This sermon was preached on Sunday
evening, November 13, 1983, at the Trinity Baptist Church in
Montville, New Jersey. One of the verses that several
of you have quoted to me in the course of these studies on the
subject of heaven is the well-known verse which the Apostle Paul
quotes from the Old Testament in which we read, Things which I saw not, and ear
heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, whatsoever
things God prepared for them that love him. And often you've
quoted the more familiar language from which this is taken in Isaiah,
I has not seen, nor ear heard, nor entered into the heart of
man the things which God has prepared for them that love him.
But the apostle goes on to say, But unto us God revealed them
through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, yea, the
deep things of God. And then he goes on in the passage
to say that what was veiled in the past and is now unveiled
is revealed in words not which man's wisdom teaches, but which
the Spirit teaches. And those words are the words
which we now have in this book that we hold before us, the Bible. And all we can know for certain
about the inheritance that awaits us is that which God has been
pleased to reveal in the very words which the Spirit has chosen,
and how much we feel our need of the same Spirit to open our
minds that we might understand those precious words. Let us
then seek His face again for the blessing of the Spirit as
we seek to understand the words of God. Our Father, we confess again
that we have felt so keenly in these past days our own weakness
and limitations as creatures and as sinners, as we have sought
to concentrate our minds upon the glories that await the children
of God. And yet we thank you that you
have revealed these things for our edification, and we pray
that the Holy Spirit will be given to us tonight in copious
measures that we may understand more accurately and may have
a firmer grasp upon the inheritance so dearly purchased for us in
the blood of your own dear Son. Hear us and draw near to us,
then, in the ministry of the Word we ask through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen. Now although God has stamped
upon the consciousness of each one of us and all of his creatures
made in his image, that is all mankind, that haunting awareness
that we are not just animals and that when we die that's not
the end of it all, in spite of that haunting consciousness common
to all mankind, We are utterly dependent upon the Word of God
written for any certain and clear knowledge of what lies beyond
the grave. Man cannot escape the haunting
consciousness that the grave is not the end of it all. But
when they begin to pursue that haunting consciousness to some
clear understanding of precisely what lies beyond the grave. They cannot find the answer in
themselves. They cannot find it in scientific
investigation. They can find it in no other
way than in the Scriptures of God. And therefore, with the
Scriptures open before us, we have been seeking for some weeks
now to answer, first of all, these two basic questions, what
is hell and who is going there? And now we've been wrestling
with the question, what is heaven? And God willing, next week, the
question, who is going there? And in our answer to the question,
what is heaven, we have seen from the Scriptures that whatever
heaven is, It is at least these five great realities set before
us in the Word of God. Heaven is a place as well as
a state or condition. Secondly, heaven is a condition
of the perfection of soul and of body. Thirdly, that heaven
is a place of unwearied service joined to perennial rest and
refreshment. Fourth, heaven is a place of
the perfected communion of all the saints of all ages, and then
that which we struggled to grasp in some little measure last Lord's
Day evening, heaven is the realization of the direct sight of and immediate
communion with God and the Lamb. Now tonight we come to examine
the final element in the biblical answer to the question, what
is heaven? And the sixth thing that heaven
is, according to the scriptures, is this. Heaven is a place of
unmixed and unending joy for all of its inhabitants. Heaven
is a place of unmixed and unending joy for all of its inhabitants—God,
angels, and all of the redeemed. Joy, bliss, happiness—these commodities
universally sought, but oh, how elusive they and with our Bibles
in our hands and with an eye to perceive reality as we see
it about us, it is no understatement to say that there is no true
joy, bliss, or happiness apart from the salvation of God in
Jesus Christ. It is for this very reason that
one of the distinguishing marks of the gospel is that it and
it alone brings true joy to sinful man. You remember when the angels
announced the birth of the Lord Jesus, they announced it in this
language. We bring you tidings of what? Great joy! For unto you is born
this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And there is no great joy apart
from the knowledge of the Savior who is Christ the Lord. Furthermore, in a text such as
Romans 14, 17, we read, The kingdom of God is not comprised of eating
and drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. One of the distinguishing marks
of the privileges of being or the privileges of those in Christ's
kingdom is that they have joy rooted in the Holy Ghost, a joy
found in companionship with righteousness and with peace. Or we could take
Galatians 5.22. The fruit of the Spirit is joy. Or 1 Peter 1.8. Though you've
not seen him, Peter says, yet believing in him you rejoice
with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Or Paul's word in Romans
15, 13, Now the God of peace fill you with all joy and peace
in believing. And these texts and others could
be brought to underscore the same point, clearly assert that
it is an privilege of the gospel to bring true joy. And wherever the gospel comes
with power, it always brings with it some of that measure
of true spiritual joy. It is impossible for the Holy
Spirit to indwell a man or woman, boy or girl, and for that person
not to experience something of the fruit of his indwelling,
namely joy along with love and peace and all of the other dimensions
of the ninefold fruit of the Spirit. It's impossible to be
introduced into the kingdom of God by the new birth and not
to have some measure of joy in the Holy Ghost along with an
imputed righteousness and peace with God and something of the
peace of God. However, the Bible that makes
it clear that the highest, richest, Most abounding joy experienced
by any child of God in this life is at every point, to some degree,
a joy that is mixed with sorrow. Whatever joy comes in the dynamics
of grace here and now, it is never unmixed joy. It is always joy mingled to some
degree with sorrow and with grief. And whatever point a Christian
may experience in his Christian life where it seems as though
his consciousness is one of unmixed joy, it will not be long before
he realizes it was not unending joy. And so I have chosen these
two words carefully and purposely in asserting that heaven is a
place of unmixed and unending joy for all of its inhabitants. While we are here, whatever joy
we know, we do indeed mourn and grieve over our remaining sin. and the sin that is about us.
And any professed joy that's supposed to be the joy of the
gospel that is not mingled with grief and pain for sin is a satanic
delusion. Beware of a gospel that promises
and professes to bring its adherence to unmixed joy in this life. it will be a gospel that takes
lightly the reality of sin. For Jesus described the subjects
of the kingdom in present tense verbs when he said, Blessed are
those who are continually mourning, for they shall be As long as the reality of remaining
sin is our earthly companion, we will, with the apostle, be
forced to cry, sometimes with greater intensity than others,
O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body
of this death? And no man says those words with
felt spiritual experience with a 32-tooth grin on his face. If he doesn't say them with tears
coming out of his eyes, he says them with a tear-drenched heart. O wretched man that I am! Furthermore, we mourn and grieve
with our brothers and sisters who pass through seasons of grief,
and when we hear our Lord saying to us through the pen of the
Apostle, weep with those who weep, as well as rejoice with
those who rejoice, we take that seriously. We are not content
simply to come with some pious drivel and pat them on the back
and tell them, the joy is the Lord of your strength, brother,
rejoice in the Lord. There's a time when they sob,
and we draw near until the felt realities that produce their
tears are ours by way of spiritual empathy, and we weep with those
who weep. That's Christianity. This chuck-a-man-under-the-chin-with-a-shallow-word-of-biblical-promises cruelty, it's not Christianity. We are to weep with those who
weep. Furthermore, according to the
Scriptures, whatever heights of joy we may know, as long as
we're in this tabernacle, we groan. We that are in this tabernacle,
Paul says, 2 Corinthians 5, we groan, being burdened, longing
to put on our habitation from heaven. And furthermore, whatever
joys we may know in the Christian life, Alas, so often that joy
is clouded by spiritual declension, spiritual dullness, and by backslidings
of heart. And oh, what a grievous thing
it is to discover in yourself a backslidden heart. So you see,
though joy is an indispensable commodity of saving experience,
and one of the unique commodities of the Gospel, In this present
state, it is never unmixed, nor is it unending joy. But, blessed
be God, one of the cardinal blessings of heaven is that it is a state,
a place, a condition, an eternal experience, if I may use the
terminology, of unmixed and unending joy. And for the true child of
God, no little part of the glory of heaven consists in that great
reality. Now let's turn to those scriptures
which teach us that heaven is a place of unmixed joy. We have the clear statement of
our Lord in the parable given to us in Matthew 25. Matthew
chapter 25. And beginning with verse 14,
we have the parable of the man who goes into another country,
calls his servants, delivers his goods to them, one five talents,
another two, another one. And then the parable tells us
in verse 19, after a long time, the Lord of those servants comes. and makes a reckoning with them,
obviously a reference to the second coming of the Lord Jesus,
at which time there will be a reckoning with all men before his judgment
throne. And he that received the five
talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, you
delivered unto me five talents. Lo, I have gained other five
talents. His Lord said unto him, Well
done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a
few things. I will set you over many things."
And we looked at that phrase in conjunction with the idea
that heaven will be a place of active, responsible service.
I'll set you over many things, but now we concentrate on the
last phrase. Enter thou into what? And here the entire inheritance
is described in this one simple phrase. Enter thou into the joy
of thy Lord." And we find exactly the same terminology with regard
to the man who took the two talents and brought a return to his Lord. In verse 23, his Lord said unto
him, Well done, good and faithful servant. You've been faithful
over few things. I'll set you over many things.
Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." Now this is a fascinating
phrase, the joy of thy Lord. Is it the joy that thy Lord has
prepared for you? Or is it the joy that is your
Lord's, which he deigns to share with you and all his faithful
servants? Linguistically and grammatically
it could be either. And frankly, I don't have a clue
to say which one it is with dogmatism, but this much is certain. Whether
it is the joy which is the Lord's in His own eternal dwelling,
now shared with all His faithful servants, or whether it is the
peculiar joy prepared by the Lord for His servants, this much
is clear. The dominant characteristic of
the inheritance into which the faithful are ushered is joy. Enter thou into the joy of thy
Lord. Now was there no joy in the heart
of the servant who out of love to his master served him? Why,
of course there was, the very flavor in which the servant seems
anxious to appear before his Lord and say, You gave me five,
and I have traded for you. He had no narrow conceptions
of his Lord as that unprofitable servant who called him a hard
man, narrow-hearted and tight-fisted, no joy in his service whatsoever. Obviously, the faithful servants
had joy in their service and whatever joy they knew while
they were administering the stewardship of their Lord. It was but an
earnest, but a down payment but a preview of the consummate joy
that was theirs upon the return of their Master. And isn't it
interesting that when the Lord Jesus would underscore the great
reality of the kingdom to come and our place in it, He describes
it in this pregnant terminology, enter into the joy of thy Lord. And that's what it will be. unmixed
joy. It was an entrance upon joy undiluted
by grief and groaning and sorrow and pain. It was the joy of the
Lord, joy unmixed. Now we add to this clear statement
of our Lord in Matthew 25 the graphic descriptions found in
the book of the Revelation And I ask you now to turn to two
of them in particular. First of all, Revelation chapter
7. Revelation chapter 7. Remember
now what we're seeking to see from the Scriptures, that heaven
is a place of unmixed joy. Verse 13 of Revelation 7. One
of the elders answered, saying unto me, These that are arrayed
in white robes, who are they, and where did they come from? And I say unto him, My Lord,
you know. And he said unto me, These are
they that come out of the great tribulation, and they washed
their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore
are they before the throne of God, and they serve him. There's that concept of unwearied
service. They serve him day and night
in his temple. And he that sits on the throne
shall spread his tabernacle over them, the immediate presence
of God. And they shall hunger no more,
neither thirst any more. Neither shall the sun strike
upon them nor any heat, for the Lamb that is in the midst of
the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall guide them unto fountains
of waters of life." And now here's the climactic statement, and
God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes. And God shall
wipe away every tear from their eyes. Here is a situation, a
state, a condition in which everything that would provoke a tear is
forever banished. God wipes away every tear from
their eyes. And then we turn over to Revelation
21 for an exposition of how it is that God wipes away those
tears. Here in the vision of the new
heaven and the new earth coming down out of heaven we read Revelation
21.1, And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first
heaven and the first earth are passed away, and the sea is no
more. And I saw the holy city, New
Jerusalem, that's the church And if you doubt my word for
that, simply read on verses 9 and following, where John is taken
in vision to see the New Jerusalem, and he sees the church, the wife,
the bride, coming down this city foursquare. I saw the holy city,
New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready
as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out
of the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with
men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples,
and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And he
shall wipe away every tear from their eyes." Now here's the explanation. And death shall be no more, neither
shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore. The first things are passed away. And as I was mentioning to my
wife this afternoon, though I trust I preach with as much conscious
dependence upon God tonight as I did last week, I preach with
a little less frustration because when we're determined to stick
by what Scripture says, Scripture gives us very few materials with
which to expound what it will mean to have face-to-face vision
of God. And all you can do is state it
and stand back amazed and overwhelmed with wonder. But you see here,
God describes what a state of unmixed joy will mean in terms
of negatives to which we can now relate. You see the difference? God doesn't give us many positives
to describe what it will be to have immediate communion with
God and face-to-face vision of God. He simply states it. Here,
He says, unmixed joy. Well, what will that mean? God
says, I'll help you, and He describes it in terms of negatives to which
we can readily relate. And the first great negative
is that there shall be no more Now think of all the grief and
the sorrow that surrounds the awful intrusion of death upon
the human race. In the day that you eat, eating
of that fruit, you will die. And the seeds of death were sown
in that moment of disobedience. Spiritual death became an immediate
reality. And then that which leads dust
to dust began to work in Adam and Eve upon the moment of their
sinning. And there was the agonizing work
of causing an unyielding earth to yield its produce. Adam and
Eve began to feel aches and pains and the seeds of death in terms
of their mortal bodies, and the seeds of death in terms of the
torture of soul that they would feel when they see their own
firstborn become a murderer and slay his own brother. And all
that surrounds death, the pain and the grief of the graveside,
the disappointment of a life cut short, the horrible, frightening
specter that this body, the only reality I have ever known of
my own existence, to think that it shall be eaten of worms in
a few years. But death will be no more. And then God goes on, as it were,
to expound and expand on some of the things that grow out of
this situation in which the curse and death are still with us. Death shall be no more, and since
death is no longer with us, neither shall there be mourning. There
will be no black shrouds to show respect and heaviness of heart
for a departed loved No mourning, no outcry, none of that sob that
comes from the depths of the soul of one who has seen a loved
one, a child, a husband, a wife, a beloved father, grandfather,
friend or neighbor, noble leader, cut down and taken from us. No longer will there be the outcry,
the mourning, And I love these two words, nor pain, nor pain. That mysterious thing that the
doctors continually try to analyze. What is pain? Everyone knows
what it is, but no one knows what it is. Everyone knows what it is. You
kids know what pain is, don't you? When Papa puts his hand
or his belt on your behind when you've been disobedient. When
mama takes that spoon, you know what? With your bad heart, you
do things that are naughty. Mommy and daddy have to spank
you. You know what pain is, don't you? But when people try to analyze
precisely what is pain, it eludes them. But we all know the reality
of it. And many of us, the older we
grow, pain is a constant companion to us, whether it's just an arthritic
joint or whether it's something that becomes more severe. And
what a blessed thing to know no pain. Your joy in communion
with God is so often interrupted because of physical pain, physical
limitations. Here, the text tells us no death,
no mourning, nor crying, nor pain. Why? For the first thing,
all of the things pertaining to the present heavens and the
present earth under the curse of God, the first things are
passed away, done, forever put behind us. All of the things
that have intruded themselves upon us in this present state
as a result of the fall, they shall all be passed away. there shall be no death, no mourning,
nor crying, nor pain, for the first things are passed away."
That's unmixed joy. Unmixed joy. Joy that will not
know one millisecond of interruption. Just as it will be unbroken face-to-face
communion, it will be unmixed joy. With perfect bodies, glorified
bodies, perfected souls, in a perfect environment with nothing but
sinless associations, God, angels, redeemed sinners, in an environment
that has been utterly transformed by the power of a returning Lord
and all the curse purged from it, an environment no longer
unyielding and hostile but perfectly consistent with and adapted to
all of the realities of the glorified humanity and everything we will
look upon will cause our joy to expand, and everything we
hear will cause it to increase, and everything we see will cause
it to spring up like a well within us. Blessed be God for the prospect
of a heaven of unmixed joy. The same Bible that teaches us
that heaven is a place of unmixed joy teaches us that it is a place
of unending joy. The conditions which make it
unmixed will never change. There will be no death, not the
intrusion of death once in a millennium to remind us of what once was. No death, no sin, no pain, no
curse. And added to those negatives,
those blessed positives, of looking upon the face of an unchanging
God and upon the Lamb in the midst of the throne, the infinite
source of blessedness. You remember that beautiful picture
that the river of the water of life, where does it come from? It comes out of the midst of
the throne of God and of the Lamb. That river that is the
source of the life of heaven flows out from God and the Lamb. And therefore, because that God
is eternal and infinite and unchanging, the Word of God teaches us that
our joy will not only be unmixed, it too, like God, will be unending. And how is it expressed in the
language of Scripture? Well, look at Revelation 22 and
verse 5. Here, after this vision of the
river, clearest crystal that proceeds out of the throne of
God and of the Lamb, Revelation 22, 1. We read in verse 5, And
there shall be night no more, and they need no light of lamp,
neither light of sun. For the Lord God shall give them
light, and they shall reign forever and ever. It's a Greek idiom,
literally translated, as you see in the marginal rendering
of many of your Bibles, unto the ages of the ages. And it's the classic terminology
used to express eternity. There are times when these words
obviously do not mean eternity, but there are other contexts
in which if they do not mean eternity, unendingness, then
the Bible has left us without language to describe the concept
of unendingness. And where we read in this passage,
they shall reign forever and forever. It is an explicit assertion
of the unendingness of the state secured for the redeemed by grace,
so that the unmixed joy has added to it the glory that it will
be unending joy. It's like the text in Matthew
25, 46, and these shall go away unto eternal punishment, but
the righteous into eternal life. And the language there is parallel
language. The same kind of usage is found
with reference to the smoke of their torment. Revelation 14,
12, and 13, the smoke of the torment of the damned ascending
up unto the ages of the ages forever and ever, and they have
no rest day nor night. God cannot accommodate Himself
more clearly to speak of unendingness than to use that word, to use
that phrase, to use that combination of words. And that is the glory
of the heaven that awaits us, and particularly the joy that
is ours. It will be unending joy. We shall reign in that state
of no curse, no pain, no sorrow, no death forever and forever. Now I'm very conscious, dear
people, that we enter a kind of mental paralysis in the very
effort to think of unendingness. And I've read many illustrations
that try to illustrate eternity, but all they do is cloud the
issue. You've just got to be willing to feel that measure
of mental paralysis. Everything we do is in terms
of the pressure of time. We think in terms of yesterday
and tomorrow. We think of terms of 8 o'clock
this morning, 10 o'clock tonight, our whole life. is geared to
that recurring cycle of darkness and light, and twenty-four hours
constituting a day, and seven days a week, and fifty-two weeks
a year, and ten years a decade. Why? God has made it that way. But again and again He tells
us in those beautiful pictures in the book of the Revelation,
no night there, no sequence of night and day. So to talk about
a billion years and to use illustrations about birds picking up drops
of water and depositing them somewhere until they empty the
oceans, my friends, it's futile. It's futile. It's futile. I've
heard all the illustrations, alas. In the past, I even used
them. But I find they haven't really
helped. Because, you see, the flaw in all of them is thinking
in terms of our present state of affairs in which everything
is calculated in units of time. And all we can do is assert what
the Word of God says. It will be joy unending in all
the glory of that blessed revelation. Unless you think that that's
just some kind of a wishful hope, it's as though God again knew
what we were made of, and it struck me in my preparation that
at both of these points in Revelation 21 and Revelation 22, after He
sets forth some of these most exotic glories that await us,
notice what God says. Revelation 21, Verse 5, after
speaking of this unmixed state of joy, or this state of unmixed
joy, verse 5 of Revelation 21, And he that sits on the throne
said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said, Write, for
these words are faithful and true. They are worthy of your
trust. for they are true. They present
concepts that our minds cannot fully grasp. We stagger and we
feel the paralysis when we attempt to focus upon them, but they
are trustworthy and they are true. Likewise, in chapter 22,
After speaking of that glory of the unendingness of our state,
they shall reign forever and ever. Verse 5, what does verse
6 tell us? And he said unto me, These words
are faithful and true. And my friend, all you can know
about heaven is what you have in the words of God. And they
are faithful, trustworthy words. They are worthy of my pinning
all of my hopes and expectations upon their validity. They are
true words, trustworthy words. And an hour is coming in which
I shall know unmixed joy and unending joy. And so will every
true child of God. Well, you may ask me tonight,
Pastor Martin, I can see getting excited about these concepts,
and perhaps occasionally indulging the luxury of thinking of what
my prospects are, but really, is there any practical relevance
to all of this? My friend, if you even ask that
question or think it, you show an abysmal ignorance of the Bible,
because according to the Word of God, it is this hope intelligently
and believingly grasped, which is one of the major motivational
factors in true biblical Christianity. Let me just give you a couple
suggested lines of thought, and that's all they are. They're
not exhaustive. It's relevant in relating to opposition, which
comes to every true Christian. All who live godly in Christ
Jesus shall suffer persecution. That's what the Word of God says.
Well, in the midst of persecution, what is it that nerves us to
press on in unyielding allegiance to Christ and to His ways? Well,
listen to Christ. Blessed are you when men revile
you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you
falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad,
for great is your reward in heaven in the midst of feeling the pain
of opposition. And it is pain. And that opposition
sometimes comes from the members of your own household, your neighbors. You feel their cold shoulder,
work associates and friends at school or one-time friends. Do you think God wants us to
go around clapping our hands and clicking our heels when we
feel that pain of rejection? Of course not! It causes grief
to us. But in the midst of that grief,
we rejoice in what? Great is our reward in the place
of unmixed joy. It will be unmixed joy because
no one there will reject me for loving Christ. No one will cut
me off and isolate me because I want to do His will and follow
Him. Everything about that will spur
me on to serve Him more devotedly, to want to do more for Him in
a growing cycle of loving obedience and the return of praise and
adoration. to the Lord who has redeemed
us. You see how relevant it is? Or
again, it's as relevant as your purse strings when it comes time
to say, what will I do with what's been entrusted to me in terms
of my being able to earn a living? Jesus said in Matthew 6, Lay
not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust
corrupt and thieves break through in steel. Lay up for yourselves
treasures in heaven. It is as relevant as what you
do with your purse strings, how you apportion the balance in
your checkbook, how much goes into savings, how much goes into
stocks and bonds and lands and houses and cars and possessions. It's just that relevant. If you're
seeking to find your joy in things, it'll be reflected. For where
your treasure is, there will your heart be. And where your
heart is, that's where your pen goes with your text and your
hand goes with your money. That's how relevant it is. It's relevant if the time should
come when some of us would be called upon Either to deny Christ,
to spare our lives, or to seal our testimony with our own life's
blood. You better have this hope burning
brightly and intelligently in your breast. Listen to the moving,
moving account in Hebrews 11. Speaking of the heroes of faith,
we read in Hebrews 11 in verse 35. Let's back up to verse 32. What shall I say more? For time
will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David,
and Samuel, and the prophets, who through faith subdued kingdoms,
wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths
of lions, quenched the power of the fire, escaped the edge
of the sword, from weakness were made strong, waxed mighty in
war, turned to flight armies of aliens, Women received their
dead by a resurrection, now notice, and others were tortured, not
accepting, and literally in the Greek it is the redemption, you'll
see it in the marginal reading of some of your Bibles, not accepting
the redemption that they might obtain a better resurrection. In other words, someone came
to them and said, look, you continue in your course of confessing
Christ and obeying Christ, and the price is death. Now here's
the price to avert death. Here was a price offered to redeem
them from death. A kind of resurrection, you see. A kind of coming back from the
dead. The sentence of death was put
upon them by their opposers. Now they come and say, here's
the price of your release. Do you want, as it were, a resurrection
from the dead? The text says no. They wanted a better resurrection. A better resurrection, and they
refused the redemption price for this pseudo-resurrection. They said, if my neck must undergo
the guillotine, the guillotine it must be, If my body must be
sewn in an animal's skin and thrown to the lions, sew it and
throw it, but I am convinced that my Lord has purchased for
me a heaven of unending, unmixed joy, and He will give me grace
for this interim of pain, of sorrow, and of grace. I'm convinced if a bloodbath
were let loose on the church in America tomorrow, probably
the vast majority of professing Christians would accept any redemption
from martyrdom. Because if we are faithful in
little, we're faithful in much. and a soft, anemic Christianity
that won't deny itself the comfort of the easy chair Wednesday nights
to pray. It won't deny itself food and
other things, occasionally even to fast and to cry to God. A fat, flabby, self-indulgent
evangelicalism is a sitting duck for mass apostasy. In a time
if God allows the unsheathing of the sword of open opposition
to the gospel. I tell you, my friend, you better
feed your soul upon this hope. Until you become what those blessed
people in Hedon's were, they were identified as what? Soldiers. Their eye, their heart, their
affections were fixed on a city that has foundations, was built
or made, was God, not a Christian retirement center in Florida.
It's sickening to see the ads pandering to this anemic, self-centered,
earthbound evangelicalism at every level. Full-page ads in
Christianity Today, Moody Monthly. I never thought I could be a
successful businessman while a Christian. And it shows him
standing to it by his new car and with his golf bag over his
back and telling you how you, like him, can really make it
big in a Christian organization. What an abomination in the sight
of God! How contrary to Biblical Christianity! Take your books! They'll be burned up when Jesus
comes to them. Take your prestige! Take your titles! Take your names! What are they? And we have such
a prospect as this, unending unmixed joy in the presence of
God and of the Lamb. Well, those are just a few lines
of thought as to the relevance of it all as I seek to bring
this word to a conclusion. Let me press this simple question
upon your conscience tonight. We've been contemplating heaven.
What is it? And we sought to concentrate
upon one element of what the Bible reveals about heaven, namely,
that it is a place of unmixed and unending joy. Do you remember
when we asked the question, what is hell? One of our points was
that hell is a place of unmixed and unending torment and woe. Everything that heaven is, hell
is not. You like pain? Anybody here like
pain? God appeals to that innate fear
of pain in man. My dear friend, man, woman, boy
or girl, if you choose a course of opposition to God and to his
Son, indifference to his cross, indifference to his claims, what
you're saying I'm prepared to meet Almighty God and let Him
pour out upon me the vials of His wrath that will bring me
to a state of intense, unending, unmixed pain and woe. And that's not the language of
a preacher trying to scare you to Christ. It's the language
of Christ Himself who used this terminology again and again.
Outer darkness. There is the weak. the wailing
and the gnashing of teeth. Nothing but weeping, nothing
but wailing, nothing but gnashing of teeth. Why? Because hell is
a place of unmixed and unending torment and woe. And those are
the issues set before you as clearly as Pastor Nichols laid
before us two Lord's days ago in the morning with regard to
propitiation Either Christ bears the wrath of God for you, or
you bear it in your person. So, likewise, I set before you
the way of life and of death, and I am not at all ashamed to
present what some would call mercenary, selfish motives. My friend, you go in a direction
that leads to unmixed and unending pain. Or would you join those
who are on their way to a place of unmixed and unending joy? That way stands before you in
Jesus Christ and in the gospel. He opened up that way by his
own perfect life and by his death upon the cross for sinners. And
he says to us in the gospel, enter in at the narrow gate. Oh yes, it is a narrow gate and
it is a compressed way, but thank God it leads to life! It leads
to life! I would not be true to the Gospel
if I told you it was a wide gate. It's a narrow gate. You've got
to leave your love of self, your pride, your self-righteousness,
your self-sufficiency, your self-will. You've got to sell out to Jesus
Christ lock, stock, and barrel. with no hidden print, no mental
reservations. Lord Jesus, I'm yours. That's it. And then you don't
breathe easy as though it's over, because you get through that
gate and you look around and say, this is wonderful. This
is the gate that leads to life. You say, yeah, but it's a way. And you know what the way is?
It's a narrow, compressed way. It's a way beset with all kinds
of danger. be set by many enemies, but it's
the way that leads to life. And my friend, if you want that
life of unmixed and unending joy, there's only one way to
get there, through the gate and along the way. There is no other
option before you. God's boxed us up and hedged
us in. And oh, I plead with you, choose
life tonight. And you choose life as you choose
Him who is the way, the truth, and the life. and dear child
of God, don't be battered into thinking this pie-in-the-sky,
by-and-by religion somehow is not respectable in the sophisticated
social consciousness of the twentieth century. Take all of that business
and burn it. We will serve this generation
best and most fervently and zealously in direct proportion to which
heaven burns in our vision and in our This is where we're going. We can afford to be a little
reckless. Not irresponsible, but we can afford to be a little
reckless. We can afford not to hedge all our bets and take risks
for Christ and his kingdom. We can afford the luxury of saying,
Lord Jesus, I'm yours. I have but a few short years
to serve you at best. Nothing else matters. Lord, I'm
expendable. Use me, that I might take a few
others with me, who in that day will stand resplendent with the
glory of your redemptive grace and power. And together we will
know, as the preacher could never have told us, what it is to be
in a place of unmixed and unending joy. Oh, may God grant that you
be there with That's the thing for which we labor. That's the
thing for which we pray. It is to that end we plead with
you. Don't slight the claims of Christ
and the overtures of grace in the gospel. Professing Christian,
don't sell your soul for upkeep. Reject anything and everything
that makes you the least bit indisposed to press on in that
narrow way. It and it alone leads to life. Anything that indisposes you
to love that way, to walk that way, to stumble in that way,
is a mortal enemy. Treat it as such. That is reality. Let us pray. O God, our Heavenly Father, how
we thank you for the glorious prospect that awaits us. No death,
no sorrow, no crying, no tears. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Oh, make the word effectual tonight
to the encouragement of your people and to the calling of
some to yourself. Hear our cry for Jesus' sake. And now in closing, let's sing
together a hymn that has been much in my mind in preparation. I hope it's been in the minds
of a few of you as you've listened to the word tonight. Jerusalem
the Golden, I believe it's number 604, hymn number 604. Here we have the language of
scripture concerning the new Jerusalem, the perfected church
in the presence of God and of the Lamb. And we confess our
faith response to that glorious prospect. Hymn number 604. You will notice that the words
of this hymn go way back to the 12th century. That's the 1100s. And the hope that burned in the
heart of Bernard of Cluny is the hope that burns in our hearts
tonight. Hymn number 604.