Notes of Faith February 9, 2025
A little longer “Note” this morning. It is Sunday and time to worship, praise, pray, give thanks, and a look forward to what God has prepared for those who love Him, obey Him, and are waiting for the return of Jesus!
Head Straight for Heaven
Five Wonders of the World to Come
Article by Jared Compton
Professor, Bethlehem College and Seminary
You won’t get to heaven unless you really want to. That’s what the Bible tells us.
Jesus wanted to go to heaven. Hebrews tells us that the joy of heaven propelled his life of faith (Hebrews 12:2). It’s what motivated him to run and run all the way to the end. The same joy motivated the other heroes too, from Abel to Zechariah (Hebrews 11:4, 37). All ran through dangers and toils and snares — too many to count — and they didn’t stop. Why? Because they longed for heaven. They longed for the heavenly country that they could see just beyond the finish line (Hebrews 11:13–16).
You can’t run the race of faith all the way to the end without a clear vision of heaven. Your legs will give out. The strength of your resolve won’t be enough. The course is too steep. The headwind too strong. Ask the heroes. Ask Jesus. They’ll all say the same thing. Only the joys of heaven can sustain the race of faith.
In their post-race interview, they’d want you to know that the race is possible. What else are we to make of the fact that they made it? But they’d also want you to know how. If we asked them that, I suspect they’d smile, perhaps pause to wipe some sweat off their face, and then begin talking about heaven.
Here’s what they might say.
Reunion
Never forget that heaven will be filled with people who know and love the Lord Jesus just like we do. Everybody there will know the Lord “from the least . . . to the greatest” (Hebrews 8:11). All the people we’ve loved and lost, and who knew and loved the Lord Jesus, will be there in that place. Every single one of them: friends who died too soon, taken by disease or worse; children taken as children; parents; grandparents; wives and husbands.
Heaven will be filled with Jesus-people, with the “church of the firstborn” (New Testament believers) and “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Old Testament believers; Hebrews 12:23). Every believer of all time will be there. Some we can’t wait to meet, like Charles Spurgeon or Martyn Lloyd-Jones or John Stott. And others we can’t wait to see again — some whose names are still too painful to say aloud. They’ll be there. All of them.
What a day of rejoicing that will be.
Perfection
Heaven is also a place where God has promised to perfectly “put [his] laws into [our] minds, and write them on [our] hearts” (Hebrews 8:10). If you’ve been a Christian for more than, say, five minutes, then you’ve longed for this reality, even as you’ve experienced it in part. It’s a promise that reminds us that heaven will be free of sin. We will be free from sin. God’s good and life-giving ways will be part of the DNA of our resurrected bodies. You’ll no longer be able to sin. And that lack of freedom won’t bother you! It’ll be one of the best things about you and that place.
It’s a reality every Christian longs for. We long to be free of our inveterate self-seeking. Our debilitating jealousy. Our too-small and ill-directed desires. Our inability to act for God’s glory with anything but mixed motives. That darkness within you that occupies so much of your mind and heart, that pattern you long to see changed, foresworn, put off, that sin that besets you now — it will be permanently removed in the sin-free world to come.
It’s a promise whose future reality extends back into the present. When Jesus died, he activated God’s promise of perfection. The Bible calls it God’s new covenant. And it gives believers in this chapter of the story not only the prospect of future perfection, but present experiences of that future world. When we believed in Jesus, sin’s power over us was broken in a brand-new way. Our slavery to sin and the devil and the fear of death ended (Hebrews 2:14–15). And all this anticipates the full flowering of God’s promise in the future, where sin’s power and presence will be eradicated.
A place without sin. A life without sin. It’s what we were made for. And it’s what God promises us at the end of our race.
Creation
Hebrews calls that coming place a “world to come” (Hebrews 2:5). I’m afraid we don’t think about this enough. Too often, heaven is a cipher for something less real, less tactile, less concrete than this world. As a result, it fails to capture our imaginations and hearts. But the end of God’s story is nothing less than a new creation. A place with food and animals of every kind. A place full of wonder and beauty. A place with things to do, to make, to create. A place filled with music, gardens, and games. A place just like this one, only unburdened by sin.
“You can’t run the race of faith all the way to the end without a clear vision of heaven.”
What do you long for in this world? What places make your heart ache? What smells and textures and sounds make your heart sing? Pine needles on a sunny forest path. Freshly baked bread. Birdsong, rushing water, cello suites. Windswept plains. Starry, starry nights. Each is a pointer given by God and meant to draw us inexorably to the world to come.
Every single good desire created by this world — every last one — will be fulfilled in the next.
There is a world at the end of our race, with joys far too large for our little words. Metaphor and simile try their best. But these too fall short, which is why the best window into that world is this one. So, we must not forget that when God created this world, he called it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). But when he talks about the world to come, he calls it even “better” (Hebrews 11:16).
Love
Now for the best part: God is there.
It’s the best reality of heaven, and it’s the hardest one to wrap our minds around. Hebrews doesn’t just tell us that God is preparing a world for us; Hebrews tells us that God is planning to live there with us. That’s why the place is called “the city of the living God” (Hebrews 12:22). It’s the fulfillment of God’s age-old promise to be our God and for us to be his people (Hebrews 8:10). In that promise, we finite creatures find our best and highest good.
We’re rightly glad that heaven is a place and that it’s full of other people we know and love. But still, there is something in us, a longing, that only God himself can fill. There’s a kind of joy that comes from relating to God that is unlike anything else. It’s a joy that is often easier to experience than to explain.
But let me try.
Our deepest joys on this earth come from personal relationships. We experience them when we spend time with people we know and love and who know and love us. People who know us and still love us. That’s what each of us wants more than anything else.
This is precisely what God gives us in himself. He knows us better than anyone else. And he loves us still. In fact, he loves us more than anyone else. More than we could ever imagine. God loves you so very much. And he’s proven it beyond all shadow of doubt by sacrificing his most precious Son for our good (John 3:16; Romans 5:8; 8:31–32).
One day, Hebrews tells us, in that coming world, full of God’s family and free from sin, we’ll live with God himself. We’ll live with the one whose love for us is better than life itself (Psalm 63:3). This hope is either true or it isn’t. And, if true, then it is more than sufficient to fuel our race of faith all the way to the glorious end.
Forever
Finally, Hebrews — the heroes — want you to know one more thing. Heaven is forever.
Hebrews calls that world to come unshakable, “lasting,” and “eternal” (9:15; 12:27; 13:14). All that good comes not with a period but an ellipsis. There’s no expiration date. No final chapter. No end. Every good of this world ends to make us long for the next. Every good meal, conversation, laugh, and sunset. They all end so that we long for a world where the good never ends. Or, better, where the good ends only because what follows is better still.
All our adventures in this life, wherever our race may take us in this wide world, are, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, simply “the cover and the title page” to the “Great Story . . . which goes on . . . forever” and “in which every chapter is better than the one before” (The Last Battle, 767).
Forever joys. Forever increasing joys. It’s the kind of story only God could tell. It’s the kind of happy ending only an infinitely creative storyteller could imagine. So run, Christian, run. Run all the way to the end. Heaven will be worth it all.
The best is yet to come. Easy to say when we are going through tough times. But even the best of times is not really the best there is. Sin has caused everything in this world to suffer. But that will come to an end for those who truly know and worship God, who have come to Jesus in believing faith, confessing and repenting of their sin, forgiven and having an eternal home prepared for them!
I do not feel old and yet none of us knows how many days or moments that we have left before we pass from this world. I am excited, filled with joy and expectation to experience what God has prepared for us that lasts forever. Life is short. The seventy years that God has given me here indeed seem like a vapor. I pray that if Jesus tarries to receive His bride that I have many more years to share the love of Jesus with those He puts around me. May you be blessed as you contemplate the perfection that God has waiting for you when you see His face and live forever in His presence!
Pastor Dale