How Big Is Heaven?

Scripture: John 14.1-14

How big is heaven? Big – most of us would say. Although the way we think, sometimes, of who will get in and who won’t would suggest that, according to our lights, heaven doesn’t need to be that big. The Jehovah’s Witnesses say only room for 144,000 is required.
That’s not that many people when you think about it. Listening to some Christians it seems that only themselves and a few others need apply to the Pearly Gates as well.

There’s an old story about a white man and a black man talking about heaven. The white man says, “I dreamed I died and went to heaven. There’s was a white section of heaven and a colored section of heaven. The white section was all and more than I imagined. Streets of gold. Clear rivers. Green grass. Paradise. Then I walked through the colored section of heaven and it was nothing but broken down shacks, and dirt roads and the people there were dressed poorly.” The man finished his story and smiled at the black man, who smiled back at the joke. Then the black man said, “I had a dream about heaven too. I dreamt I died and went to heaven and the colored section was sort of like you described it, the people there were living simply but they were happy. Then I strolled over to the white people’s section of heaven and it was like you said, golden and rich and beautiful, but you know, there wasn’t a soul in the place.”

But what does Scripture tell us. Well, Jesus says that “narrow is the road and hard one at that which leads to life and few who find it (Matthew 7.14).” In the same passage Jesus tells us it’s easy to get to Hell. The road is well-maintained and the signposts clear. This scripture would seem to support the notion that relatively few people make it to heaven. But. . .there is this in John 14: “In my Father’s house there are many rooms. . .” and Jesus goes to get them ready for us. Comparing these passages in John and Matthew you have what scholars call an apparent contradiction. So how do we resolve it?

You resolve apparent contradictions in scripture by looking at other scripture on the same question. Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3 that “Whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.” That statement in backed up by the scripture that says “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” 1 Timothy 2.3-4 says, “This is right and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Let me sum up these scriptures. Jesus is the door through which humankind can be saved for heaven. To enter this door you must believe in Jesus as Savior and God. God wants everyone to believe this and be saved. Jesus said it of himself in this “many rooms” passage: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Do I think it’s hard to walk the road of belief to heaven? Yes, sometimes I think it’s the hardest thing we can ever do. It’s hard to believe and to walk the road of belief when so many other things in this life are pulling you to throw in the towel and just live a life of selfishness and hedonism with no thought to the future. In that sense, narrow and hard is the road to life. And conversely, to quote those great modern theologians, ACDC, “there’s a highway to Hell.”

But God does everything possible to show us great mercy and patience. Our Father has the patience of Job, and then some. He is slow to anger and is love is unfailing. His Grace, this unearned, unmerited favor God shows us, is the power that upholds this world and keeps it together. Grace is also the only power strong enough to do what seems virtually impossible, more impossible than getting a camel through a needle’s eye, that is to move millions of fallen, wretched, sinful human beings to a place of perfection and bliss. Think about that!

The very entertaining animated movie, The Incredibles, begins with mock interviews of the Incredibles, modern-day superheroes who use their special powers to save ordinary human beings from disaster. Mr. Incredible himself confesses his frustration with ordinary human beings and their foibles:

No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get
Back in jeopardy. I wanna say, “Stay saved for little bit, ya know.” I feel
Like the maid – I just cleaned up this mess, can we keep it clean for ten minutes?

The Lord is good to us. The Lord shows us the meaning of patience, the meaning of grace. The Lord doesn’t run around solving all our problems, but he does fix the one problem that really matters in eternity – how can sinful human beings enter a sinless paradise? By the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

We can look around us and scoff at the many who don’t seem to give a fig for heaven or for God. Will they go to heaven? We can also look around us and wonder, “If Jesus is really the only way to heaven, how in the world will so many of other faiths and beliefs be saved by Jesus? How fair is that?

My answer to that is the power and the mathematics of Grace. God adds the sum total of our deeds and lives, comes up with a figure, then erases it and provides his own answer - Grace. Grace. The Grace of Jesus Christ. As the old hymn says, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy. . .”

I preached a sermon on the Population of Hell a couple years ago. In it I believe I suggested that Hell was a big place, not because there were so many people there, but because those people couldn’t stand to live next to each other. I borrowed the idea from C.S. Lewis book, The Great Divorce. In it Hell seems large at first, until it is compared with Heaven. In comparision Hell could rest on a pin in heaven, if heaven would allow it. Heaven is impressive. Heaven is real. And I think that seekers and agnostics and just casual unbelievers could find faith and hope in God if a belief in a real Heaven could be given to them. Maybe, if they could hear the words of Jesus, “In my Father’s house there are many rooms,” maybe they could believe, maybe you can believe, there is a place for me there too.

Know My Voice

Scripture: John 10.1-10; Acts 2.42-47


God’s grace speaks to us in sibilants. Fred Buechner explains that sibilants are sounds that can’t be shouted but only whispered: the sounds of bumblebees and wind and lovers in the dark. . .cars on wet roads, the sound of your own breathing. In sibilants, life is trying to tell us something. In fact, Buechner suggests that living a life of faith is a matter of listening to your life.

That makes sense. Doctors tell us that pain is the body’s way of telling us something’s wrong. Something’s been injured. Something’s not working correctly. Life has its own whisperings that we should heed. The believer learns to recognize the voice of Jesus in the many whisperings that our lives speak to us.

The Good Shepherd is the good shepherd because his sheep follow out of trust born of a long and deep relationship. Deep calls to deep in whisperings of mind and heart that almost don’t need to be put into words. “They know my voice.”

In a crowded room of children talking, laughing, crying, I can distinguish my son’s cries because I know his voice. Any parent can do that. Because parents have spent so much time listening to the subtle and not so subtle sounds and pitches and inflections of their child’s voice. It becomes second nature.

Athletes and musicians describe their most successful moments as “being in the Zone.” What is the Zone? It is where time slows down for them. They can see their movements and others movements as if they’re happening in slow motion. The ball gets bigger for them. The strike zone is huge. The notes come from out of nowhere and play themselves. They no longer have to think about what they are doing. They just do it. It is an effortless present.

I have experienced this sometimes when I’m writing. The words just flow. More talented writers than me describe whole books coming to them and finding them, not the other way around. There is a mystery to it. There seems to be a wholly Other.

And there is that quality, as well, to being in the presence of God. There are times when He just comes. The Holy Spirit alights upon our shoulders like a dove. The voice is clear, the peace is palpable, and present is effortless.

But just like an athlete or a writer or a musician, believers don’t get to those moments without effort, without practice, and without a long, deep relationship.

Knowing the voice of Jesus only happens as we learn to live with Him in the community of faith. Sheep follow the Shepherd together. Sheep hear His voice together. The early church as described in Acts chapter 2 devoted themselves to hearing God’s voice and being in His presence by being in the Word, in prayer, in life together. They got to the point where they were so good at it, that major decisions of leadership where revealed to them and they described it like this: “It seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit.” They were actually making decisions with God. They were in a Zone.

Being immersed in the life of the church will strengthen your walk and bring you closer to intimacy with the Savior. In church you learn to listen, you learn to pray, you learn to see Jesus in others. At the same time, if you would know the voice of Jesus then you must begin to listen for yourself, and you must pray for yourself. I can’t pray for you. Your Sunday School teacher can’t pray for you. Your spouse can’t pray for you the prayers of your heart that only you can pray.

I am convinced that when we learn to pray for ourselves then we become better listeners of God’s voice speaking to us. When I am praying more, then I hear more of God’s direction in my life – simple things like “Go see that person today,” or bigger things like, “It’s time to move the church more in this direction.”

The more we pray, the more we are able to hear things that we haven’t wanted to hear, the hard truth about ourselves. There are many examples of this in the Bible. David always comes to my mind. David has lied, cheated, stolen, committed adultery, and murdered. In other words, he’s had a few moral lapses. And you don’t get that far in sin without a singularity of purpose, that is, to ignore your conscience and ignore the voice of God wherever and through whomever God speaks. But here comes Nathan the priest; and Nathan catches David unawares. He does this by telling David a story. By the time Nathan is done with the story, David has heard God telling him some hard truths about himself.

Nathan’s job is my job too. I am supposed to preach hard stuff to you on occasion – things you may not want to hear. Any preacher that has been doing this for a while knows the risk involved. You say hard things and people might leave the church or make you leave the church. There’s a cartoon in which a preacher says to his wife, “I told them the truth, and they set me free.”

It’s like the story Gordon MacDonald tells about the three little girls who are playing school. The oldest of the three, Lisa, plays the teacher and says to her class, “Now children, there is no such thing as the Easter bunny. Do you hear me?” Upon which one of her students protests, “Lisa, Lisa, stop teaching us things we do not want to hear.”

Listening to the voice of God requires a commitment to reality as God defines it. Are we willing to look into the mirror that God through His Word and Spirit holds up before our lives?

Know this. If you submit to the discipline and effort of praying and listening to the voice of God, you will hear and know His voice. You will.

Underground Movement

Scripture: 1 Peter 1.17-23; Luke 24.13-35;


You are members of an underground movement. You are the original counter-culture. And you are the only counter-culture the really matters. What am I talking about? The Apostle Peter writes to the church as “exiles of the Dispersion” in the Mediterranean Rim. The first exiles of Dispersion were Jews who journeyed to countries outside their ancestral Palestine. They settled in places like Rome, Athens, Ephesus and became known as Jews of the Dispersion. Peter writes to Jewish converts and to Gentile followers of Christ as a Dispersion. Later he tells them that during their “time of exile” they should live in reverent fear.

They should fear God, not the culture or the country in which they are living. An important point. They should fear God who will someday return them to the Promised Land. This second Promised Land is not Palestine or Zion, but the Heavenly Zion, the New Jerusalem. Peter is reminding them of who they are in Christ. You are exiles in a foreign land. You are Salt and Light in a bland and dreary world. You are to live in the world but be not of the world. You are underground agents of God’s Kingdom in the kingdom of this world dominated by the ruler of this world, who is the Devil.

Upon the recent death of Pope John Paul II there has been much remembering and appraising of his value as a Pope and a person. Much thanksgiving. One of the historic things that this Pope accomplished is his quiet challenging of one of the twentieth century’s biggest blights upon humankind, atheistic Communism. Pope John Paul is credited by all who really know best with really starting the revolution that would bring down the Wall in Berlin and Communism in Poland and the whole Eastern Bloc with his visits to Poland after becoming Pope. This Polish Pope reminded his countrymen of who they really are in contrast to who the Communists had been telling them they were for the past seventy years. Pope John Paul told them that above all, they belonged to God, no matter what their militant atheistic leaders said. And the Pope’s words became Lech Walesa’s words that ignited a peaceful revolution in Gdansk and then the world.

Church don’t you know we are the hope of the world? We are a movement that changes lives, changes cultures, changes the very foundations of society. John Wesley and the early Methodists knew this. They were a movement. They brought the power of the Word of God in freshness and confidence to a people hungry for change. And since then the Methodist Church has always been this unique combination of an Evangelical/Confessional Church and a Sacramental Church. There is no other branch of the Body of Christ in the world quite like it. We are evangelical because we know lives don’t change without the transforming power of the Word and Spirit of God. And people can’t believe what they haven’t heard. We are Sacramental in that we see all of life as sacred. All that is in the creation is good and has been hallowed by the Creator for us to enjoy and serve Him in. Everywhere we go is holy ground.

And yet this Creation, this world has been usurped by Evil powers. People are more and more falling away from the truth of God and living a lie. We are losing our spiritual and moral center. Community is breaking down.

Robert Putnam reports, as does Barna and Pew and virtually every reputed source that tracks such things, that our community life has become significantly weaker on virtually all fronts. Putnam notes that we are becoming a more secular country than we were twenty or thirty years ago. “The country is becoming ever more clearly divided into two groups –the devoutly observant and the entirely unchurched.” What’s more, all the good things in community life that the church used to be the locus for are suffering as well. Americans volunteer less, give less, visit less, join less, serve less. We don’t get together and play cards with friends as much, break bread together as much, visit as much. “Over the course of the 1990’s the average American came to spend nearly 15 percent more time on child care or pet care and roughly 5-7 percent more time each on personal grooming, entertainment, sleep, exercise, and transportation.” By contrast, Barna reports, “the largest changes of all involve time spent at worship and visiting with friends, both of which fell by more than 20 percent.”

Friends these are not the kind of changes that make for community. This evidence, however, should tell us that the time is now for an underground movement. The time is now for a revolution of habits, what Tocqueville once called, “the habits of the heart.”

If you listened carefully to what Putnam reported changed in the last 15 years, you notice that largely we spend more time on ourselves and less time with and for others. It’s all about Me. Only, as a follower of Jesus, you know and I know that it’s not about Me. For the Church to become an Underground, counter-cultural movement once again we must be able to speak the language of the culture but bring a totally different message. We must tell them – It’s not about Me, It’s not about Self. It’s about loving God and loving our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. It’s about Christ and His kingdom. It’s about living as a community of faith, a new people formed for Him.

There’s a scene from that epic cultural movie The Godfather II in which Michael Corleone is in Havana, Cuba. And he’s riding in a car through the streets and witnesses a political insurgent blow himself up rather than submit to questioning by the police. Michael Corleone concludes that if the insurgents are willing to die for what they believe, then they can win.

Another kind of revolutionary once put it this way, “If a grain of wheat falls to the ground dies, it will produce much fruit.”

If we really want a community, if we really want a life we are proud to live, it’s gonna take some effort. It’s gonna take sacrifice. We will have to die to some old and current ways of living. It costs something to follow Jesus.
But I would also ask you to consider this: What will it cost us, and our children, and our communities if we don’t give us ourselves completely to this underground, countercultural movement that is the Church of Jesus Christ?