Let The Journey Begin Series

How many of you have just woke up one day, got in your car, went to the airport and randomly bought a ticket to a place you never heard of? Or just got in your car and drove to a random city? None of you, I would suspect. When you go on a trip or a vacation, you picked a certain place to go and then you made certain plans. Where you go is important. It determines what you will pack. You pack one way if you’re going to south Florida or Texas and another way if you’re going to Alaska. The time of year affects your plans … are you going somewhere in the dead of winter or the middle of summer. How long you’re going to be gone also affects your plans. Are you going to be there for one night, a week, a month? Are you staying in a hotel? Camping? Staying with relatives or friends? Is it a vacation? A business trip? We travel for all kinds of reasons and each trip requires its own preparation and planning.

When you woke up this morning, whether you realized it or not, you were planning to take a journey. Your destination was 155 Newfound Street [80 Rice Cove Road]. You thought about what you were going to wear after checking the weather. You had a timetable to keep. You may not have pictured it, but you knew that at some point you would arrive at the church, park, walk into the church. Greet and be greeted by friends. Sit down, look through the bulletin, maybe mark the hymns, and settle in. As you thought about coming to church this morning, you had a physical destination in mind but did you have a spiritual destination in mind? Coming to church is like getting on a train and then asking the conductor where you’re going after you get on the train and just going along for the ride … waiting to see where the train stops and hope you like where it took you.

And it’s often how we look at our spiritual journey. We’re just along for the ride. We come to church. Maybe we read our Bibles … we go to Bible study … we’re involved in the activities of the church … we pray every morning and we pray every night. We “do” a lot of things on our journey but how much time do we actually spend thinking about our journey … where we are headed? We assume that we going to Heaven, but what does that mean? How does that inform and shape our plans as we head home? That is exactly what we’re going to be doing for the next few months.

For many, many people, life is a journey from birth to death … death being the final destination … and it affects their planning. Since there is nothing after death but annihilation and oblivion, darkness … not even an awareness of awareness … all their plans are focused on the here and now … their day-to-day existence. What and how much they can get out of life.

What a contrast to those of us who have an eternal sense of life … that death is not the final destination. We are just passing through … that there is so much more beyond this world. The problem is that we’re headed to a place where none of us have ever been before. We know that we will pass from the physical world to a spiritual realm, leaving behind these physical bodies and taking on new “bodies” or new spiritual forms, but what that will be like we don’t know and won’t know until it happens … but we can’t assume that we just sit in the pew and passively let life sweep us along until we arrive at the Gates of Heaven … and even when we arrive at our final destination, our journey, I believe, is not only far from over but has only rounded the bend or reached a new level … a Promised Land with infinite mysteries to explore .. a Paradise where we spend eternity with an Infinite Creator who is always creating and always inviting us to explore what He is creating.

I don’t know where I got the idea but for years I thought of Heaven as some kind of Heavenly retirement community … a kind of a reward for a life well-lived where we stand around singing and praising God for all eternity … which is true … we will be standing in the Presence of God, singing and praising Him with all the Heavenly hosts, the angels, and the saints. The Apostle John paints a wonderful picture of Heavenly worship in Revelation but I don’t believe that that is all that we’ll be doing. I believe that Heaven is a wonderful, fascinating, dynamic place because God is wonderful, fascinating, and dynamic … so I have to believe that His kingdom would also be a wonderful, fascinating, dynamic place, wouldn’t you?