How We Will Relate to God Podcast by Pastor John MacArthur for Grace to You
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Well, we’re going to talk about heaven tonight. I’m going to give you the first half of our discussion of heaven from the viewpoint of what will our relationship to God be. We won’t have time to cover it all, and that’s probably just as well because of the richness of this particular theme. The apostle Paul made an amazing statement when he said, “For to me to live is Christ, to die is gain.” For someone to say to die isgain reflects certainly a different attitude than most people would have in this world. Most people in our society, and reasonably so, fear death. For Paul to say “to die is gain,” or “to die brings advantage to me,” to die is to gain something advantageous is quite a remarkable statement. And that kind of confident statement assumes that Paul felt that the life to come was better than the life he was living. He had a personal experience some time prior to saying that, in which he was caught up into the third heaven, according to 2 Corinthians 12:2. There he saw in some way the abode of God. There he saw the heaven of heavens. It was indescribable, it was unspeakable. But he saw enough to know that to die was gain. John the Apostle lived in such anticipation of heaven that he could say, “Even so, come Lord Jesus.” And I believe that it’s not uncommon for any believer who walks with Christ, and who rightly ascertains this life and the life, to come to be able to echo the words of Paul and John and hope for that which is yet ahead.
Now, we’ve been learning why heaven is so attractive. We’ve been learning about the fact that it is gain to leave this world and go into the presence of the Lord. That eternal dwelling place where God lives and where He lives with all the redeemed of all the ages, a place where there is infinite perfection of body and soul, a place where there is a perfect environment of love and joy and peace and fulfillment and satisfaction. We have noted many wonderful truths about heaven. But tonight we come to the most wonderful one of all. We come to the most glorious reality of heaven, that which surpasses everything else and that is our relationship to God in heaven. And so, we pose the next in our list of questions: what will be our relationship to God in heaven? And the Bible delineates several wonderful features. We’re going to look at them tonight.
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