perfectly reflects who we are, which matches our loves and preferences, where we're surrounded by people we love and can live a life of useful enjoyment to eternity.

Following from this is the responsibility to keep that vision in mind so that we do our part day in and day out to receive and to actually prepare.

How can we be more eternally prospective and let that eternity filter into our day-to-day, changing our concepts of what matters and guiding our decisions in wise ways?

It's useful to set that as a goal for ourselves.

Second theme that arises out of the Lord's words to his disciples has to do with the mansions that the Lord describes.

What are these mansions and how do they we hold that portion of the Lord's sayings?

Some other translations call them abodes or dwelling places or places to stay.

We can think about them as the wonderful homes dotted across heaven, each occupied by someone, or more particularly a married couple who have been led there by the Lord.

But there is powerful symbolism at work here.

Another passage in the heavenly doctrines invites us to consider that what really allows us to live in heaven in the first place is that our minds are formed into a replica of heaven.

They become a mansion of heaven or a heaven in miniature.

To use the words familiar to many of us, neither will I say see here or see there, for indeed the kingdom of God is within you.

Implied is what we know.

With preparation and a focus on spiritual life, we come to act and think in the ways that people in heaven do, so much so that the different parts of our mind are filled with qualities that exist in heaven.

Well, seeing ourselves as a mansion or a miniature heaven opens up a beautiful way to consider the rooms inside of that mansion.

We read in a passage, rooms mean two parts of a person, that is the will and the understanding.

And further, that both will and understanding are divided into countless parts or rooms.

This is a picture of a multifaceted human beings that we are.

It provides us with an elaborate description of our minds as if they were many rooms in a large mansion.

There are rooms in this scenario which occupy our memories, memories of past events, memories of things learned.

There are other rooms which contain, as it were, habits or characteristic ways of responding to people and events around us.

Some contain generosity, others compassion, others defensiveness or anger or fear.

There are rooms filled with various loves, a desire to be useful, the energy to make a difference in this world, a love for marriage, a deep affection we have for certain people.

Because we're not fully regenerate, there are rooms, secret rooms, that we don't show to anyone else containing our known evils or the parts of us that we're embarrassed about.

Rooms we sometimes enter when we think no one else is watching.

Still, other rooms are filled with information from the Lord's word or our understanding of what it means to be a good person, what's right and wrong.

And there are rooms filled with what the heavenly doctrines call remains or remnants, heavenly states we've experienced in the past, which the Lord gathers up in our minds as a force for good in our spiritual development.

And on the list goes.

So how does that relate to heaven and the Lord preparing a home for us there?

Amazingly, it has everything to do with preparation and leading, because it calls us to think about our job in this world, the bulk of our spiritual responsibility to clean up that house.

We're asked to cooperate with the Lord as he orders our minds and perfects them over our lifetimes.

And the picture I get is of a person opening various doors and dealing with what's behind them.

We know that we're called to examine ourselves, see something that needs changing, and set ourselves to work on that area of our lives with the Lord's help.

So we open the door that contains our habit of twisting the truth to suit our purposes, and we commit ourselves to tidying it up.

Or we choose to move the room of forgiveness to a more central part of the house instead of leaving it off somewhere in the corner of the attic.

In the same way, we choose to focus on being more compassionate, more willing to take opportunities to be of service that the Lord shows us.

We may set up worship in our home, a part of our lives devoted more fully to going to church, reading the Lord's Word, and praying for the Lord's presence and guidance.

And so we go, exploring this analogy in countless ways, all with a good and orderly house or mind, with many qualities and true ideas in the many rooms.

And it's vital to cooperate with the Lord as he leads us to this version of our home in heaven, actively participating in the journey.

A third and final theme for us today comes in the Lord's concluding words to his disciples in this particular section.

And where I go you know, and the way you know.

In this, we return to a teaching we heard earlier.

To bring you to a place which I have prepared means being brought into heaven by the Lord according to goodness of life and of faith.

We know in the new church faith that there is a consistent emphasis on living the life that leads to heaven or putting our faith into practice.

Heaven ultimately is more a way of living and believing than just a place that good people go after death.

So we could think about this in regard to the things that we know about heaven and actively trying to pursue them.

Let me frame it this way: if we took the book Heaven and Hell, which is given to us by the Lord to take some of the mystery of life after death away, each of us might have learned some things about heaven there.

Take, for example, the Lord and the closeness to him that every angel of heaven experiences, echoed in the Lord's words to his disciples, that where I am, there you may be also.

If one other way of defining heaven is as a relationship with the Lord, what does that imply for us right now?

We would be wise to actively cultivate a worshipful attitude towards Him by praying to Him and thanking Him and growing in our trusts of Him.

There's a safety and happiness arising from good people living with nothing but the best interests of others at heart.

It's called mutual love.

It's a true blessing of heaven not to have to second guess the people who are around us, not having to lock our doors or guard against being abused by word or selfish deed.

Is that how now instructive how we're called to live in this world?

To treat others with heavenly regard, ridding ourselves with the Lord's help of anything that would hurt or endanger others, so that we can live in that sphere of mutual love.

The same could be said of the beautiful reality about heaven, something that you may love about that vision, the opportunity to live with a husband and wife whom we deeply love.

If that part of the vision is foremost in your mind, the logical implication is to focus constructively on your marriage, or to be the best version of yourself to prepare for a future marriage?

What about the truth that infants and little children are raised by loving parents in the next life and become angels eventually in their own right?

Could this teaching call us to focus on being a positive influence now in the lives of children, particularly by helping them to live with the reality of the Lord and spiritual life in mind?

And so we could go on with the call to be useful and how that is a mainstay of the happiness of heaven, or a particular way of being useful, as, for example, to serve as a guardian angel.

Could we not look intentionally at ways we could serve as guardians for people in our lives right now who matter the most to us?

So we return to the powerful feeling conveyed by the Lord to us by means of this little episode given to us in the Gospel of John.

I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also.

And where I go you know, and the way you know.

Today we've had the opportunity to expand the meaning of those words and to think of them in terms of a place prepared specifically for us, for the best of what we can become with the Lord's help.

That is the home to which the Lord is leading us, and he can prepare us to the extent that we embrace that vision of spiritual home in the ways that we choose to act and live right now.

And that means embracing an eternal perspective.

It means examining the rooms of our mind with the desire to clean them up.

It means setting our sights on specific heavenly traits and trying to incorporate them into our choices.

We close with the culmination of that vision of a place prepared with the vivid fulfillment of that prediction by the Lord of people who are actually walking to their prepared place.

It says, After spirits have been prepared for heaven, they are dressed in angelic clothing and taken to a path that leads up towards heaven.

When they arrive at their own communities, their inner natures are opened, and since they are in harmony with the inner natures of the angels who are members of that community, they are recognized instantly and accepted with joy.

Amen.