Monday, June 13

John 14:1-6

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Do you remember the old “E.F. Hutton” commercial? I don’t remember much about what the commercial was selling – I think it was financial guidance – but I do remember it featured two men sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant. One of them says to the other, “Well, my broker is E.F. Hutton, and E.F. Hutton says…” At that moment the whole restaurant grows silent as people strain to hear what the man says next. The tag-line of the ad was: “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.”

In a way, that’s what our summer sermon series, “What Did Jesus Say?” is all about! When it comes to the most important issues of human life; life and death, heaven and hell, money and love; doesn’t it make sense to ask, “What did Jesus say?” And doesn’t it make sense that if Jesus did say something about these issues, that we would also strain to listen to and understand what he said?

In this familiar passage, Jesus is talking about heaven. Heaven, or life after death, is one of those subjects that everyone thinks about – but we rarely talk about. Throughout history and across almost every culture and civilization, human beings have dreamed and speculated about life after death. Consider this paragraph from Randy Alcorns’ landmark book entitled, “Heaven”:

“Australian aborigines pictured Heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. The early Finns thought it was an island in the faraway east. Mexicans, Peruvians and Polynesians believed they went to the sun or the moon after death. Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt the spirits of the buffalo…In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world…Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal – that this world is not all there is.”

A few months ago I saw a movie entitled, “Hereafter,” which dealt with the subject of life after death. Over the course of the entire movie – which was entirely focused on the issue of what happens after death – God was not mentioned once. And “Jesus Christ” was only mentioned one time – and that was as a kind of sarcastic joke. It seemed to me profoundly sad to devote an entire movie to a subject with eternal significance without ever once referring to the only being who actually is eternal!

So where do we start in our understanding of heaven? We start, Jesus says, with trust.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.

“Trust me,” Jesus says.

Think of it this way; if you were planning a trip to New York City and you had never been there before, who would you consult for advice on everything from travel to hotels to restaurants to sightseeing? Would you trust someone who had never been there before but had lots of ideas about what New York City must be like? Or would you trust someone who was born and raised there – and who still lived there?

When it comes to heaven, to life after death, there is no shortage of opinions or people who are willing to speculate based on what they would like to believe. But there is only one opinion that matters, that we can trust – and that is the word of the one who still lives there

Thank God for his word and ask him to clarify your understanding of heaven as you listen to Jesus this week! 

Brian Coffey