Welcome to answers to the big questions. I'm your host Allen Sonter and I'm glad you could join me. If you ask most people who believe in heaven whether they want to go there, they will say yes.
No doubt this is because we have been taught that heaven is a very good place to be. But we've also been taught that only good people go to heaven and that it is God who decides who goes there. Thus our question today is one that most of us have asked ourselves at one time or another.
And it's an important question too, because it concerns the future that most of us wish we knew about. I need to make it clear right at the beginning that only God knows who he will have in heaven. So if we want to answer this question, we must go to the Bible to find out what God has said about it.
Heaven is what we call the place where God's people who are given eternal life will live. Actually, the Bible says that for the first 1000 years after the second coming of Christ, his people will be taken to be with him in the heaven where he now lives. And after that they will come back to this earth in the holy city to live forever with him on this earth made new and free from all traces of sin and death.
For the purposes of our talk today, we will take it for granted that this earth made new is also called heaven. So when we talk about heaven, we mean the place where God's people will live forever. The Bible gives us several short answers to this question who will God have in heaven? Jesus himself in John 316 said and this is how God loved the world.
He gave his one and only son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. In the book of Acts we read the story of Paul and Silas visiting the town of Philippi. While there, they healed a spirit possessed girl who told fortunes for her masters.
They were angry with the apostles for driving the demon out of the girl because she was no longer able to tell fortunes to make money for them. So they started a riot and the magistrates beat Paul and Silas and put them in prison. God sent an earthquake which broke the prison open.
And when the jailer saw the prison was open, he thought the prisoners had all escaped. So he was about to kill himself as he believed he would die if his prisoners escaped. Paul called to him and told him they were still there.
And he was so grateful to Paul and Silas that he asked them what he must do to be saved. He'd obviously heard them preaching about salvation through Jesus. Paul told him in Acts 1631 believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.
The apostle John, in his first letter one, John, chapter five and verse twelve writes whoever has the Son has life, and whoever does not have God's Son does not have life. In his Gospel chapter 17 and verse three, John also writes and this is the way to have eternal life, to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. I could quote other verses that indicate the same thing that salvation comes from believing in or knowing or having the Son of God.
But what does it mean to have or know the Son of God? John answers this question by writing in One, John five, two and three we know we love God's children if we love God and obey his commandments. Loving God means keeping his commandments. At least part of knowing God is to love him, and to love him is to obey him.
Jesus said in John 1415, if you love me, obey my commandments. Another answer that seems to make sense is that God will have in heaven those who are safe to have there. Because if God saved someone who would rebel against him as Lucifer did long ago, we would be back in the same trouble as we are now.
But in the Bible, God says that sin will never come back again after he has dealt with it this time. We need to unpack this answer to find out what it means. Let's start with a parable.
There was a man whose favorite food was beef steak. He made friends with a girl who was a vegetarian, and she took him to a vegetarian restaurant where he could eat only some kind of soy meat substitute, which he didn't really like because he wanted to please the girl. He ate the vegetarian food on a few occasions when he took her out, but then they decided to marry.
He asked her to cook him a piece of beef steak, but she refused, so he could never get at home the food he longed for. He had to eat only vegetarian food as long as they stayed together. Their marriage lasted only a few months because although the man was willing to go without his favorite food for a while, eventually he decided that he would rather eat his favorite food than stay with a wife who would not give it to him.
This fictitious story illustrates an important principle upon which God bases his decision about who to have in heaven. There must be compatibility between the life God wants us to live and the life we are happy to live. The Bible makes it very clear that the ultimate goal of life is to maximize joy.
Therefore, we must be able to experience the most joy when we live according to the principles that God has set for his people in our natural state. Without a knowledge of God, we are sinners in rebellion against God because we're the descendants of Adam who gave his dominion to Satan when he disobeyed God. If we are to accept Christ as our Lord and Saviour, change from serving Satan to serving and worshipping God and experience joy in obeying God, we must repent of our sinful past and ask forgiveness from God.
He's promised in one John One Nine to cleanse us from our sins if we do this. But after we have repented and have been forgiven, we still have to deal with the reality that we are sinners and we have a sinful human nature that battles with the good we try to do. In Romans 714 to eight one, Paul expresses very clearly the dilemma we face when he describes the struggle he has with his sinful nature.
He concludes his remarks about this issue by saying, oh, what a miserable person I am. Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God the answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So now there's no condemnation for those who belong to Jesus Christ.
But Paul doesn't leave the matter there, but goes on in chapter eight, verses two to eight, to say that the Spirit of God has freed us from the power of the sinful nature. He says that letting the sinful nature control our minds leads to death, but letting the Holy Spirit control our minds leads to life and peace. Then in verses nine to eleven, he says that we're controlled by the Holy Spirit if the Spirit of Christ lives in us, and if he doesn't live in us, we don't belong to him at all.
So the choice is ours. We can choose to allow Christ to live in us, control our behavior and bring us joy, or we can choose to retain control ourselves, and the sinful human nature will take control and keep us miserable. So if we want to be God's people, we must ask Christ to come in and live in our lives and take control of all we do.
This experience of asking Christ to control us is an ongoing, continually growing experience. The sinful nature keeps trying to get control, but we must continually ask God to keep control. If we feed the sinful nature by filling our minds with sinful things such as immoral thoughts, books and magazines, TV and computer programs and games depicting sinful themes, then the sinful nature will grow stronger.
But if we fill our minds with the things of God, reading the Bible and Christian literature and watching Christian TV programs and videos, the spiritual nature will grow stronger and overcome the sinful nature. According to some psychologists, if we wish to break a bad habit, we need to be willing to seriously battle with it for 21 days. Then they say it takes 90 days to reestablish a new lifestyle to replace the bad habits we've broken.
So we need to be prepared to really battle with our old selves for three weeks to give up a sinful habit such as watching immoral programs on TV, and we need to work hard for three months to establish a new habit to replace it, such as daily prayer and Bible reading. Of course, we need to pray to God continually to give us the power to break bad habits and establish new lifestyle habits. And also because Satan doesn't want us to break bad habits and establish new ones, he'll keep trying to frustrate what God is doing in our lives.
We must always ask God to change us, and he will do so. We must understand that the battle we have to change habits has nothing to do with earning our way to heaven. We are saved by the free gift of salvation that God gives us in Jesus, not by the habits we make or break.
It's God that changes our habits, but he does it when we ask Him to. He doesn't change us against our will. If we don't ask God to change our habits, we'll not be happy in heaven.
We'll be happy in heaven only if God has given us, in answer to our prayers, the kind of lifestyle habits that fit in with God's laws that everyone in heaven keeps. The habits have to do with whether we will be happy in heaven, not whether we have worked hard enough to get there. We can never earn our way to heaven.
Heaven is a free gift from God, as Paul puts it in Romans 623 for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus, our Lord. Also, it can be misleading to talk about us battling with bad habits. Actually, all we can do is to put our will on the side of righteousness and ask God to change us.
When we do that, God does the work of making the change. As Paul wrote in Philippians two, verses twelve and 13 work hard to show the results of your salvation. Obeying God with deep reverence and fear, for God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases Him.
We decide what kind of people we will become by the choices we make every day. It takes time to grow the spiritual nature, but once we have asked Christ to live in us, he helps us to grow in the right direction. Our only hope of pleasing God is to allow Christ to be in control.
God tells us in Micah six eight that he requires us to do what is right to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. In other words, obey his commands, love and be a support to those who are struggling with temptation and trust God in everything. Another way of growing in Christ is to learn as much as we can about Him.
Thus we come to know Him as we know a friend, as Jesus said in John 17 three. And this is the way to have eternal life, to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. If we try to become good by trying hard not to sin, by our own efforts to do right, we will fail, as the sinful nature is too strong for us.
Only Christ living in us can make us good. As Paul said in Galatians 220 my old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, so I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
While this process of growing in Christ is going on, if at times we fall short of God's ideal for us, we can have full confidence in God's ability to save us, because Christ covers us with his righteousness. So God does not see us as sinners, but as perfect in Christ. Paul describes himself in Philippians three, verses twelve to 14 like this I don't mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection, but I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me.
No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it. But I focus on this one thing forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead. I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.
Finally, just before his execution by Nero, paul summed up his life in Christ in two, Timothy four, seven and eight in these words I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. And now the prize awaits me, the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on the day of his return. And the prize is not just for me, but to all who eagerly look forward to his appearing.
From what has been said, I hope you will see that while God is very particular about obedience to his commands and living a Christfilled life, we can have every confidence that we will be accepted into his kingdom to live forever. If we accept the salvation offered in Jesus to be safe to have in heaven, we must totally trust God and be joyful in obedience to Him. It's extremely important that our obedience to God must be motivated by love to Him, so that obedience brings us joy.
We sometimes hear people talk about the new covenant that God makes with us. He tells us in Jeremiah 31, verses 31 to 34 that the new covenant is made when God writes his law in our hearts. Now, what does that mean? How can God write his law in our hearts? I believe that the new covenant is Christ living in our lives so fully that our minds are totally in tune with his mind.
We come to the place where the things we do on a day to day basis are the very things Christ would do. His will and ours are the same. When we come to that place, we're safe to have in heaven because we experience joy in everything we do.
So we will never, throughout eternity, want anything other than God's will to be done. Then doing what we enjoy doing can be continued forever without any desire to turn away from God's will in any way at all. I would like to take this opportunity of inviting our listeners today to give your life to Christ.
Right now he's waiting to accept you as his child and he will come into your heart and live in you every day. He will never leave you if you keep your heart open to Him. I can assure you from my own experience that the joy of Christ's presence is better than anything you could experience without Him.
And the hope of living with Him for eternity is worth more than anything you may have to give up in this life. You've been listening to answers to the big questions. I'm Allen Sonter and I hope you have enjoyed this series of answers to the Big Questions
if you have any questions or comments in relation to today's program, you can call 3ABN Australia Radio within Australia on 024-97-3456 or from outside of Australia on country code 6124-973-3456.
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You have written what you want from me in stone a reflection of Your character, O Lord so I try to keep Your loss without regret but I'm easily distracted and forget so write them on my heart. Feel them in my mind the beauty of your lord and grace combined remind me just how lovely your commandments are and write them on the tablets of my heart.
You there is only one desire inside of me it's to be. Everything you've created me to be. And I know the only way that I can grow is for you to come inside and take control.
Write them on my heart see them in my mind the beauty of your Lord and grace combined. Remind me just how lovely your commandments are and write them on the tablets of my heart. Your heart reflects your goodness and the cross reveals your grace love the motivation behind your perfect ways to write.
Them on my heart feel them in my mind the beauty of your grace combine write them on my heart and grave them in my mind the beauty of your grace combined remind me just how lovely your commandments are and write them on the tablets of my heart sing the wondrous love of Jesus sing his mercy and his grace in the mansions bright and blessed he'll prepare for us a place when we all when we all get to heaven what a day of rejoicing that will be when we all see Jesus we'll sing and shout the victory. The victory. Onward to the prize before us soon his beauty will behold soon the pearly gates will open we shall tread the streets of gold when we all get to heaven what a day of rejoicing that will be when we all see Jesus we'll sing and shout the victory much dear friends and family and the time we spend together is so wonderful and sweet but this world is temporary and it doesn't satisfy let's meet up there in our home beyond the sky because in heaven we'll be forever more.
No more crying, no more death no more pain. And there in heaven, we'll meet again at Jesus feet. Let's enjoy eternity together forever.
Sin. This world will pass away with its sickness, death and pain. And then Jesus will return to take his children home.
Will you light ourselves in peace, reunited ever more? Who will you bring to heaven's golden shore? Because in heaven we'll be at peace forever let's enjoy eternity together forever without you there it just won't be the same without you there there'll be an empty place in God's heart heaven will be missing your smile so will you meet me there? Will you meet me there? Because in heaven we'll be at peace forever no more crying, no more death, no more and there in heaven we'll meet again at Jesus no more goodbyes to say because we'll be together let's enjoy eternity together forever you have been listening to a production of three ABN Australia radio.
