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Heaven “is somewhere you believe in… It’s a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there.  At night you can sit next to the stars, which are the brightest of anywhere in the universe… If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven… When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you up to Heaven to be with him…”

Even though this is written for children and pretty simplistic, you can hear some popular conceptions of heaven – it’s up there, there’s something magical and otherworldly about it, it’s where God is, and it’s where you go when you die if you’re good.  I think if you asked the average Christian what happens when you die, they would say “you live in heaven with God forever.”  If you ask the average evangelical Christian what happens when you die, they would tell you something like this:  “well, there are basically two options:  heaven and hell.  God created us to have a relationship with him, but we sinned, and now we’re separated from God.  Those who come to faith in Christ Jesus will live for God with eternity in heaven, and those who do not will experience eternal torment in Hell.  Heaven is up there, a disembodied existence in the presence of God.  The body dies, the earth is no more, but our souls are up there forever with God, worshiping Him and enjoying his presence, being reunited with our loved ones, and living in mansions with streets of gold.”

This conception, of course, seems to raise two important questions in most people’s minds:

1) Really?  Is that it???
2) Will my dog be there?

The answer to number one is, No, that is NOT the whole Biblical teaching.  The answer to number two is, I’ll get to that in a later sermon.  The reason I am doing this series is to free heaven from the cultural portrait of it, to recapture what the Bible actually teaches our Christian hope is, what God’s purpose is in this world, and how that all affects how we are to live in the here and now.

The question most people are interested in when it comes to the afterlife is “what will happen when I die?”  But to properly answer that, we need to understand that there is a larger context, and the question which defines that context is this: “what is God’s plan for the world and the cosmos?”  What is God up to in this world, and where is all of this headed?