For Heaven’s Sake – Up There, Down Here

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason and Liz Burns in Access Church in Lakeland and Bartow, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Let's get to work today, everybody.

Today, as we approach Easter, I'm kicking off a series of three messages called For Heaven's Sake.

I don't know if you ever had a grandma that said this.

Oh, for heaven's sake.

That's not what we're talking about.

For the next few weeks, what we want to talk about is this question.

How do we care about what heaven cares about?

Like, how can we care about the stuff that heaven seems to care about?

When I was in undergraduate college at the end of what feels like the Civil War now, at that time there was a professor who said one thing, it may be the only thing that stuck with me from undergraduate college.

He said, if you'll find what breaks the heart of God and give your life to meeting that need, God will bless you in ways you can't even begin to imagine.

How do we care about the stuff that heaven seems to care about?

To get us started today, and I know we have a lot of guests coming, so I want to introduce you to my family.

This is my family, the Burns crew, the starting five.

It's my wife Liz.

We've been married for 20 years, which is crazy.

Got married in kindergarten.

And um, these are these are our three kids.

We love them so much.

This is Joey.

And um, I got emotional during the song House of Miracles because there was the clip of him.

He was the first baby in our church, the first baby dedicated in our church, and so to see him now as a high school senior going into college is crazy.

Middle's my son, uh, over here on the right is my son Gavin.

Gavin's 14 years old and just unbelievable.

And then here is my daughter Ella.

She is um expensive, is what she is, and uh, but I do love her so much.

And Liz and I, we've been married for 20 years, which is crazy.

And we have just like walked through some stuff in those 20 years.

And if you've been married for a long time, you just you just walk through stuff because that's how life goes.

And we, if you don't know us or know our story, we got married with this picture that we're gonna go out and change the whole world, and we have, you know, sunshine and roses in our future.

And six months into marriage, my wife was diagnosed with stage two non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Talk about that more later.

Uh, later, several years later, we got pregnant unexpectedly, and we we got way into the pregnancy, find out it was a girl, and then 26 weeks in, there was no heartbeat, and we lost the baby.

Like we've walked through some stuff together, and I'll never forget there was this day a few years ago when uh I just kind of missed it.

Here's what's going on.

I was in the the end of a seven-day fast.

And if you're not new, if you're new to church, fasting is when you deny yourself something you want or need in order to experience God in a different kind of way.

And so for seven days, I only drank water, I had no food at all.

And if you've never fasted, here's how it works.

Usually the first day is miserable.

Day two is even worse because you're so hungry.

But day three, you're good.

Day four, you're fine.

Day five, you're fine.

But if you know that you're gonna eat on day seven, all the hunger comes flooding back in on day six, and you are so hungry.

So experts say that at the end of a fast, you should take several days where you don't eat lots of food, you just eat fruit and vegetables.

But I'm like, what do experts know?

And so I decided to break my fast in a really beautiful spiritual kind of place.

My wife and I went on a date to Carabas together, and um, and I was so excited.

They they used to have minestrone soup.

I wish they would bring it back.

If you own carabas and you're here, do your boy a solid minestrone soup.

It was so good.

So I haven't eaten for seven days, and we order our food, and the soup comes out, and I'm like, I'm trembling.

Like, I am so excited to take this bite of soup.

And right before I put the bite in my mouth, my wife reaches her hand across the table and she goes, Hang on, what one one second, one second.

And I said, I have done seven days of one seconds, like I can't I can't do this.

And her eyes well up with tears, and she looks at me and she goes, I I just uh I just love you so much.

And if you know the stories that we've walked through, you would know how deep and profound this is.

And as she's choking back tears, somehow I slipped one bite of soup into my mouth, and she says she loves me so much, and the only words that came out of my mouth in response was, I really love this soup.

And I don't know where that came from, I don't know why it happened, but I learned two things from it.

Here, number one is this is that men can be really dense.

Any women agree with this?

Some woman in Bartow was like, I found my church, there it is, that's right.

Number two is that you can be in the right place and completely miss the moment.

You can be there where you're supposed to be and you can miss it altogether.

Can I tell you one of my great fears as a pastor is that you can come to church at access.

You can love the church, you can get involved, you can sing the songs, you can lift your hands, you can give, you can serve, you can be all involved in the right place and you can miss the moment altogether.

But what is the moment?

Here's the question I want you to wrestle to the ground today, okay?

I'm gonna ask the question and I want you to think about what is your answer.

Ready?

What was the gospel message that Jesus came to proclaim?

Like, what is the thing that Jesus seemed to care about more than anything else?

I want you to think about it.

What do you think it is?

Now, the word gospel literally means good news.

The Greek word that's in the New Testament is the word uangelion.

It literally means good news.

EU means like good, like a eulogy is the good, ology is the study of, it's the good study of a person's life.

What is the eungelian, the gospel message that Jesus came to proclaim?

And here's my guess.

Today we'll probably have some 3,000 people at our church.

If we were to ask every person to write down your answer to this question, my guess is we would get hundreds of different answers, all of them good, but possibly missing the point.

Let me show you, because Jesus himself said it.

And if you read the Bible, it's easy to skip right over it and to miss it.

But let me show it to you.

In the book of Mark, chapter one, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all record this.

In the book of Mark, chapter one, as Jesus is starting his ministry, it says this after John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the Euangelion, the good news of God.

The time has come, Jesus said.

He said, The kingdom of God has come near, so repent and believe the good news.

Then Jesus chooses his twelve disciples.

Here it is in the book of Luke, chapter 8.

Luke 8 · chapter mention

It says, After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God.

Then Jesus takes those twelve disciples and he sends them out in Luke chapter 9.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

It says, when Jesus had called the 12 together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all the demons and to cure all the diseases.

And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.

By Acts chapter 1, Jesus is risen again from the dead.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

And it says he appeared to them over a period of 40 days.

And in Greek literature, this would have been um kind of an unspecified number of time.

And he spoke about the what?

The kingdom of God.

In fact, the last picture we have of the church in the book of Acts, the first church, says Acts 28, verse 31.

Acts 28:31

He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.

So if I could ask you again, what do you think Jesus was really all about?

The kingdom of God.

In fact, let me show it to you like this.

What Jesus came to proclaim was the reality of the kingdom of God.

Now, this is important for you to understand because you can be here in the right place and you can miss it altogether.

Today, I want to spend some time defining words.

Because if we have the wrong definition, we'll have the wrong picture or the wrong understanding.

Now I love this.

Jesus comes and he says, the kingdom of God is here and it's near.

It's here and it's all around us.

And I don't want you to miss it.

And I love this word reality, because reality is reality, next slide for me, is what you can count on.

Reality is that thing that's as real as the stage I'm standing on, the chair you're sitting in, the clothes that you are wearing, the people around you that you can touch.

Reality is the realest thing.

And Jesus comes along and he says, the kingdom of heaven, what God is really about is the kingdom of heaven is more real to you than you are.

It's so real and it's here and it's all around us.

And the problem is a lot of us have a picture of the reason Jesus came that's good.

What we might say, well, the reason Jesus came was to die on the cross to pay for our sins.

That's true, and that is good.

The reason Jesus came was to die so he could rise again, proving he has power over life and death and hell in the grave, and that is also good, and it is also true.

You might say the reason Jesus came was to put on flesh and blood and to to live as the love of God, and that's a good answer, and that is true.

Maybe you think the reason Jesus came is to be the grace of God personified through a person and all good answers, and we could come up with a hundred more, but they miss the point.

Like somewhere along the line, if we're not careful, our church will do what lots of churches do, and we will reduce the message of Jesus to what I call the M E R.

It's the minimal entrance requirements.

We think that if I just say the right prayer, say the right combination of words, or I'm gonna get to heaven, and what's going to happen when I get there is there's gonna be a test, there's gonna be a question, hopefully it's multiple choice, but I gotta get it right.

So, what we've reduced getting into heaven is is it's like no different than knowing the password.

Anyone else hate passwords?

I am so over passwords, I'm out of passwords.

I've come up with everything I can remember and I've run out of them.

I've reached a point where I've got one password that if you found it out, you could devastate and ruin my whole life.

My password to everything is the same.

I'm not proud of this.

And then over time, they're like, for security purposes, you need to change your password.

I'm like, you need to change your password.

What do you mean to me about this?

So, like, I just started adding a one and then a two and a three to it.

Anyone else want to admit this?

Come on, cyber hackers are out there watching you now.

Like, funny story, one time there was this guy in our office and he had been messing with my wife, and so he left for lunch, but he left his computer there.

And Liz thought, if I can get into his computer, I can send a funny text message from him and embarrass him.

So we opened his computer, but his computer was password protected.

I said, just try the word password.

And she typed in password, and his password was password.

Okay, like it worked.

Okay.

A lot of us have this picture that heaven is like getting there, and you gotta know the password.

You just gotta know the right combination of things to say.

I prayed this prayer when I was a kid, and blah blah blah, and that's it.

And we miss it all together.

I think part of the reason we miss it is we don't even understand what heaven is.

If you pay attention on TikTok or Instagram reels or social media, very often there's this movement of people who like to show up and they like to try to confront Christians, and they'll ask questions like, well, how could a loving God keep people out of heaven?

Have you thought this before?

How have you wrestled with this before?

And I think the reason we struggle with this is we have just the wrong picture of heaven altogether.

We think of heaven as this like cartoony, it's floating on a cloud, there's angels with harps.

That's the picture we have of heaven.

And the problem is, heaven is probably nothing like that.

In fact, a good definition from a man named Dallas Willard is heaven is just life with God.

That for all of eternity you will be with God.

And I want you to think about this because life with God really changes things.

Life with God causes you to act differently, to think differently.

Anytime you would be tempted in God's presence to sin, to cut a corner, to exaggerate a story, to lie just a little bit to make yourself feel a little better.

Anytime you might feel tempted to lean in and to gossip a little bit.

Anytime these things happen, you wouldn't do it because you're literally with God.

The same philosopher Dallas Willard, who said this, said, I think God will let anybody into heaven who can stand heaven, who can understand the reality that heaven is forever with God in the presence of God.

This is what heaven is.

And we've got to have a right definition of it because Jesus came to say that the kingdom of heaven, the book of Matthew says 32 times, or Mark, Luke, and John says over a hundred times, the kingdom of God, it's real and it's here, and it's permeating our space.

It is so, so real.

In what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, Jesus is preaching to these people who are physically and literally following him everywhere he goes, and he's talking to them about the stuff that they deal with, the stuff that we tend to fritter our emotions and our life away on, things like money and worry and security and divorce and all of those things.

And in the middle of all of that, in Matthew chapter 6, Jesus says this.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

He says, For the pagans, the people who live life without God, they run after all of those things, those things people fritter their lives away for.

But he says, and your heavenly father knows that you need them.

Then he hits us with this massive conjunction.

He says, But seek first his kingdom.

There's that word again, and his righteousness, which is this inner living, this inner goodness for God.

And all these things will be given to you as well.

He uses language that we don't use.

He says to seek first his what?

His kingdom.

Now here's the thing is we don't use this word kingdom very often, do we?

We live in a democracy where every four years we vote for a president, and if you like who we got, congratulations.

And if you don't like who we got, you can vote again in four years.

That's how it works.

But I don't know if you were like this, but three or four years ago in England when Queen Elizabeth passed away, anybody remember this moment?

It was 2022.

I was glued to the TV for days watching all the pomp and circumstance.

It had never happened in my lifetime, candidly, probably had never happened in anyone in our church's lifetime, because Queen Elizabeth reigned as queen for 3.7 billion years.

Remember this?

And it was so interesting to me because it was fun to watch all of the mourning, all of the country coming to a halt to remember her life.

And then all of the pomp and circumstances, her son was named king.

It was so interesting to me because we don't live in a kingdom.

But the thing is, you you were made for a kingdom.

In fact, let me give you a simple definition of a kingdom.

This is just my own interpretation.

A kingdom is anywhere where you what where what you want to do gets done.

It's wherever your decision is followed.

So, like if you're by yourself and you think to yourself, I really want Chipotle, and you go to Chipotle, like that is your kingdom.

What you want is happening in your little sphere of influence.

Here is a different definition of a kingdom.

A kingdom is the range of your effective will, okay?

And if we're gonna be about the kingdom of heaven, we need to understand what a kingdom is.

Now let's start with this.

You need to understand that everybody has a kingdom.

It's the place where your will, where your desires get done.

But Jesus says, listen, the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God is coming to earth.

So therefore, we need to make this decision to be about God's kingdom more so than ours.

Now, the idea that you were created for a kingdom is found all through the Bible.

The creation story, Genesis chapter 1, it says, Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so they may rule over, the King James Version says, have dominion over, go back for me.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

They may rule over or have, or have dominion over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

Like you were and I were created to have some sense of rule, some sense of say in our world and in our earth.

Now, here's how this tends to play out for us.

We tend to be kingdom-minded thinkers, but we don't we don't say this.

Like when a baby is born and starts talking, what is their favorite word when they're about two years old?

No! And then what is their second favorite word?

Mine! And they say it at a pitch so high and so shrill that insects fall out of the sky dead, right?

Like that's what they say.

What are they saying?

They're saying, This is my little kingdom.

This is where my will gets done.

And then they get a little older, and you have two or three kids, and they sit in the backseat of your car and they fight with each other.

And they draw imaginary lines between themselves and they say, Don't touch me, don't get in my space.

He touched me, he taught me, I'm gonna punch him if he touches me because they're protecting their kingdom.

Anyone else's kids dumb and do this?

Like, mom said, Don't touch me.

Fine, I'm not touching you, and they put their hands right here in their kids' face.

Anybody else have their kids do this?

What is it?

It is the kingdom.

And the funny thing is they're in the backseat fighting over their kingdom and their space.

And what does the dad do?

He turns around and says, Don't make me come back there.

Why?

Because this is actually my kingdom.

You think this is your kingdom, this is actually my kingdom.

And here's how this plays out.

You start with your own little kingdom, and then maybe you get married someday, and your kingdom gets a little bigger.

Then you have kids, and their little kingdoms intersect with your little kingdom, and then you live in a neighborhood where there's a bunch of people that have their own little kingdoms, and you come together to form an hoa, that's a little kingdom.

Come on, anybody have a power-hungry hoa in their neighborhood?

That's a kingdom.

Then your kids go to school, and that's a little kingdom of leadership, and then then there are there's a PTA, and then all of our little communities come together to form a city, and then the city, all the little kingdoms come together to form a county, and then all the county kingdoms come together to form a state, and then a nation, and then ultimately what the Bible might refer to when all these kingdoms collide is the kingdom of earth.

Now, I'm gonna start with the question.

How do you think it's going on the kingdom of earth for us?

Wars in Gaza, wars in Ukraine, rumors of war in Syria and Yemen right now.

Every day, thousands of babies around the world die of preventable malnutrition.

There's starvation, there's homelessness, there's education issues, there's clean water issues, and everything in our world could be solvable if we would work together.

But how's it going on the kingdom of earth?

Like, not good.

And every time, in my opinion, that people fight for their rights and their ideals and their ideology, it just furthers this divide in the kingdom of earth.

But Jesus comes along and over a hundred and thirty times in the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John alone, he says there is a different kingdom that we need to be aware of.

It's the reality of the kingdom of God.

And Jesus doesn't hide it.

Like he says it over and over and over again.

In fact, I want you to think about the most famous prayer ever, the Lord's Prayer.

Jesus says, Our Father in heaven, and not that heaven is some distant, far-off place, but it is this reality that we can live in here and now.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed it, or holy be your name.

And then he says these words your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

What is this?

This is kingdom of God language.

And the funny thing is you can pray this prayer.

The reason we don't pray this prayer every Sunday at Access, I had a lady ask me a couple months ago, why don't you pray the Lord's Prayer every Sunday?

It's because it becomes common, and when it becomes common, it gets forgotten.

You've probably heard this, recited it, said it multiple times in your life, maybe even multiple times this week, and you blow through this and you never stop to think, what does it mean for God's kingdom to come and for God's will to be done as a result of me and my life?

If I were to summarize the message of Jesus.

If I were to say to you, what access has been about for 18 years and just newsflash, what we're gonna be about for the next 18 years is we're joining Jesus in this mission to bring up there, down here, to take the kingdom of heaven and to bring it to earth.

What does this look like?

It looks like every time we have an opportunity to love someone and to serve someone, we do it.

Why?

Because it brings heaven a little closer.

It means every time we have an opportunity to show God's love or to show grace to someone, it brings heaven a little closer.

Every time a parent makes a decision to turn away from all the workaholism that they feel in their heart and to spend time with their kids, heaven gets a little closer.

Every time a husband chooses faithfulness over the opportunity for a fling on the side, heaven gets a little closer.

Like the goal should be that everything we do brings heaven a little closer because it was the mission of Jesus not to have heaven be this far-off place we go, but that heaven should permeate our lives in every part.

Every part of it.

So as we were approaching this 18th anniversary of our church, I was thinking through the story of Access.

And we didn't start Access to be a church, we started it as a college Bible study for our friends.

And I'll never forget, there was the summer I was out traveling with.

My brother Mike, and we were speaking at camps.

I had gotten married earlier in December, and then, like, six months later, in end of May or early June, I was in a camp in Texas, and I flew my wife out to be with us for a couple days.

Well, the week before, she was doing her makeup and she leaned against the counter and she felt what it what felt like a bruise in her leg.

And when she looked at it, it kind of had like a little bit of a bump to it.

So she already had a physical schedule with the doctor, and she said, Doc, look, I got this weird bruise.

And the doctor said, It's not a bruise.

That's oh, let's do a test.

And one test led to the next, which led to the next, which led to the next.

And the doctor said, I'm so sorry, Liz.

This is stage two, not Hodgkin's lymphone.

I had flown her out to be with me at this camp in Texas.

I caught her as she heard the word cancer.

Three days later, I had to put her back on a plane to fly home for a week of testing, and I went and spoke at another camp.

I came home a day early from that trip, the day before she was gonna start chemo, and all of this happened so fast.

I'll never forget that week they had to put a pick line in her arm to push the chemo through.

And her arm hurt so bad from this.

That the first time I saw her, she hugged me with one arm and she kept her arm like this, like as if it was in a sling, even though there was no sling.

We sat down and we hugged on the couch and we held each other and we prayed a prayer that to this day we feel the ripple effects of with my wife trembling, with me not knowing if I would have a wife in six months.

We prayed a prayer.

God, may we never forget how we feel right here, right now, in this moment.

May we never forget someday if you allow us to lead people or to serve people or to be pastors or whatever you do with our lives.

May we never forget how we feel now, so that when people come to us hurting and broken and tired and worn out and restless, when people walk in with tragedies and trauma, that we'll never forget how we feel in this moment.

And so here we are 18 years later, and by the grace of God, our church has gotten big, but we've never gotten off mission.

Our church has grown in size, but we've always made this decision to say no.

The prayer we pray was bringing up there down here.

God, when we needed help, when we needed hope, when we needed healing, when we needed grace, when we needed love, you showed it to us in that difficult, dark season of our lives.

May we never forget it and may we show it to the world around us.

That is bringing up there down here.

So normally when I preach, here's my hope.

Normally when I preach, my goal is to give you some tangible, practical things to do and come back the next two weeks.

That's literally what I'll do.

Today, I wanted to raise one thing, which is awareness.

I wanted your eyes to be open to the opportunities all around you.

The kingdom of God, Jesus says, is here, it's near, and it's close.

It is possible entirely for you to miss it.

In one example, Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a man who's walking through a field and he finds a treasure buried in it.

And in his excitement, he goes home and he sells everything he has because he knows he has to have it, because what it is is so beautiful and so precious.

In the book of Luke, Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a banquet that is thrown, but it's not just for the wealthy or the rich or the elite.

He invites people like the broken, the lame, the blind, the deaf, the hurting.

And they come to this banquet for them, which means everyone's welcome and everyone's invited to it.

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is real.

It's realer than you, realer than the seat you're sitting in.

It's the most real thing imaginable.

It's what you can count on.

And it's what he's all about.

So, what if this week we just lived with this awareness, with our eyes as open as we know how for ways that we can bring the kingdom of God to earth?

What would it look like if a church got a hold of this?

What would it look like Bartow location?

What would it look like if the Bartow location of our church just said all of us are gonna be on mission with Jesus to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth?

I think it would look like a city that gets changed.

I think it would look like lives that are forever altered.

I think it would look like miracle after miracle after miracle.

So here's how we're gonna end today.

I'm gonna invite you at every location wherever you're joining us, would you stand to your feet?

Come on, South Lakeland, would you stand with me?

We're gonna end in a different way.

In a moment, I'm gonna pray for all of us, and we're gonna invite God to open our eyes to what he's doing.

And then I'm gonna pray and give you an opportunity because some of you, I think maybe you heard me talk about the minimal intro and entrance requirements.

Maybe for some of you, you came today, and that is your relationship with God.

You just did the least amount possible to just feel like you could get a free pass into heaven.

But what if today you said, Jesus, today I give my whole life to you?

I want to be about what you're about.

We're gonna pray.

And I believe Jesus is gonna do a miracle in our church.

We're gonna see people make a decision to follow him.

And then for the first time ever, we're gonna join our church, one church in three locations, live via simulcast, and we're gonna sing the same song together in unison that this is a place of miracles, a house where God's presence dwells.

And because of it, because the kingdom of heaven has come here, we can experience his goodness.

So, can we do this all across this place?

Would you just lift your hands like this towards heaven?

So, God, in this place, make us aware.

Open our eyes to what you're doing in the world around us.

God, help us to see opportunities to love and to serve and to give.

Help us to see places where your kingdom can invade the kingdom of earth.

And God, may we care about what you care about.

God, my prayer is that you will break our heart and open our eyes to the things that you see that break your heart.

And God, that is the result.

May the city of Lakeland and the city of Barto be flipped upside down for the glory of God.

God, we love you.

We give you praise and worship for that in Jesus' name.

With your head still bowed and night still closed.

If you don't know if you're right with God, but right now you want to make this decision to not just get into heaven by the skin of your teeth, but to go all in and to say, Jesus, I'm literally all in.

I'll follow you with everything I have.

If this is you, would you raise your hand right now from you?

Thank you.

Yep, thanks, thanks.

I love this.

Thank you.

If this is you, would you pray this with me?

Say, Jesus, today I give you my life.

From this day forward, I choose to follow you.

Whatever you ask of me, I'll do.

Whatever you need from me, my answer is yes.

Jesus, I believe you're the Son of God.

I believe you came into this world and died on the cross for me.

And because of your salvation, because of your death and your burial and your resurrection, I believe salvation is available to me.

So I receive your forgiveness, and from this day forward, I'll follow you.

Jesus, I love you.

I give you my life for the rest of my life, and it's in your name I pray.

Amen.

Church man, we just had people pray.

Come on, let's celebrate the miracle, everybody.