Dr. Ed Young, senior pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, delivered a sermon titled, “Heaven is Real.” According to Dr. Young, Jesus promised to prepare a place called Heaven for every Christian. “I am going to come and get you when life leaves this body, or the curtain of history comes down. I’m going to take you to that place uniquely prepared for you, and more than that, I’m going to stay with you and be there with you,” said Dr. Young quoting Jesus.
Is Heaven Real? According to Dr. Young, Heaven is real because Jesus said it’s real. “All we’ll need to know about heaven is we’ll have resurrected lives. In heaven, all of our friends will have resurrected lives. In heaven, there’ll be a resurrected New Heaven and New Earth. In heaven, there’ll be a resurrected Jesus. In heaven, there’ll be a resurrected culture. In heaven, there’ll be creativity and joy and celebration that’ll go on and on that’s beyond anything we can picture or imagine because heaven is real. It’s real.”
Why Should We Worry About Heaven?
People worry about the unknown. It’s human nature to worry. The unknown scares us. And death is unknown.
According to Dr. Young, “Every second, three people die. Every minute, 180 people die. Every hour, 11,000 people die. Every day, 250,000 people leave this earth. The mortality rate is a hundred percent, a hundred percent.”
And since the mortality rate of every human being is 100%, most human beings wonder about what will happen to them once they die. It’s normal. Is there life after death, or do we cease to exist forever?
Both spiritual and non-spiritual individuals may believe a person’s being, or essence, or soul continues after the physical body dies. Some use their own logic to make a determination, other’s use sacred texts, like the Bible, or other writings or stories or illustrations handed down over the centuries.
Dr. Young speaks only about what the Bible says about heaven.
Where Do We Go When We Die?
“We who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ in that book (the Bible) knows that when life leaves this body, we go to heaven or we go to hell,” says Dr. Young. “Understanding that God never sends anybody to hell, it is a choice we make on this earth that decides our destiny.”
Why Is It So Hard to Believe in Heaven?
Humans desire certainty. We want evidence. And most of us won’t believe what we’re told until we see it or experience it for ourselves.
We were all told by our mother’s not to touch a hot stove. But until we touched it, experienced the heat and the pain, many of us were not convinced. Lesson learned.
Dr. Young tells a blond joke to illustrate his point. No disrespect to blondes is intended.
Two blondes are standing on the coast. It’s night time. They look out over water at the moon.
One blonde says to the other, “Are we closer to the moon or to Florida?”
The other blonde says, “Can you see Florida?”
According to Dr. Young, “We can be confused about what is real and what is not real.”
The blonde could see the moon, so she was confused about how close it is. It was more ‘real’ to her than Florida.
But we can’t see heaven. We can’t touch it.
“People have trouble believing that (heaven is real) because it is out of this world,” Dr. Young says. “But it’s real. Heaven exists.”
And we know it exists because of the Bible.
What Does the Bible Say About Heaven?
The Bible says, in John 14:1, “Do not let your heart be troubled.”
When Jesus states offers this state, He is in the upper room with His disciples. At what has become known as the Last Supper.
“It’s only hours before his arrest and his crucifixion,” says Dr. Young. “This is the victory address in which he’s instructing those eleven apostles one last time and he’s trying to teach them and let them understand that he’s about to leave.”
Jesus explains the obvious, that there is evil in the world.
“There is evil in the world, so there is trouble in the world,” says Dr. Young summarizing Jesus’ point. “But we don’t have to look at a global perspective, we can look at our lives. And there’s trouble in individual lives. There’s trouble in relationships. There’s trouble in families, there’s trouble in our vocations, there’s trouble with our health. All around us, we see they’re troubled but this Scripture says, ‘Let not your heart be troubled,’ but we are surrounded by troubles. We have troubles. Everyone who walks this earth has troubles. Jesus did.”
Dr. Young offers three things we need to know for victory in this life when trouble comes.
I. Trust God
Jesus said to believe in God, and believe in Him.
“It’s trust. Can God be trusted?” asks Dr. Young. “He created this world. Can Jesus be trusted as you look at His life and His words? He not only taught these principles, He lived them out. So, Jesus is saying, trouble comes, don’t let trouble get over you, and control you, and ruin your life. He said, ‘Put your trust in me as you put your trust in Almighty God.’ That’s where we begin when troubles come. We trust, we believe, put our full weight down upon him.”
II. Jesus Has Prepared a Place for us in Heaven
What’s the next thing Jesus says when trouble comes?
According to Dr. Young, “He said, ‘In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’ He’s saying, ‘Look, when trouble comes, the worst thing that can happen is your life can be taken from you. You can leave this earth.’ But he said, ‘That shouldn’t be an overwhelming trouble because,’ he said, ‘I have gone ahead of you. I have paved the way for you. And I have prepared a place just for you.’ And that will be our home. Anybody thinks they’re at home on this earth, you are fooling yourself.”
Are you happy with this world? Your situation? Do you long for something more?
“We’ll never be totally fulfilled, totally satisfied, totally on top of things, totally happy in this world,” says Dr. Young. “It’s not gonna happen because we’re made for something more and bigger than this world. And Jesus says, ‘I’ve gone ahead of you. Whatever happens in this life, you go to the next life, I have prepared a place for you.’”
The life we know now is just a brief stop on our eternal journey.
“We’re pilgrims. We’re passing through. We’ll never be totally at home here, but when we all get to heaven, we’ll be completely at home there in a way that we can’t even imagine in this life,” says Dr. Young. “Your initials will be there and for the first time you’ll be totally at home. The best day of my life will be the last day I live on this earth but the last day I live on this earth will not, by a long shot, be the best day of my life. That’s true of you, that’s true of me.
And Jesus makes another promise, says Dr. Young.
III. Jesus Will Come and Get Us
“I am going to come and get you when life leaves this body or the curtain of history comes down, I’m going to come and get you. I’m going take you to that place uniquely prepared for you and more that, I’m going to stay with you and be there with you. Man, what kind of beautiful comfort and promise that should be.”
According to Dr. Young, John 14 is an entire chapter of comfort. “Martin Luther said it’s the best chapter of comfort in the Bible. You read John 14, it’s just comfort stacked on comfort, stacked on comfort, stacked on comfort. It is a comforting word and this is the very heart of that comforting word. He (Jesus) will come and get us. Breath leaves this body, He will take us to the place that has been prepared, where for the first time ever we’ll feel totally at home and he will abide there with us. What a deal. That is the beginning of heaven.”
But Thomas, a disciple of Jesus, was uncertain. In verse 5 Thomas said, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
“And then Jesus uttered the most exclusive, narrow statement that you’ll ever find,” says Dr. Young. “He said, ‘I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life.’ He explained clearly and probably elaborated on this to the apostles exactly what that was all about. He said, ‘I am the way.’ How do you get to God, ladies and gentlemen? How do you get to know God? How do you have an entree to God? How do you listen to God? How do you speak to God? Jesus says, ‘I’m way you do it and it comes through reconciliation.’”
In his book Basic Theology, Dr. Charles Ryrie explains that “because of sin God and man are in a relationship of hostility and enmity.” In order for humanity to be reconciled to God, Jesus bore our sins on the cross. So because of Jesus, we are reconciled with God, which means “a change of relationship from hostility to harmony and peace.”
Dr Young explains it this way. “We’re unholy, impure, stained, broken, lost, confused people. We have to be reconciled. We have to have a way to get to God and Jesus is the way. He established the way through reconciliation by dying on a cross and paid the price for all of your stuff and all of my stuff. He regenerates us. We die, we leave this earth, we get that resurrected body and all of a sudden, we are regenerated. We have life forever meant for heaven.”
AN ILLUSTRATION OF DEATH AND HEAVEN
Dr. Young tells the story of a young girl who was diagnosed with terminal illness.
All of her family and friends were gathered. She didn’t understand death and what was to come.
The girl’s mother said, “Let me show you what death is.”
The mother walked the young girl out of her room and into another room and left her all by herself for a few moments.
“The little girl was crying,” Dr. Young said. “The mother went and got a member of the family, brought her in the room with the little girl, and another one, and another one, until all of them were in the room with the little girl. And the mother said, ‘This is the way it is with death. You just go first.’ She said, ‘All of us will follow with you afterwards.’”
HEAVEN ISN’T A ONE-HORSE-PARTY, IT’S A CELEBRATION
Dr. Young tells the story of a party that a friend invites you to attend. There’s a few people there with a little food, some hors d’oeuvres, a few drinks. You have fun talking to your friends, and the party’s just okay. Not great. But fun. But then your friend is ready to leave.
“Let’s leave,” your friend says.
But you think it’s too early to leave. “No,” you say, “maybe the party will pick up.”
But your friend insists. “No, let’s go,” she says.
So you grudgingly leave the small party and go with your friend back home. Maybe at this point you’re a little disappointed. But then you open the door and all of a sudden, you’re home, the lights come on, and there’s laughter, and there’s food and live music, and there’s people you haven’t seen in a long time. Your family is there. It’s a celebration.
“All of a sudden,” says Dr. Young, “you realize that you have gone to your own graduation party and it is really terrific. It is magnificent. And you say, ‘My goodness, I was worried about leaving that little old one-horse party, but look at this celebration, this banquet that I’ve come to.’”
According to Dr. Young, we have the idea in our minds that we might miss something here in this world, and we’d like our little ‘party’ to go on, but we don’t understand what a celebration we have in store in heaven.
“Oh no, we go to a party, a banquet, a place of excitement we can’t even imagine in this life,” Dr. Young says. “It’s called heaven, heaven. And I don’t want to get us too excited about heaven today, because you’ll say, ‘Pull up a bus and let’s go there right now.’”
HEAVEN IS SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO
“An older Christian man was dying,” says Dr. Young. “He’s in the bed. His son came in, sat on the edge of the bed and said, ‘Dad, how do you feel?’ And that Christian man with a little smile on his face said, ‘Son, I feel like a young boy on Christmas Eve.’ You see, heaven is exciting.”
REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE
“When I was growing up, almost without exception every time I left my home, my mother would say, ‘Edwin, remember who you are.’ And I would turn around and grin, or smile, or throw my hands back, keep moving, but I knew exactly what she was talking about.”
“‘At the party, remember who you are.’
“‘As you go out with that date, remember who you are.’
“‘As you take that trip and you get away from people that really don’t know you, remember who you are.’”
“‘Remember what you have learned.’
“‘Remember what you have been taught, what your name means, principles you have seen your dad and I live out before you.’
“That’s what my parents were saying, ‘Edwin, remember who you are.’ To this day, I have not forgotten that reminder and you shouldn’t either. Sometimes I have remembered, but out in the throes of life, I did not remember who I was in Christ. We need to always keep that in the front part of our minds. Remember who you are and, more importantly, remember who you belong to. As a son or a daughter of God in Jesus Christ, live through Him and for Him and never forget, you are His. That’s who you are and that’s who I am.”
Some day you mortality will become reality. It happens to every human being. It could be today. It could be tomorrow. It could be next month, or next year, or in several decades. But it will come.
Will you be prepared? Are you prepared? Where will your soul end up, if the Bible is true? Will it be the destination you choose? If you have a saving faith in Jesus Christ, your eternal journey can continue into heaven. Don’t wait.