I Have Some Questions, Part Three Series

We’re in a series that we’re calling "Questions That I Have," questions that I have for God or about God. Boy, do you guys have questions. I’m telling ya. I’ve asked you to e mail me at pastorgreg@seacoast.org, and so far, I have over 1,000 e mails just about that, and nearly 1,000 text messages, and somebody -- two or three of you have said in the e mails, "When is Pastor Greg gonna get back to me personally on my question?" Here’s my answer. I love ya, but it ain’t happening. Okay? It ain’t happening. I just can’t do it. I’d be doing that until Jesus came. And so I’m gonna try to answer as many questions as I can. I’d love for you to keep sending ’em in. We’ve got a team that looks at ’em and bring ’em to me. And we try to pick out ones that a lot of people are asking or ones that are maybe a little bit more unusual and not too unusual. There are some weird questions. Can I tell ya that? I’ll have you know there are no stupid questions, only stupid people, okay? I’ll have you know that. I should not have said that. I’m sorry that I said that, kind of. Okay?

This week I’d love for your questions to be about relationships, anything about relationships, single, married, divorced, straight, hetro, homo, whatever, any kinda questions, ’cause you guys are pouring ’em on, and next week I’m gonna deal with those issues. Next week will be PG13 borderline R. It might be a good week to take the kiddos to the children’s church. Last service I said it would be a good week to expose them to children’s church. Bad use of words. But it might be a good opportunity to do that. It’s gonna be kind of an adults only service next week. We’re gonna take off the gloves and deal with the tough issues as they relate to relationships, so I want you to be a part of that.

Now, this week, there was a four year old or maybe a six year old, I can’t remember, that sent in a question that said, "Where did God come from?" How many of you wanna tackle that? I didn’t and so I gave it to Jim Miles who is our Family Life pastor. Jim, fire away on that one.

Jim Miles: Hi, Pastor Greg. Where did God come from? Wow. That is a deep one. We figured since the question came from a four year old, what we’d do is we’d go into our children’s ministry, ask a few more young minds and see if they might just have the answers. So, let’s go see what they have to say.

Hi. What’s your name?

Child: McKenzie.

Jim Miles: Hi, McKenzie. Can you tell me, where did God come from?

Child: Heaven.

Child: Heaven.

Child: Heaven.

Child: Heaven.

Child: Heaven.

Jim Miles: Does he have a telephone number?

Child: No.

Jim Miles: You don’t know the address?

Child: No.

Jim Miles: Where did God come from?

Child: Our heart.

Child: Jesus.

Child: What is this?

Jim Miles: It’s a camera. Don’t worry about it. No one’s watching it.

Child: The earth.

Child: From the world.

Jim Miles: Where did God come from?

Child: That’s a hard question.

Jim Miles: Who made God?

Child: Who made God?

Child: The people.

Child: Jesus.

Child: Now I think -- I’m thinking of playing Duck, Duck, Goose right now.

Jim Miles: Okay. You go play Duck, Duck, Goose.

(Laughs) That’s how I feel when I see some of your questions. I just wanna go play Duck, Duck, Goose. (Laughs) Kids are great, aren’t they? Alright. I wanna talk about Heaven because we’re gonna do one week on the afterlife. You guys had so many questions about it, and last week we dealt with the judgment. We dealt with hell. This week I’d like to deal a little bit with Heaven. It’s important for a couple of reasons. Number one, a lot of you had questions about, "Hey, I’m a Christian and all this, but I still fear death," and so I wanna deal with that a little bit so that we kinda know what’s out there as best we can. And the second reason is ’cause you’re gonna -- by my calculation, you’re gonna spend a long time in one of the afterlife places, and so you need to know what it’s about just a little bit. And there are a lot of misconceptions about Heaven. It’s boring. You know what I mean?

Somebody said they always thought Heaven was gonna be a 24 hour a day church service, and that doesn’t sound real exciting. Gary Larson, who created the cartoon "The Far Side," did a lot of stuff on Heaven. In one of ’em he’s got a guy just kinda hanging out on a cloud doing the harp thing and he’s got a look on his face like -- and the caption says, "I shoulda brought a magazine," just that type thing. The problem with that is if that’s your view of Heaven, why share the good news with anybody? If you’re not excited about where you’re gonna spend eternity, why would you bring anybody with you? So I wanna delve into a little bit of the truth as I could see it and as I see in the Word of God.