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The Dream Fulfilled

03/18/2007 - I Can Only Imagine, John 14:1-3

"I can only imagine what it will be like when I walk by your side. I can only imagine what my eyes will see when your face is before me. I can only imagine."

"Surrounded by your glory what will my heart feel? Will I dance for you, Jesus, or in awe of you be still? Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall? Will I sing hallelujah? Will I be able to speak at all? I can only imagine."

"I can only imagine when that day comes and I find myself standing in the Son. I can only imagine when all I will do is forever, forever worship you. I can only imagine."

Those words were written by Bart Millard, lead singer of the group Mercy Me. And the song "I Can Only Imagine" became an instant phenomenon after it was released in 2001. It quickly rocketed to the number one spot on Christian radio and won three Dove awards in 2002. The next year it started getting air time on mainstream radio stations and in 2003 became one of the most requested songs in the country.

It all started about ten years earlier when Bart was a teenager. He scribbled four words on a piece of scrap paper shortly after his father died of cancer. I can only imagine. He was struggling to make sense out of his dad's death and the well-meaning words of others like "your dad's in a better place" or "your dad wouldn't want to be back here even if he could" didn't do a whole lot to comfort him. Years later he stumbled on to that piece of scrap paper and turned those four words into a song to help himself heal.

"In the beginning," he says, "I wasn't trying to imagine what heaven was like out of some Christian sense of wonder. I simply was trying to make sense of my father's early death. I had heard all the stories about how wonderful the next life would be, but I was still grieving, struggling to figure out what could be so wonderful about heaven that my dad would be willing to leave me so soon."

"And the song helped. Dad had been a godly man, and imagining my earthly father meeting his heavenly Father helped me heal. Pondering what he was seeing and knowing he was free of the physical limitations he'd had here on earth helped bring me peace. And the song has helped others who are hurting too."

"As the months flew by, it became clear that this little song was doing more then putting to rest loved ones. It was changing the lives of the living. And no one was more amazed than me. God was taking this song to places we couldn't have dreamed."

"Mainstream radio began playing it, and calls flooded into the stations. This overt message of faith was resonating with people who hadn't considered spiritual matters in years. Others told of being so moved they had to pull over to the side of the road until the song was done playing."

"The response was beyond our comprehension, but we knew that ultimately it wasn't about us or even about this song - God was using a willing band and a simple trust about heaven to draw people to himself. And he's not done yet."

The thought of heaven and the image of standing or kneeling or dancing in the presence of Jesus surrounded by his glory touch something deep inside every one of us. That is why that song is so powerful.

This morning we begin a brand new series at Valley View and it's all about heaven and about the coming kingdom of God. The Bible says more about heaven and the kingdom of God than perhaps we've ever imagined and we're going to look at those passages in a series that I've called The Dream Fulfilled: Glimpses of the Kingdom.

The Bible is going to be our main script, but I've also received considerable help from a book simply called "Heaven" written by a former pastor and author named Randy Alcorn.

Not long ago I read an article about the movie industry and discovered that Hollywood is calling 2007 the year of the threequel, not the sequel, but the threequel. This year we're going see the release of Shrek 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and Spiderman 3, all starting in mid-May so get ready. And in keeping with Hollywood this series is a threequel. It's actually the third part in a trilogy that began last summer when we taught The Dream of God: Bringing Heaven to Earth.

In that first series we discovered how God's dream is to dwell among his people. God wants to live in our midst so that we can enjoy him forever. All throughout history God has been actively at work through his people and through his Son Jesus to bring this world back to the way he originally intended it to be, a beautiful, breathtaking place where we can all live together with God in peace and harmony. The kingdom of God we said is both now and not yet. It has not yet come in all its fullness. We recognize that every day. But it is now present through its citizens, through those of us whose allegiance is to the King.

And so last fall and into the new year we looked at a second series called Living the Dream: The Sermon on the Mount. And we saw how Jesus, the King himself, taught us to live in a way that reflects the values of his kingdom. Jesus said, "You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth." Heaven and earth overlap in us. We are the way that God has chosen to dwell in this world right now. We are the body of Christ. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit and it's our privilege and responsibility as kingdom citizens to be a blessing to this world. We are to bring a little bit of heaven to this earth. Around here we call it the mission of Christ.

And in that great sermon Jesus taught us to pray for God's kingdom to come and God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. And some day his kingdom will come to this earth in all its fullness and that's the kingdom that we want to explore in this series.

And so The Dream Fulfilled: Glimpses of the Kingdom is the third part of this trilogy. It is the threequel and I believe it will bring hope and comfort, perspective and inspiration to all our lives. I believe this series will spur us on to love and good deeds as the Bible says. Knowing somewhat of what God has in store for those who love him will help us be better lovers and better equipped to bless this world right now.

The sense that we will live forever somewhere is not unique to the Christian faith. That sense has shaped every civilization in human history. 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 that they went to the sun or the moon after death. Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt the spirits of buffalo.

The Gilgamesh epic, an ancient Babylonian legend written almost three thousand years before Jesus, refers to a resting place of heroes and talks about a tree of life. In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies of mummies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world. The Romans believed that the heroic and virtuous would picnic in the Elysian Fields while their horses grazed nearby. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said, "The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity."

And though each of these scenarios is different, there is a unifying theme. And that theme is a universal belief rooted deep inside the human heart that there is more to life than this life. Evidence from anthropology suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal, that this world is not all there is.

When I was a teenager I was impacted by the writings of a missionary named Don Richardson who wrote the book Peace Child and then a book called Eternity in Their Hearts. Don Richardson served for years on the island of Irian Jaya, north of Australia, taking the gospel to the Sawi tribe, a cannibalistic people.

And as a result of his work there and his study of many other cultures around the world he concluded that God has set eternity in every human heart. He believes that in each culture there are redemptive analogies, stories, rituals, traditions that can be used to illustrate and apply the message of Christ. We just need to discover them.

Jesus himself drew on those analogies. The Scripture passage that I read more often than any other at funerals is John 14 where Jesus uses the analogy of a Jewish wedding to speak of the after life. In the Jewish culture of his day after a man was betrothed or engaged to a woman that man would return to his father's house and build room onto that house where he would one day live with his future bride. Often that period lasted about a year during which the betrothed couple would see each other, but would live separately with their parents.

But when the wedding day finally arrived the groom and his friends would leave his father's house and come and get his bride, usually at night, signaling his arrival with a shout. And after the bride and her bridesmaids got ready they would follow the groom back to his father's house in a torch light procession.

And when they arrived, the house would be filled with guests ready to party and the wedding festivities would begin. It was a time of great joy and celebration. In fact, the reception would last sometimes for seven days while the bride and groom went off to Cancun!

And against that analogy Jesus says to his followers the night before he dies inJohn 14:1-3, Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. ²In 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. ³And 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.

The groom is going away. He's getting a room ready in the Father's house. But he will come back for his bride, the lover will return for his beloved. And those words have comforted Christ followers for centuries. "There is more to life than this life," Jesus said. In fact, the best life is yet to be!

The Roman catacombs, where the bodies of many martyred Christians were buried during the early centuries after Christ, contain tombs with inscriptions like "In Christ, Alexander is not dead, but lives." And "one who lives with God." Or "he was taken up into his eternal home."

One historian writes, "Pictures on the catacomb walls portray heaven with beautiful landscapes, children playing, and people feasting at banquets."

In AD 125, a Greek named Aristides wrote to a friend about the Christian faith, explaining why he felt this "new religion" was so successful. He said, "If any righteous man among the Christians passes from this world, they rejoice and offer thanks to God, and they escort his body with songs and thanksgiving as if he were setting out from one place to another nearby."

In the third century, the church father Cyprian said, "Let us greet the day which assigns each of us to his own home, which snatches us from this place and sets us free from the snares of the world, and restores us to paradise and the kingdom. Anyone who has been in foreign lands longs to return to his own native land …. We regard paradise as our native land."

After being away in Africa from all that is familiar I can say a hearty "Amen" to that! I couldn't find a cheese steak anywhere over there. It's great to be home in my native land and even greater still to one day be home in paradise.

When Jesus told his followers, "In my Father's house are many rooms …. I am going there to prepare a place for you," he deliberately chose common, everyday, physical things like a house with rooms, a place to describe where he was going and what he was getting ready for us. He wanted to give us something tangible to look forward to, an actual place where we would go to be with him one day.

In the Dream of God series we discovered that ultimately the place that God is preparing for us is this place, this earth that we were created for, that we were designed for. This is the place that God had in mind for us to inhabit when he created the garden in Genesis 1. God has never given up on his original plan for his people to dwell on this earth. In fact, the climax of all human history will be the coming of heaven to earth, a marriage, a union where the two will become one.

A resurrected universe inhabited by resurrected people living with the resurrected Jesus spoken of in Revelation 21:1-4, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ²I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with people, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." That's the ultimate fulfillment of God's dream, heaven come to earth with God living in our midst.

As human beings, we all have a terminal disease called mortality. And despite all our incredible advances in medicine and technology the current death rate is still 100%. Worldwide three people die every second, 180 die every minute, nearly 11,000 an hour, which means over 250,000 people will exit this life and enter the next before the end of the day. And unless Jesus comes first one of those will be us one day.

In Psalm 39:4-5 David wrote, Show me, O LORD, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life. ⁵You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone's life is but a breath.

David says our life is like a single breath escaping from our mouth on a cold day and vanishing into thin air. That's the brevity of life. And the wise person considers what's next in order to make the most of this short, little life. And I believe that God uses suffering and pain, hurt and shattered dreams, and the inevitability of death, all a product of the curse, to help us all learn to live for the things he values the most.

Jesus said we don't have to be afraid of death, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Don't be freaked out. Trust in God. Trust also in me."

In 1 Corinthians 15:55-57, the apostle Paul defiantly stares death right in the eye and says, Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? ⁵⁶The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. ⁵⁷But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

What can deliver us from the fear of death? What can take away its sting? Faith in the one who faced death head on and has gone on ahead to make a place for us to live with him.

I don't know what's going on in your life right now. You may be discouraged, depressed, or completely overwhelmed. Maybe your dreams for your marriage, or for your children, or for your career, or for your life have been shattered in some way. Maybe you're feeling cynical or you've lost hope. Take heart. Glimpses of God's future kingdom can put meaning and purpose and faith and hope and love back into your life. The best is yet to be.

In a little book I read this week about the song "I Can Only Imagine," Bart Millard says, "I think the song has evolved. The first few years were for me, to help me to heal. Now it's for everyone else." In that book which is filled with letters and testimonials, a woman named Margie wrote, "When I first heard this song, I was at a low point in my life, spiritually, emotionally, and physically drained. When it came on the radio I had to stop the car, I started to cry so hard. Needless to say, 'I Can Only Imagine' started me on a path to recovery. I came to Christ after many, many hurts, pains, and abuses. What keeps me going forward is knowing that one day I will be in his mighty and heavenly presence." Do you have that same confidence? You can if you're a follower of the King.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.