“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2
In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. 4
And you know the way to where I am going.”
Discouragement and fear are powerful tools used against the church. My guess is that everyone knows personally the power of discouragement and the fear it produces
as well as how it causes us to lose sight of God’s promises and even to lose sight of Jesus himself.
We have noted in our study in John of the upper room that the Lord’s heart also was troubled as he considered what was to come. But here Jesus, as is always His way,
forgets himself and turns his attention and his heart to the comfort of the disciples who themselves were deeply troubled by his saying He was to leave them. We can certainly appreciate their concern. They had left everything for the past three years to follow
Him and had come to view themselves exclusively in terms of their oneness with Jesus and their being brought into the purpose that He promised to bring to the world.
There is some confusion in this well-known text. It centers around the meaning of the word that is often translated “rooms”. The word only occurs twice in the NT,
here and in verse 23 of this same chapter. Literally the word means abiding place or staying place. It was translated in the Latin Bible as “mansions”, but that is really not the right idea, to the disappointment of many as if the issue of heaven is a big
building and not Jesus himself. The effect this has on the disciples is of great consequence for us. Their lives and our lives as well, are motivated by and inspired by the reality that Jesus speaks of here. So, the future determines the life of, the power
of, the motivation of the present.
Remember, that is what Jesus is doing in the upper room; giving courage to those He loves. What would you expect him to say, what would have been the right words to
really bolster their sagging spirits? Jesus simply offers this image of the Father’s house and of it having plenty of room. He doesn’t go into any detail at all. He doesn’t explain what precisely he means. He says that He is going to prepare this place where
we live in Him fully, but He never tells us what He will be doing TO prepare that place.
He is content simply to leave his disciples at this most precarious moment with this single image of new heavens and the new earth as it is called elsewhere, as our
home and a most solemn promise that he will see to it that we will arrive at home. It can be very hard in this world of sin and death to believe that not so long from now we will step through the door into our Father’s house and will be home at last. The
Lord knows precisely how hard it can be to believe that and to keep that reality alive in our minds and our hearts, to live by it and even to live for it. And so He said not only that he would return to this world but that home, our home is coming with Him!
And then in a most touching personal note as though talking to little children who want to believe the amazing nature of these words but are doubtful that anything
so glorious could really be true he says: “If this were not true I would have told you.”
This is what we say to our children when they are fearful: Have I ever lied to you? Do you trust me? I am only telling you the truth. I am telling you the certainty of what my love promises. You will be at rest…you will come Home. That was what the Lord
thought his disciples needed to hear in their fear and their confusion. He could have told them that although unseen He would be with them always, which of course is true and is something He did eventually tell them, but it was not the first thing.
He didn’t think they needed to hear in the first place of the obstacles that they would face and how he would lead them by the power of His Spirit to overcome those
obstacles and to establish the NT church. All of that is still to come in the context of his being in that upper room with those he loved.
But at the first sign of their fear and confusion, he felt what they needed to hear was this: when all was said and done, there is a home that waits for them, the
Father’s house, and a place for them in that house. But still the question is not answered: Courage for what? Is it just courage to hang on until they too can be in that place Jesus is preparing for them? Courage to hide from the big bad world until their
death where they then…wait until the resurrection?
No. Jesus is saying that because of these promises the disciples are to live now the kingdom that Jesus has brought, which is exactly what happens after the resurrection,
that is exactly what the disciples do! They don’t wait around until they die, or think that because Jesus has this home prepared for them, there is nothing to be done, nothing to be lived, nothing to give oneself to, but it is just the opposite.
I am going to great lengths this morning so as to combat three errors that we see today:
First, a triumphalism that seems to say that Xnty can take over the globe if we just elect the right people, or have the right social programs, as though the work
of MAN and the institutions of man are the hope for the world God has made…but that’s not the gospel.
And second, the attitude more prominent in evangelical circles, that this world is going to hell in a hand-basket so let’s just wait it out until Jesus comes back.
Why care too much since this is all going to burn anyway? I hope you can see not just how defeatist that is but how opposite the gospel it is! Heaven will be the renewal of our resurrected bodies with our souls made perfect, redeemed, that we might live in
the new heavens and the new earth, which also has been redeemed by the power of Grace.
We are then called to live that reality that redemption that hope, NOW, through the church by the power of the Spirit, in faith toward the victory promises of Jesus.
As one contemporary author put it:
To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), or only for
our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven…is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private.
But of course, you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people. And salvation only does what it’s meant to do
when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not just as disembodied souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.
That is exactly what happens to the disciples…they are filled with the Holy Spirit, not to sit around and wait, but to live the victory of Christ. We are going to
do some theology here, and it is very important theology if we are to think God’s thoughts after Him.
The third misunderstanding, is as Dr. Robert Rayburn put it;
“…that for most people, belief in life after death is nothing but instinct reinforced by sentiment. The instinct comes from their being made in the image
of an eternal God. They can’t help but think of their existence in eternal terms, much as that thinking is corrupted by sinful patterns of thought, by worldliness, by selfishness, and by unbelief.”
The
sentimentality is seen in a tendency to believe whatever one wishes to be true. For most people beliefs about eternity are little more than wishful thinking. They want it to be so, they don’t want death to be the end, and so they just make up what they
want to be true. This is evident in many ways but one of the most obvious is how it is, that within those folks who believe in existence after death, which is almost everyone, hardly anyone worries that things might not go well for him or her in the world
to come.
After all, existence here is both good and bad; people here in this world are punished for their sins. Why do folks assume that all will be well in the next life?
If there is a next life there is a God; but if there is a God, why do they not worry more about what God thinks about their lives here and now and what he might do in consequence when they reach the next world?
People are, in vast numbers, content with a vague, unexamined, and undemonstrated confidence that things will be fine on the other side no matter how one has lived
his or her life in this world, no matter how he or she has related to the God who makes life in the next world possible. This is sentimentality of the purest kind!
As Christians our belief is not sheer sentiment. We do not believe that life continues after death because we want it to continue after death or because we hope it
will. We believe in life after death because God has promised it to us; because Jesus Christ himself, our Savior, rose from the dead, the first fruits of those that sleep; because he has taught us that mortality must put on immortality; and because he promised
that he was going to prepare a place for us so that where he is we might be also, and then added those words: “if it were not so, I would have told you.”
I will conclude this morning with JC Ryle:
““The time is very short. A few more years of watching and praying, a few more tossing on the sea of this world, a few more deaths and changes, a few more winters
and summers, and all will be over.
We shall have fought our last battle and shall need fight no more. The presence and company of Xp will make amends for all we suffer here below. When we see as
we have been seen, and look back on the journey of life, we shall wonder at our own faintness of heart.
We shall marvel that we made so much of our cross and thought so little of our crown. We shall marvel that in counting the cost we could ever doubt on which side
the profit lay. Let us take courage. We are not far from home. It may cost much to be a true Christian and a consistent holy man or woman, but it is worth it.”
Prayer:
Father, help me to fight discouragement by thinking on and apprehending your promises. May the realities of the future be mine this day to embrace and walk in. I pray that you would guide me as I live with eternity in mind and that it would be evident in
my desires, thinking, feeling and behavior. All that I must sacrifice is of nothing to be compared to all that has been sacrificed for me, through Jesus Christ my Lord, Amen.
Hymn: There is a Land of Pure Delight
