Far Better Series

Have you ever noticed that life is always better when a vacation is on the horizon? It’s just a fact of life. When you’re going on a long trip you may contact a travel agency or you surf the net or talk to friends who have had a great experience somewhere. So you begin to look at pictures. You do searches for activities and events there and along the way. You check out your frequent flyer accounts or your Hotel reward programs to see if you can cash in on a free ticket or lodging. You check out golf courses or shopping malls on the Internet. And as the day approaches your excitement and anticipation swells! When you are a week out you check out the ten-day forecast and you start checking it daily until the moment you depart.

The Bible tells us that each one of us will go on a long trip—in fact it will last for all eternity. You will be assigned to one of two places, heaven or hell. There’s no middle ground. But for such an important journey we should be putting more time and energy into planning for that than we do our earthly travel. Choice, not chance, will determine your eternal destination. This morning, we are going to take an intentional detour in our Philippians series and here is why. One of the reasons that joy is hard to find in the world, is because a fallen world is designed to rob you of joy. It’s designed to break your heart. But the good news, is that for a Christian, those same realities are meant to grow our affections for heaven. And one of the reason joy eludes us, is because we are too focused on the here and now sometimes to the point that we forget that our greatest joy was not to be derived from the things this world offers us. Our greatest joy is to be reserved for focusing on what God has promised is waiting for us.

So, hard times, difficult and painful patches, serve a Godly purpose of sharpening our affections for eternity, the place of ultimate joy. We have titled the message this morning Far Better because that is exactly what Paul said in the verses we looked at last week when he thought about death as gain. “To live is Christ but to die is gain!”

Let me tell you one of the dangers of our preaching and teaching here at LHC. We spend a lot of energy on not only teaching the Bible, we work really hard to help you understand what it could look like to faithfully apply it. We believe the Bible contains real truth that can be applied to a real person struggling with a real problem. So, what’s bad about that? Here is what we have to be careful of:

ONE: we can evaluate every sermon NOT through the filter of “is it true?” but through the filter of “does it personally help me?” The purpose of the Bible is NOT to make your life better. The purpose of the Bible is to reveal the character and redemptive plan of God through Christ. Now, should the overflow of teaching produce more joy and wisdom? Of course! But, that’s the not purpose. And if we are not careful, we can become more interested in the gifts (like a better life) than we are the giver.

Here’s another thing we have to be careful of when attempting to be very practical or applicational: we can become imbalanced in our focus where we are so focused on applying the Bible to the TEMPORAL life that we are living, that we spend no time thinking about heaven. And that leads to a lack of joy because every circumstance is then filtered through “does this make me happy right now in the temporary life that I am living?” Instead of, “does this make me long for home and increase my joy at the thought of it?”

Because when all of our focus in on the here and now, we start hoping that eternity holds off a little longer…like we create this list of things that we want to do BEFORE we leave this earth!

We’re like the little boy who was sitting in church one day. The preacher was going on and on about how great heaven would be. He talked about the streets of gold and the angels and about seeing God face to face. He concluded his message by asking the members of the congregation to raise their hands if they wanted to go to heaven. All hands went up into the air, except for one little boy. He sat there looking scared. So the preacher looked directly at the little boy and asked everyone again to raise their hand if they wanted to go to heaven. Again, all hands went up into the air except the little boy. So the preacher bent down and asked, “Son, don’t you want to go to heaven one day?” The little boy said, “Oh, yeah, ONE day I do. But the way you were talking, I thought you loading up the bus to leave right now.