00:00: As many of you know, I had a very unusual middle school experience.
00:05: In seventh and eighth grade, I was part of a class called the Paradise Project.
00:11: It was 25 seventh graders, 25 eighth graders, nothing special about them.
00:16: They were just a sampling cross-section of the school.
00:20: But the class did things differently.
00:23: There was a lot of travel, field trips.
00:26: The students who were on the trip, typically eight students and a teacher.
00:31: The remainder of the 42 or so students stayed back with just the one teacher and did a lot of self-guided studies.
00:40: But I'm not talking like one-day field trips.
00:42: I'm talking big field trips.
00:44: You had to qualify.
00:46: You had to do certain things, kind of like a Boy Scout or Girl Scout merit badge kind of thing to develop some skills.
00:54: Just for me personally, growing up in Vermont, I visited on field trips with this Paradise Project, rural Vermont.
01:01: I went to the Opera in Montreal.
01:03: I visited Faneuil Hall in the Haymarket in Boston.
01:06: Tried Chinese dim sum breakfast in New York City.
01:10: Went to the top of the Empire State Building.
01:12: Visited Washington, D.C.
01:12: and saw all the major monuments.
01:16: Visited the Holocaust Museum right after it opened.
01:20: Traveled up and down the East Coast of the U.S.
01:23: Staying with families and churches.
01:26: Even sitting on a chicken farm in the Shenandoah Valley.
01:31: Swam in the Atlantic Ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.
01:35: Visited and toured museums and factories, a Civil War fort.
01:39: Visited Amish country in Pennsylvania, the French Quarter in New Orleans.
01:43: Went to a jazz concert at Preservation Hall.
01:46: Went to Mardi Gras parades.
01:48: This was an amazing experience.
01:51: And when I wasn't traveling, even when I was at home, this class had a huge place in my life.
01:58: They had a couple of publications, student-run publications.
02:00: They ran what was called The Noun.
02:02: It was a student-run magazine.
02:05: The longest-running student-run magazine in the United States at the time for a couple of decades.
02:09: They had a school newsletter.
02:11: I was involved in those.
02:13: And pretty much most days of the school year, I stayed late at school.
02:19: I was part of something that was going on.
02:21: Sometimes even into the evening.
02:23: Helping out the magazine.
02:26: Back then, they didn't do layout on a computer.
02:29: Like, we'd type up stuff because computers were new and exciting.
02:32: But then they got printed and cut out and pasted on the light board.
02:35: And they did the formatting that way.
02:38: And I remember as I got towards the end of eighth grade, and then on the last day of eighth grade, I was just distraught.
02:44: Because I couldn't imagine what my life was going to be like without the Paradise Project anymore.
02:52: It was such a huge, defining part of my life that I just thought, I can't lose this.
02:58: I can't have this taken away.
03:00: How can I possibly be happy about whatever's next?
03:06: Losing that was going to leave a giant hole in my life.
03:13: Today, as we consider Scripture, I think about Jesus talking to his disciples in John 14 and preparing them for a transition.
03:29: Preparing them for his departure.
03:32: And realizing that he was about to leave a giant hole in their lives.
03:36: They've been following him around in ministry around the area of Israel for three and a half years.
03:43: And he's about to leave.
03:45: He's about to die and rise again and then return to heaven.
03:49: And they don't understand.
03:51: They don't understand what's coming next.
03:53: Even the explanations he's given them is not clicking for them.
03:57: And yet, it's not the end of the story.
04:00: High school was fine.
04:01: I did okay.
04:02: It was alright.
04:04: God had good things ahead for me.
04:06: And when Jesus left earth, he had good things ahead for his followers.
04:11: In John 14 verses 1 and 2, we read Jesus talking to his disciples and saying to them, Do not let your heart be troubled.
04:20: Trust in God.
04:22: Trust also in me.
04:25: In my Father's house are many rooms.
04:28: If it were not so, I would have told you.
04:30: I am going there to prepare a place for you.
04:35: Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus, after returning to heaven, has spent at least some of the time between then and now, preparing a place for you.
04:49: Preparing a place, a room, or depending on your translation, a mansion.
04:55: I don't know exactly how this is going to look or how it's going to work out.
04:59: But a place for you.
05:02: And whether it's a room or a condo or a palace or a mansion, I have no idea.
05:07: You have to imagine that if Jesus custom prepares a place for you, you're going to be wowed.
05:13: It's going to be great.
05:19: And yet, as great as that place will be, what really grabs my attention is the next verse.
05:26: John 14, 3.
05:28: Jesus says, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that you also may be where I am.
05:45: He doesn't just say there's a place and when you get there it will be ready for you.
05:49: Or I'm going to go prepare a place and I'll come back and deliver you to this place.
05:53: He's saying, I'm going to be there too.
05:56: This is the place where you will be with me.
06:00: At the heart of what Jesus is preparing for his followers is that we get to be with Jesus.
06:11: That's his word of encouragement.
06:12: They're about to go through incredible transition.
06:15: They're about to experience loss specifically because Jesus is going to be taken away from them.
06:20: He's not going to be on earth with them anymore in the way that they've experienced him.
06:23: But he's essentially saying, this is temporary, fellas.
06:28: You're going to get to be with me again.
06:30: And I'm going to go prepare that.
06:32: Apparently, reading the New Testament, this concept had not been adequately communicated to some Christians in the early church.
06:48: In the Greek city of Thessalonica, there was a group of believers there.
06:55: And they were waiting for Jesus to return, just as we are.
06:59: And it was taking a while.
07:02: And in the meantime, just like our experience, some of these believers in Jesus had passed away.
07:09: And the million dollar question was this.
07:14: Were they going to miss out on being with Jesus?
07:17: If these Thessalonian Christians, if some of them died before Jesus came back, were they going to miss out?
07:24: Was there some kind of disadvantage tied to it?
07:29: Were they going to miss being with Jesus?
07:31: And the apostle Paul wrote to this church and reassured them with this clear message from 1 Thessalonians chapter 4.
07:38: This is where we're going to spend most of our time this morning.
07:40: 1 Thessalonians 4, verses 13 to 18.
07:43: Paul writes to them and says, But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.
07:58: For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
08:10: For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not proceed, though, to have fallen asleep.
08:21: Fallen asleep is passed away.
08:25: For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
08:37: Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
08:45: And so we will always be with the Lord.
08:49: Therefore, encourage one another with these words.
08:52: What Paul is saying to them is essentially this.
08:57: Hey, Christians, you need to know this stuff.
08:59: When a Christian amongst you dies, don't be sad as though they missed out.
09:04: Don't be sad like, oh, no, they were trusting in Jesus and then it didn't work out for them.
09:09: They missed what God had promised.
09:13: They're okay.
09:14: God raised Jesus from the dead, and God will raise his followers from the dead, too.
09:19: And they will all get to be with him.
09:22: In fact, Paul says this particular bit of teaching that he's sharing comes straight from Jesus.
09:29: That when Jesus comes back from heaven, the first folks who get to be with Jesus are the ones who already died as Christians.
09:36: In fact, the folks who died waiting for Jesus, not only do they not miss out, they get to go to the front of the line.
09:43: If you're alive when Jesus returns, you're at the back of the line, so to speak.
09:48: The folks who passed away go ahead of you.
09:52: Now, verse 18, therefore, encourage one another with these words.
09:57: This teaching is not abstract.
09:59: Hey, what's going to happen when the time comes?
10:01: This is about encouraging each other.
10:03: This is about our hearts and minds and souls being buoyed as we think about what's to come.
10:10: God is faithful.
10:12: He will do what he's promised.
10:14: And not one follower of Jesus will miss out on being with the Lord.
10:18: That's what we have to look forward to.
10:20: That's what is meant to encourage us here.
10:24: Now, let's reconnect this with John 14.
10:27: In John 14, verses 16 and 17, we read this.
10:30: The dead in Christ will rise first.
10:33: Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
10:41: It's talking about the same sort of thing.
10:44: That they're going to join with Jesus.
10:47: That's going to be an amazing thing to be part of.
10:50: Now, I don't know when Jesus is coming back.
10:52: If it's today, next week, next year, a decade, a century from now, I don't know when.
10:58: But I'm a believer in Jesus, which means I'm not going to miss that.
11:03: I'm going to be part of that.
11:04: And if you're a believer in Jesus, you're going to be part of it, too.
11:06: It's not something we're going to read about in the history books someday.
11:09: We are going to experience it firsthand.
11:12: I'll be there.
11:13: If you're ever reading something or hearing somebody talk about the rapture, this is what we're talking about.
11:19: Being raised up, believers being raised up into the air to be with Jesus.
11:22: We're told at the end of this passage, and so we will always be with the Lord.
11:33: I love that word, always.
11:36: There's going to come a time that we get to see Jesus face to face, that we get to be in his presence, and we're never going to lose that.
11:45: We're never going to have to say goodbye.
11:48: In John 14, Jesus promised to come back, take believers to be with him.
11:53: In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul encourages worried Christians with the same theology.
11:58: Jesus is coming back, and when he does, he'll take you to be with him.
12:01: John 17, later in that same section of John's Gospel, as he's preparing his disciples for his departure, John 17, he begins this, what's called the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus.
12:12: It's basically Jesus praying for his on earth at the time disciples, and then transitioning after that to praying for future disciples for you and for me.
12:21: So if you ever want to hear what Jesus literally prayed for you, check out John 17.
12:25: It's really cool.
12:26: And at the beginning of the passage, verses 1 through 3, we read this.
12:30: When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come.
12:36: Glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.
12:48: And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
12:57: You know, we think about eternal life as not death and forever.
13:02: And it is that.
13:04: But Jesus says that the heart of eternal life is that you get to know God, and you get to know Jesus.
13:11: It's the relationship with God that's at the heart of what eternity is going to be about.
13:17: Sometimes I hear people talk about death and the afterlife, and they talk about, oh, I'll get to see my loved ones.
13:24: And I think that's accurate, but it's not going to be the focus.
13:28: God's going to be the focus.
13:30: Being with God is going to be the greatest thing about what happens after we're raised from the dead.
13:37: Now, this is not some little side note in one or two passages.
13:42: This is a core concept in God's Word.
13:45: Christianity is legal.
13:48: That is, there's issues of guilty versus not guilty, right?
13:53: And forgiveness and being counted as sin free by God.
13:58: There's the legal aspect of Christianity.
14:00: But Christianity is also relational.
14:04: Broken relationship with God or restored relationship with God.
14:09: Spiritually dead or spiritually alive and able to have relationship with God.
14:14: Think back to the earliest pages of Scripture.
14:16: At the very beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
14:19: He created Eden, the garden of Eden, man and woman, Adam and Eve.
14:22: They're in the garden with God.
14:25: Right?
14:26: They're in the place of God with the person of God and enjoying it.
14:32: And then sin.
14:33: They rebel against God and what happens?
14:36: They're separated from God.
14:38: They're removed from God's place and cast out both from the place and from the presence of God.
14:45: Then we move into the stage of Scripture where God raises up a people, the Jewish people, the Israelites.
14:52: He gives them an identity.
14:56: They end up in Egypt where they're enslaved.
14:58: And then what does God do?
15:00: He rescues them out of the place of slavery and rescues them into the promised place, the promised land, the land of Israel, with his own presence to guide them.
15:11: This pillar of cloud and fire leads them and is present with them.
15:17: When they set up camp on their journey, the pillar, the manifestation of the presence of God is right there in the center of it all.
15:24: And they set up camp around God.
15:26: Then they finally get into the promised land and God says, a tabernacle, a portable tent kind of temple, ultimately replaced by a permanent physical building temple.
15:41: And what is at the heart of that?
15:43: The Holy of Holies, the place where God's presence is manifest.
15:46: And God's people are supposed to live in God's place, the promised land, with God at the center.
15:53: And also, where are we going?
15:56: What does scripture describe at the end of the book, chapters 21 and 22 of Revelation?
16:03: It talks about God's people being with God in God's place, the new heavens, the new earth, the new Jerusalem, where God is in their midst, where he is the light.
16:14: There's no need for a sun or a moon because God provides it.
16:19: God's people in God's place in the presence of God is a key theme of scripture from cover to cover.
16:27: Sin gets in the way, but God overcomes that sin.
16:32: And what we're looking ahead to is not just the day when the gavel comes down and God says, you're forgiven, go your way, quit sinning.
16:42: Rather, the place where God says, welcome home, sons and daughters.
16:47: We're going to spend forever together.
16:50: That is what we're meant to be looking forward to.
16:54: And we get foretastes of that even now, just glimpses, the fact that the Holy Spirit lives in us.
17:00: He is present with us.
17:03: At Christmas time, we rightly spend time thinking about Jesus' first coming.
17:07: We look backward when God became a human being and was born of Mary.
17:12: But it's also more than a little appropriate for us as believers to spend time thinking about Jesus' second coming.
17:18: To looking ahead and saying, what will that day be like?
17:22: Not the specifics of, it's going to play out exactly this way or that way.
17:26: We can get lost in those details and lose sight of the forest.
17:31: Say, he's coming back and he's going to take us to be with him always.
17:37: And Jesus' return is as sure and as guaranteed as his first coming, which is historical fact.
17:44: Even non-Christians don't deny that there was a man named Jesus who was credited with doing extraordinary things.
17:51: We know from God's word that he did amazing things the first time, like turning water into wine, giving sight to the blind, causing the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.
18:00: He healed the leper, made the lame to walk.
18:02: Cast out demons, calmed the storm, walked on water, fed multitudes with a single little boy sack lunch.
18:09: And then he gave up his life on the cross, dying and rising again as a substitute for you to pay the price that your sin, your rebellion, your ignoring of God and rebelling against God has earned.
18:27: And yet there's more to be done.
18:29: Jesus' saving work is complete.
18:33: Everything needed for your forgiveness and acceptance by God.
18:36: But there's more yet to happen.
18:38: He said he was going to prepare a place.
18:40: That happened after the cross.
18:43: Maybe still going on, I don't know.
18:46: There's still yet to happen of him returning and bringing us to be with him.
18:51: Bringing every knee down before him.
18:55: One day at the name of Jesus, according to Philippians chapter 2, at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow.
19:02: In heaven and on earth and under the earth.
19:08: And every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
19:14: One day at Matthew 25.
19:17: When the Son comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.
19:24: Before him will be gathered all the nations and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
19:32: And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on his left.
19:36: Then the king will say to those on his right, come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
19:49: One day, 1 Thessalonians 4, the dead in Christ will rise.
19:54: Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
20:01: And so we will always be with the Lord.
20:04: I want to encourage you to think about, to appreciate, to cherish the fact that as a believer in Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.
20:15: Absolutely.
20:16: But don't stop there.
20:19: I want you to be excited about and looking forward to being with Jesus.
20:26: Being in his presence.
20:29: Where there is no more sin.
20:31: No more shame.
20:32: No more conflict.
20:34: Just getting to enjoy God in the fullness of who he is.
20:39: He is coming back.
20:41: And he will complete all that he has promised.
20:44: He will raise from the dead those who trust in him.
20:47: And from the face of the earth, he will lift them up to be with him.
20:52: And you will always, always, always be with Jesus.
20:58: I can't imagine anything better than that.
21:03: And in fact, any time I think or you think about heaven and eternity as something other than that.
21:09: If we think about harps and wings and clouds.
21:12: If we think about the old song back in the 90s about playing football in the backyard.
21:17: And if we think that heaven is just this, but more.
21:22: Oh, we are downplaying it.
21:25: We are underplaying it.
21:27: It is going to be amazing.
21:30: And I want to encourage you to celebrate and treasure that God himself present with you, us with him.
21:39: And this is going to be the greatest thing.
21:42: And we will have it forever.
21:44: Let's pray.
21:46: Amen.
21:47: Father, we ask for you to help us to reorient our thinking and our valuing.
21:55: To love you more than we love ourselves.
22:02: Even the best things in this life.
22:04: To love you more than we love long lost loved ones.
22:09: To recognize that you do all things well.
22:12: However those things, those secondary things get worked out.
22:17: We are going to agree that you have done it well when we see it and experience it.
22:21: But to love you more than anything else.
22:24: To look forward to being with you.
22:28: Help us to want to be like Moses who, after all these amazing encounters with you, his greater ask was to see you.
22:39: Help us to long for that day when the promise of Matthew 5-8 is fulfilled, that the pure in heart will see God.
22:47: I pray that you will work these things in our lives right now.
22:53: So that more and more day by day, we live by faith, confident of future grace and future glory.
23:04: We pray these things in Jesus name.
23:07: Amen.