Heaven 2 Relationships And Responsibilities Series

Heaven 2 Relationships and Responsibility

“A little girl was walking with her father in the country. No neon signs, no automobile headlights or street lights marred the stillness of the crisp evening. As she looked into the deep blue velvet sky, studded with an array of diamonds which put the most dazzling Tiffany display to shame, she said, ‘Daddy, if the wrong side of heaven is so beautiful, what do you think the right side will look like?’” (Death and the Afterlife Billy Graham, 167, W. Publishing, 1987)

- Read Revelation 21:1-5

Look again please at verse 4. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.”

Can you imagine? No more grief. No more crying. No more pain, and the Lord wiping away every tear.

In heaven there will be no fear. There won’t be certain parts of heaven that we are afraid to walk through by ourselves. There will be no locks, no bars on doors or windows, no barbed wire around parking lots. There will be no alarm systems. Martial arts will be unneeded. We will need no weapons nor conceal carry permits.

In heaven no presidents will be shot, no elections will be rigged, no babies will be aborted.

In heaven there will be no cancer. There will be no traffic nor traffic accidents. In heaven there will be no middle-of-the-night phone calls nor surprising knocks on the door. In heaven there will be no fear nor anything to be afraid of.

In heaven there will be no darkness. There will be no night. Today we may fear the dark, or we may fear ignorance, and when we understand we say, “Now I see the light.” In Psalm 27:1 , David says, “The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom should I fear?”

In heaven there is no fear and there is no darkness. In heaven there will be no suffering and we will never again have to watch helplessly as disease and death slowly steals a loved one from us.

Vance Havner, that great preacher from years past once said, “I’m homesick for heaven. It’s the hope of dying that has kept me alive so long.” (Christianity Today, Nov. 7, 1986).

I still remember the last song we sang at my dad’s funeral.

Sing the wondrous love of Jesus,?Sing His mercy and His grace;?In the mansions bright and blessed?He’ll prepare for us a place.

Onward to the prize before us!?Soon His beauty we’ll behold;?Soon the pearly gates will open;?We shall tread the streets of gold.

Refrain:?When we all get to heaven,?What a day of rejoicing that will be!?When we all see Jesus,?We’ll sing and shout the victory!

(When We All Get to Heaven, Eliza Hewitt, 1898)

There was a time when the church and it’s members would regularly sing about heaven. There was a time when Christians would think and sing about heaven during the week, not just at church. It was the thought of heaven that kept them going. It was the thought of the prize awaiting them that helps the make it through another week.

“However glorious heaven may be, all too many Christians don’t give it much thought. Philip Yancey wrote, ‘A strange fact about modern American life; although 71 percent of us believe in an afterlife (says George Gallup), no one much talks about it. Christians believe that we will spend eternity in a splendid place called heaven . . . Isn’t it a little bizarre that we simply ignore heaven, acting as if it doesn’t matter?’” (Ibid, 155)

“We are seeing more and more articles about old age, death, right to life, and out-of-body experiences. But rarely do we read anything about heaven in the magazines or find books on the subject. When we go through a gallery of pre-twentieth century art or look at dusty anthologies of poetry and prose, we discover that heaven was a topic of greater interest in the past. What has happened to us today? Why the general lack of attention to heaven in modern thought and preaching?

If we begin to think of reasons for disinterest in heaven, here are a few conclusions. First of all, in America and most of the Western nations, we live in an affluent society. Most of us have pain relievers to rely upon, enough food, and beautiful surroundings. The biblical promises of those advantages seem to have been dulled for us. We areas caught up with the affairs of this life we give little attention to eternity.” (Ibid 116)

Also, we live in a goal-oriented society. We want to do and accomplish, and accumulate. We have goals we work toward, even if tha goal is nothing more than retirement. So, the idea of sitting around and doing nothing for eternity hols very little appeal for us. Just as a child cannot imagine what it might be like 20 years down the road, we cannot imagine a time or place where we live for all eternity. The whole thing seems boring.