This article is based on a sermon I first preached at Christ Church, Surbiton in July 2006. I’ve adapted it and tidied it up for this website (you lucky, lucky people).

One of my favourite hymns is ‘How great thou art’. The final verse of this hymn goes like this:

When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
And take me home – what joy shall fill my heart
Then I shall bow in humble adoration
And there proclaim, my God, how great Though art!

I love this song because for me it just captures the majesty and the awesomeness of God and his creation. And this final verse expresses quite how amazing heaven is going to be.

But when you ask people what heaven is going to be like I don’t know how many people would quote hymns to you. Ask the man on the street what they think heaven will be like, and I reckon a popular response would include wings, clouds, harps and Philadelphia crème cheese.

Ask the average person in church and I think the responses were probably not too far away from this secular stereotype. We know that heaven is where we are going to worship God for eternity, so the harps become guitars, the wings are our new bodies and the Philadelphia cheese becomes quiche (fairly traded of course).

But is this image a really satisfying one?

Or to put it another way, does this scene sound familiar:

You’re standing in a church, the music group slowly chugs its way through some truly awful songs. The congregation around you looks like extras from Dawn of the Dead. The only evidence that there is breath in the bodies of the congregation is the loud, incessant and quite frankly irritatingly vigorous coughing coming from the back row. Despite the scene of desolation spread out in front of him, the worship leader stands up and in a fit of uncontrollable ecstasy exclaims ‘this is what heaven is going to be like!’. You can’t help but think ‘If this is what heaven is like then I want to take my chances with the beast in the pit of burning sulphur’.

The Church is meant to model the Kingdom of God. It is supposed to be a place where people can look in and see what it’s like to be in God’s Kingdom. But what happens when the thought of spending eternity in church makes you wonder if going to heaven is such a great idea.

Mark 12:28-30 says this:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

In Mark 12:28-34 Jesus is faced with a difficult choice. He’s asked “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” At this point in time the Jews had 613 commandments. The Jews would claim that all of those laws were from the Old Testament and this guy is asking Jesus to pick out one of those 613 laws.

“The most important one” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’”

This is so important, and so ground-breaking, because Jesus has identified the most important thing that we should be doing with our lives. Jesus has explained, if you like, the Meaning of Life: to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength’. To ‘bow in humble adoration’, as it was put in that great hymn we looked at earlier, or maybe ‘worship’ is the word that we would most readily use today.

I have a friend who has a T-shirt which says ‘created to worship’. I love that T-shirt because it nails what we were created for. Just think of all those great philosophers who have agonised over the meaning of life – Descartes, Socrates, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant – they all spent their lives trying to get to grips with what life is, and then some anonymous guy with a T-shirt company goes and sums it up in 3 words.

The problem with our lives is that we do not spend it worshipping as we were created to. Or at least not all the time, not even all the time that we are in church. How often do things get in the way of us worshipping? How often does your quiet time get missed for something else? How many times do we decide to sit down and pray, but the phone rings, or there’s someone at the door, or we remember something we were supposed to do. And when we finally do sit down to pray we find it a real struggle because God feels very distant. We start wondering if maybe we’re talking to ourselves.

Even at church things get in the way. Am I the only person who whilst singing the closing song is wondering what to cook for lunch? How many times do we not really engage in a service because we’re worrying about work on Monday?

Or does the choice of music get in the way? Maybe there are words in songs that you struggle to get to grips with, or perhaps you struggle to worship with modern songs, or maybe old hymns seem a bit… old?

I have this funny thing about the word ‘lovely’. I just can’t bring myself to use the same word to describe the all-powerful creator of the universe that I would use to describe a cup of tea. For this reason when certain songs which use this word are sung in church, my mind is more irritated by the use of the word ‘lovely’ than it is engaging in passionately singing the praises of my creator.

All these things get in the way of doing what we were created for, and when we imagine heaven as being struggling with all these things 24/7 for the rest of eternity it makes us sigh inwardly.

But the thing is that in heaven we will do what we were created for, and it won’t be the struggle that it is on earth; we won’t have to put up with all of these distractions, and we will be able to focus on what we were made to do. There are lots of reasons why heaven is going to be fabulous, but I’m going to focus on two.

It’s God’s place

Sometimes it’s easier to worship in church, or at some big Christian festival, or at a weekend retreat, than it is sitting in a room in your house (especially if that room contains a PC or a TV or a CD player or a toastie maker). Being surrounded by other Christians who are also worshipping often helps us to focus on God. I find being in a place that has been set aside for worship for generations makes it easier to remember that the God who is outside Time is with me. Stained glass windows make it easier for some people to feel God’s presence because they remind people of Jesus’ life.

Maybe not everyone is as sentimental as me about this, but I find it easier to be close to God in some places than others. From my personal experience the quiet room in the University of Essex Chaplaincy is a place that feels like my spiritual home, a place that it is easier to pray in than any other.

Some people may not be able to relate to this idea of holy places, for very good reasons, but I suspect that the place where we interact with God is more important than we realise. I had a non-Christian flatmate who’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. She knew I was a Christian, and wanted to pray for her mother; she knew I was there to help her, and she could ask me anything and I would answer her as best I could. She choose to ask me, not how to pray, not who to pray to, but rather where to pray.

This isn’t a new concept.

Michael Wilcock in his commentary of Revelation says this:

“The second revelation concentrates on a temple, or rather the lack of one. The Jewish Temple, like its predecessor the tabernacle, was the place where God said he would meet his people and would be known to be dwelling among them (1 Ki 6:11-13, Ex 25:22). In the heavenly Jerusalem there is no need of a temple because merely to be in the city is to be with him.”

Now we all know that God is omnipresent (everywhere), so what is all this ‘holy place’ lark? What makes a place a holy place? I think it is a place where God has revealed some of his glory and has been worshipped. Think back to Exodus 3 where God appears to Moses in the burning bush. He says to Moses ‘take of your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground’. I reckon it was holy ground because God had just appeared there.

Think about all those altars that were built throughout the Old Testament as Abraham, Jacob, Isaac and all that crew trekked around the ancient world. Throughout Genesis it seems like every few steps they were building an altar to God. But every time it was to commemorate something that God had done in that place, making it holy ground.

“The LORD appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.” – Genesis 12:7

In Genesis there are 11 examples of people building altars to the Lord in places. The altars served to remind them of the things that the Lord had done. The altar in chapter 12 was to commemorate that the Lord had appeared to Abram and made this great promise to him.

Even today the places that we think of as holy are often places where we have seen God work. I get sentimental about the quiet room at Essex University, not because it’s a beautiful room (trust me its not) but because I saw God work in it during the three years I was there (at the university of Essex, not all of it in the quiet room).

Heaven will be one big holy place because God will be there. He will be at work everywhere in heaven, and we are told in verse 4 that we will see God’s face. He will be there for all to see. We will be able to see him and touch him. He will live with us and we with him.

And how much easier will it be to worship God when we are in his place? Don’t get me wrong, God is with us now, he is watching us, Jesus lives inside us. So what does it mean to say that ‘he will be with us in heaven’ as opposed to ‘he will be with us on earth’? I think it means that his glory is there.

Revelation tells us that Heaven won’t need the sun and the moon to shine on it because the glory of God gives it light. In heaven all the glory of God will be there for all of his people to see. That’s gotta make the whole worship experience better. Remember my favourite hymn?

Oh Lord my God! When I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the works thy hand hath made
I see the stars I hear the mighty Thunder
Thy power through the universe displayed

Then Sings my Soul my saviour God to Thee
How great Thou Art, how great thou art

Looking at God’s creation gives us a glimpse of his glory, and makes worshipping him easier. Does looking down on a beautiful landscape make you realise how powerful and mighty God is? Maybe a wonderful sunset with lots of oranges and reds on the skyline makes you realise how majestic and awesome God is.

God created all these things, but they are just the surface of his glory. If you find it easier to worship when you have these scenes in front of you, imagine how much easier it will be to worship where you see all his glory shining out on you like the sun and the moon. If you come face to face with all of God’s glory then you couldn’t help but worship. Whether or not you’re ‘in the mood’ isn’t really an issue.

God’s rule

Sometimes someone can say something to you on your way into church and rather than worshipping through the service you are quietly burning up on the inside incensed by it.

Or maybe someone at the front says something that you profoundly disagree with. Something that has upset you so much that you can’t listen to anything else that goes on throughout the rest of the service, and this makes a service a write-off for you.

Or maybe the dreaded church politics is getting in the way. You were out-voted at some sub-committee meeting, and the changes that were implemented against your wishes are meaning that you can’t focus on God because you’re too angry about them.

Maybe the person on the row in front has done something to really hack you off. They’ve done something really awful to you, and now they’re standing in front of you, worshipping away, while you stand watching thinking ‘how can they worship God like that after what they have done to me?’

On earth these things are a problem. But not in heaven. Nothing impure will enter into heaven, nor will anyone who does what is shameful of deceitful.

Now, we have all done what is shameful or deceitful, but Jesus has sorted all of that out on the cross, meaning that we can enter into heaven sinless. All the sins that we commit on earth that get in the way of ourselves and others worshipping God will be gone. Heaven will be completely under God’s rule. It means an end to all sin, which after all is a major factor in why we don’t worship God on earth as we should. Take sin out of the equation and worship suddenly becomes a whole lot easier and much less of a struggle.

This is all very exciting. We now know that Heaven is going to be great! But so what? How are we to live differently in light of this? Surely if it’s about the future it doesn’t effect us now?

Well, it does. We are to look forward to heaven, and stop dreading spending eternity engaged in singing awful music. If we are looking forward to heaven then it is going to affect the way we live on earth. Heaven is going to be perfection, doing what we were created to do. With that knowledge we can try and recreate it on earth.

1 Peter 2 11-12 says:

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

Peter has identified the reason that it is so hard, the reason that there are so many distractions. We are aliens and strangers in this world. This world isn’t our home, our home is heaven. And this is why things on this foreign climb get in the way of us doing what we are meant to be doing.

I’m not a Londoner. I’m just not a city person, the big city isn’t me. I did live in London for a year and it confused me, and lead to me living differently to how I would normally live. I wasn’t used to the volume of traffic that went through the main road outside my front door. When I first moved to Surbition I would stand by the pelican crossing at rush hour hugging it for dear life because I was terrified to cross the road without the little green man. I didn’t tend to get the bus very often, because it confused me. The first time I got on the bus from Surbiton I asked for a return to Kingston and the driver looked at me as if I had just stepped off the mothership and said ‘we don’t do returns’. What kind of bus service doesn’t ‘do returns’?!

But over time I learnt to charge across the main road, I procured an Oyster card, and in many ways I started to live and act like a Londoner. But I was still not a Londoner.

I altered my lifestyle because I was in bizarre, unfamiliar surroundings, and we as Christians often end up doing that in the unfamiliar surroundings of this world and start living like people of this world when they are not people of this world. This is what Peter is warning us against in his letter. We are to abstain from sinful desires, the things of this world that try and draw us away from God and our heavenly home.

The great song writer and theologian Belinda Carlisle once famously said “we’ll make Heaven a place on earth”. In light of knowing that heaven is our home, we should be looking for our lives to be little pockets of heaven.

How do we make heaven a place on earth?

We should live our lives as if we are already there. We should do what we will do in heaven, we should love the Lord our God with all our mind, with all our Soul and with all our strength. And we should try and do that with every aspect of our lives.

We are to be God’s people, we are to spend time together with other Christians worshipping God, we are to encourage each other. We’re to commit to being part of a church. We’re to serve each other, we are to volunteer to do things in church, whether it’s the coffee rota, leading youth group, or the being in the music group. And we are to do these things as an act of worship to God.

We are to make our homes and lives like God’s place. We won’t be able to see him, but he is there, and we need to live like that’s the case. We are to talk to him, to pray to him. We are to remember that he is there and act accordingly, not doing things to displease him, as an act of worship.

We submit to God’s rule in everything, we worship God with our money, by being generous with it, by being wise with it. We worship God with our families, by teaching and encouraging each other and submitting to God’s rules. We are to worship him with our time, like we are to be with money, to be generous with it and wise with it.

This is going to be really hard and we won’t completely manage it on earth because we have all of sorts of distractions, but we can battle through them and seek to get as close to heaven as we can on earth.

We were created to worship. That’s what we were made for. Life is a struggle to do this, but in heaven it will come naturally and we will just do it, and it will be great!