Jesus Christ is our eternal advocate who intercedes for us in Heaven. He has entered Heaven itself, not a symbolic representation, to appear before God on our behalf. This intercessory ministry connects Earth and Heaven, assuring us that we have the strongest defender before the Father. When we reach glory, God will wipe away every tear, and there will be no more death, mourning, crying, or pain. The former things will pass away, and what God gives us will be far better than anything we could have desired for ourselves.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] I remember Salisbury Church here coming along a number of decades ago, and they had a lot of guitar-playing instruments. They used to have a lot of flowers, pop plants and stuff along here, a fence behind it, and the musicians stood back. I always wondered why, because you couldn’t see them as well behind the flowers and the little fence. The stage extended all the way across to those windows, so it was a different scene back then. But I remember they sang a song, and the song was one about heaven. I’d never actually heard a song about heaven, but they had a good beat to it. Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace. I want to sing, see my Saviour’s face. Excuse the song he’s singing. Heaven is a wonderful place. Well, it struck me as a real attempt to be youthy and shallow, frankly. I don’t know what you thought. I actually haven’t ever heard many good sermons on heaven without them striking me as not living up to what I was expecting would be the presentation.

[00:01:26] I’m going to be trying to do that. I get bit tonight, so I don’t know how I’ll go with talking about heaven. In my travelling overseas, I studied in Dallas, and in that time studying I went to the First Baptist Church, which was the biggest Baptist Church in the world at the time. They had over a hundred pastors on staff. They had an orchestra with enormous amount, I think it was 80, 90 pieces of instruments playing. So when they did the hymns, fancy this, 80, all sorts of instruments, even one person had that gokum a bit. What was it? It was when you strike a note, and they had to wait all through the singing, and there’s one moment they come out and go, dong! I thought, how stupid am I? But it was very glorious, and then they had several choirs who all took turns. There was an upstairs and downstairs, and on some occasions they put all the choirs together. They all wore these white robes. So all around where you were sitting were these people, when they stood up to sing these combined choirs. It was like the rapture happened, and you were being lifted up. It was an amazing church to go to. In that particular church, the pastor was a very excellent preacher, but he said he finds it hard to preach on heaven.

[00:02:52] I was really curious about that, because I thought it was a sort of topic that, in the Salisbury Baptist Church 20 years ago, they seemed to get on it really easy. Why did he find it hard? Well, he didn’t tell us exactly why it’s hard, except for the fact that heaven is something beyond, above, out of our experience. You might have had a heavenly girlfriend, but that’s just using the descriptors to say she was wonderful. But we don’t really have many things on earth that is like heaven, and there’s going to be really large differences between that experience and now. And that’s a part of why it’s not so easy to accurately and convincingly get across how the Bible speaks of heaven. In fact, the Apostle Paul had much the same problem, and he said that he had difficulty talking about heaven, and he sort of stopped himself from saying too much when he wanted to tell about a time when he had a vision of going to heaven. Well, anyway, there were reasons that this pastor said it was hard to preach on heaven, because it’s so different. But we need to understand that because of that, in the people who study about theology, the people who try and present how we should read our Bibles, sometimes they say that it’s because we make it too literal, and they say heaven should be understood as some metaphor.

[00:04:41] That sort of understanding is called realized eschatology. Eschatology is a study of the last things, but realized eschatology is when you don’t make it happen because of some big event of Jesus returning, the Second Coming, but you make it some spiritual experience that we have in our hearts. It’s the same essence but spiritualized to something to do with your Christian living and Christian experience. It’s called realized eschatology. It has an element of truth in it that there are some things that we do when we become Christians. Experience, which the people who don’t ever come to Christ and don’t know what it is to be a Christian, and we only have no way to know what we’re talking about because we’re getting a bit of something of Heaven, but we’re getting it now.

[00:05:36] There’s a verse in the Bible says, Christ in you the expectation of glory or the hope of glory, you’re getting a little bit now of what you’ll have a lot of then. But it’s not saying that Heaven is not a real event, it’s saying that there’s some of that that happens now in you being a Christian, In that sense, realise eschatology is a true thing. When you come to Christ and you let him feel your life, and in the spirituality of your Christian experience, you are getting a small dose of what you’ll get a lot of when you

[00:06:11] get to glory, when you get to heaven. That, realised… Andy used it when he was here – is a proper term to use, but it depends on what you make of it, because there are some people who use it to get out of, even believing that there is a heaven. They just think there’s a good, nice Christian experience here now. But here is this passage that tells the opposite. And I’m reading now, if you look up on the screen, in Hebrews 9, 23-28, last it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things. Hear this? The copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites. He’s talking about the Old Testament and the Jewish worship in the temple, and the things that they did. All of those things were copies of what goes on in heaven. But the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. So all of the Jewish

[00:07:08] religion of the Old Covenant is being replaced. But what it’s been replaced with is the coming of Christ and his sacrifice on the cross instead of, you know, beefs and cows and heifers and all. But Jesus is a sacrifice, but that’s not the end of it when he just dies. Because it goes on to say what Jesus did about his sacrifice. He actually went to heaven. I don’t know whether it’s metaphorical that he actually carried some of his blood and had someone collect it after he died, or whether the fact that he died and shed his blood. He goes to heaven and takes his sacrifice there by his presence. Let’s go on reading the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these, the old Jewish ones. For Christ has entered not into a holy place made by hands, like the Jerusalem temple, which are copies of the true things. Wow, copies of the true things. But into heaven itself, now to appear

[00:08:12] in the presence of God on our behalf. Now what you notice is that there is a correspondence between the Jerusalem sacrificial system and the priests and the sacrifices and the holy of holies and heaven. But which one is the greatest reality is actually heaven. It’s not the other way around that our imagination of heaven is actually the real one was what happened on earth. Well the Christian experience in your heart in the New Testament era is the real thing and we’ve pictured it as somehow Jesus coming back again. That’s that bad way to do realised eschatology. But the real thing is the final one, Christ entering heaven with the fact that he’s died and presenting himself as a sacrifice. And this morning I was talking about the fact that we get atoned by what Jesus did on the cross, the atonement, a completed work where God the Father is satisfied by what Jesus did. Jesus takes the evidence of all of

[00:09:17] that in his very person to heaven. But into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Actually this is one of the laughs of my life. To understand that there is a person who right now is in glory, is in heaven. But he’s gone there to represent you and me. He’s gone there to be before the Father and to present our case. And the part of what he does in presenting our case, he says, the devil might come and say, look at their sins. And he says, but I died for those sins and my shed blood as you’ve said, it’s enough. And he’s our great, you know, ever think of having a lawyer who was always going to jump in on your behalf. I had a secretary in my church in Sydney who was a lawyer. He was really, really good. But to have someone even better than that bloke, Jesus in heaven. And what he can do in heaven is speak up for you. And when you have a need, he’s speaking to the Father for you. Talk about being connected. I feel I’m the most connected

[00:10:37] person in all the world and I’m not boasting because you are too, if only you’d realise it. Because of the Saviour who came into the world to save you and died for your sins upon the cross, has gone to take the evidence of the success of his mission to the very seat of justice in glory. And if ever the devil comes along and accuses you, he steps forward. He’s ten times better than my secretary lawyer friend down in Sydney. Jesus got into heaven to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. You wanted to hear some good news tonight? I’m going to tell you, underline the fact that you have got a representative, you’ve got the best lawyer of all creation in heaven. And he speaks to the Father and he says, now David here or John here or Sally there, they’re mine. And I’ve purchased them with my blood and they are forgiven. Get that stupid Satan out. He’s defeated. I won the victory and all of the glorious angels are all cheering for your successful trial by Jesus

[00:12:00] in heaven. He stood up for you. That’s what this is all about. It’s called the Intercessory Ministry of Jesus. He began it with his disciples when he prayed for them and he continues it in heaven praying for us. It’s a fantastic thing. The ministry of intercession that Jesus has. He actually shares that ministry amongst the body of Christ as a gift to be an intercessor. I’ve had some people in my life, they started out with my mother actually. She’s an intercessor. She was an intercessor and then she’d collect a group of ladies around her. I didn’t know this at first, but they used to pray for me because I was a baby that was born weak and grew up. Anyway, my mother used to recruit other intercessors and pray for me. And when I moved from Adelaide up to Brisbane, funny things kept happening. Well, not funny, ha ha, but out of the ordinary things. I arrived here in Brisbane and on the Saturday and during the day along came a member of the Salisbury

[00:13:18] Baptist Church who happened to be running a youth camp down at Corumbum and he was your grandfather, yes. And he came to pick up my dad who was going to be the speaker. Anyway, he was sitting in the lounge waiting for dad to get his papers together and I bundled myself out of the bedroom and came into the room to find a guest sitting there and he said, who are you? I said, I’m the boy of the house or something silly like that. And he said, well, how old are you? And I said, I think I was 17 or 18. He said, well, I’m about to take your dad down to a camp and it’s for that age group. Why don’t you come, go and pack your bag. I didn’t tell him I hadn’t unpacked it from coming from Adelaide, but I did and I went with them. But on the camp, they had this as a Corumbum. Anybody here who went to the camps at Corumbum? Ken, you were from New Zealand. They’re different. No, no. Anyway, no one here went to the camps at Corumbum. It’s all before your time. But they

[00:14:24] had these camp huts where the beds were three levels high and it was on the slope that went down to the Corumbum Beach. It’s a terrific campsite and you could go running down to the surf at Corumbum. And anyway, they led me there and on the front of the camp of the hut, they were going to put me in. I came a bit late with dad and his grandfather and they showed me that they had the names of the people already in the hut and they had two of them underlined as leaders. I’ve been to lots of youth camps and I knew you didn’t always have two leaders. You had usually one. So I was curious about that. And the extra one was actually an older bloke. He was 24. He was quite old. And he made a leader so he wouldn’t be embarrassed about being on the camp. And he came from another denomination. I got to know this fellow and said to him, let’s have our devotions in the morning because they encourage you to get together and pray. And every morning I realized

[00:15:37] that he came from a denomination that didn’t gospelize their people and he didn’t know how to belong to Jesus. And so I gave him John 3.16 in the first morning. It was a week’s camp. And I took him through all the gospel passages in the New Testament. And after a while, he was a teacher, he cottoned on to why I was doing this. He says, you don’t think I’m a real Christian, do you? And I said no. I was my blunt person even more back then. And I said no. And I was explaining to him, you’ve got to have an experience of Christ to be a real Christian, not just go to church. And he was a bit in a huff about this, but he’s in the same hut as me as I said. And then on the final night, something happened. I don’t know exactly the details, but he came across and woke me up. And I said to him, why won’t you accept God’s wonderful word? Now I actually was asleep and he told me this the next morning. I didn’t remember it for myself. I said to him, why won’t you accept God’s

[00:16:47] wonderful word, which is not really sounding like my language at all. But then the next morning, he told me this, he says, and it really worried me and you went back and lay down. And I thought about it, and I went across to talk to you again and realised you were sleeping and you’ve been asleep all the time. So I walked in my sleep. So he said, I was so worried. I went out and walked around. I found another Christian, and as a fellow, I was a little bit older than the others. And he He sat down next to him and this bloke was a minister’s son and he knew what was going on and he led him to Christ in the middle of the night. That bloke became a Christian. That was just one event but that sort of stuff where you walk into sleep or where something happens or you meet someone and you say something and it touches them kept occurring.

[00:17:42] I didn’t know what to do so at home. I said to my mother, there’s these strange things going on and she had a knowing look in her eye and I think she said something like, I think someone must be praying for you and then it flashed into me. An event before I left South Australia I had my father’s car and mum had asked me to run one of her prayer partners home, an old lady, one of those types with powdery cheeks that always want you to kiss them. This old lady and I had to run her home. As we got to her home I had Dad’s car and I used to practice, raising it around corners, I used to do it before driving but I couldn’t keep it too long.

[00:18:27] I wanted her to get out and run into her house but she wouldn’t. She sat in that left hand seat and wanted to talk to me. Oh, Jimmy, she said, you know, how nice of you to run me. What can I do for you? And I was trying to fob her off to get her out the door. I said, well, you can pray for me, I said, without knowing what I was saying. She got out the door, went inside, and I drove home. And as my mother reminded me, maybe someone’s praying for you, I flash back to remember, asking her to pray for me.

[00:19:00] So maybe it’s like I used to call her, Auntie Hilda. And my mother said, why don’t you write to her? And I wrote and said to her, are you praying for me? And she wrote back and said she did that that was her job in the kingdom of God or something to this effect. And she was praying. I started sending her lists. I’d become a preacher by then of different places that I went. But I deliberately left out some as a test to see whether it made any difference.

[00:19:29] And I tell you, the ones I told her about had these things happening. There is a very powerful thing in prayer. But it doesn’t come just from Auntie Hilda. She is an intercessor by gift. It comes because she shares the intercessory ministry of Jesus in heaven. There’s some connection between earth and heaven. You better know it. It’s already in existence because of Jesus

[00:20:08] and his connection as having come from heaven, having gone back to heaven, and being at the right hand of the Father. And when you’re a Christian, when you come to Jesus, he takes on board to pray for you. Right now, I want to tell you, if you belong to Jesus, you’ve got a very strong intercessor in heaven. That’s what this passage is about, into heaven itself to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.

[00:20:43] And everything I told Auntie Hilda, I tell you, it made a difference. And I realize I couldn’t have get a better lesson for someone who was trying hard to become a young preacher. I learned that the preaching, when I went to college, they’d say, oh, you’ve got to have this introduction like this, and you’ve got to do this. I didn’t really listen because I knew there’s a deeper explanation for why your preaching works. It is that Jesus is praying for you,

[00:21:16] and sometimes he gets intercessors on earth. We have people in our church who have a special ministry of praying for things. They know who they are because you find your ministry by how God blesses it. That happens all over. It’s a part of how God works that he has his people on earth who are his representatives, and they’ve got touch with heaven. And if you’re a sensible one, old evangelist

[00:21:46] told me when I started to be a preacher, he said, get yourself a bunch of people who pray for you. It sure does make a difference. Anyway, that’s what this passage is about. But the biggest thing that I notice here is that of the two between heaven and earth, the one that is the true thing is heaven. And how the Old Covenant sacrifices and all were effective was because they are a copies of heaven. You understand what I’m saying?

[00:22:21] Heaven is a wonderful place filled with glory and grace. And when Jesus Christ comes back again, I want to see my Savior’s face because he’s the one who’s been jockeying me through the Christian life, just like he wants to jockey you. He’s our intercessor. That’s what it is to be a priest, is to be someone who prays for you. We don’t need priests on earth in the sense of taking his place.

[00:22:56] We just need people down here who will present him for who he is. Anyway, I probably need to go on to the other four verses the passages I have. But let’s get to Revelation 21, 1 to 4. Revelation 21, 1 to 4. Now this is a passage that is very mysterious because it’s the one that talks about a new heaven and a new earth. There is a cults that goes by that name.

[00:23:26] And because I’m turning you through this passage doesn’t mean that I believe their cult is right. But they may be right to at least notice that in the Book of Revelation I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and first earth, and we’re on the first earth, had passed away. So there’s gonna come a time when God has a second making of everything. The next bit is one that’s troubled me because I used to like going skindiving.

[00:23:55] The sea was no more. In fact, I was swimming down in Adelaide at a beach and felt something brush my feet. I had my mask and snorkel and flippers, but when something brushes your feet, you know, you get a bit of a scare. I didn’t see what it was. The next day Rodney Fox or Rodney Cox got taken by a great white pointer at the same spot. And probably this white pointer came, not the time,

[00:24:28] but it was probably a little one that brushed my feet. But anyway, this passage annoys me because I like going swimming, and it used to be something important to me, and it says the sea was no more. But I did read one interpretation of that, and that is, I don’t know what to follow, to believe this or not, but what the ancient people understood about the sea had to do with just how angry it could be

[00:25:00] and how they knew how dangerous any seafaring adventure was for sudden storms and boats sunk. And even right through to the, you know, 1700s, traveling on the high seas was a dangerous thing to do because the boats that they used, in the middle of a very bad storm, the pressures caused it all, the boats, the planks that were all nicely fitting together to come apart, and the boat could sink really quickly. John Wesley was on such a ship coming back

[00:25:35] from the Americas to England when there was a terrible storm. And there are a lot of Christian people who didn’t have good tickets because they had to stay out on the decks, but they belonged to a certain Christian group. And John Wesley came out onto the deck and saw them, and they were singing hymns. And he was a bit amazed. He wasn’t actually yet converted.

[00:25:57] John Wesley, he founded the Methodist denomination, but at this point he’d been a missionary, but was doing it in his own strength. And this is how he found out that he needed to have a conversion experience. He went up to them and says, how come you’re singing at a time like this? They said, well, when the ship goes down, we go up. And when he saw the confidence they had that it was ill in God’s hands,

[00:26:26] when the ship, well, the storm, they survived the storm and they got to England, he looked up their group in, I think it was in London where they had a meeting place and they showed him the truth of the gospel and he became the Christian that then could be someone that led many people to Christ. Jesus is real. And the explanation about the sea being no more,

[00:26:57] as it’s referring to the angry sea, and so one interpretation, I don’t know what to make of this, I’m just telling you it, because it’s how some people still have an ocean. But what it’s saying is that God will get the sea from no longer being the angry thing that was cruel and cause the sailors often to die. And I do remember that the Psalms tell us that Jesus leads us besides still waters,

[00:27:26] which fits in with that idea, but I don’t know what you can tell me what you think of that idea later. Well, and I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, because God’s gonna make a New Jerusalem and it’s gonna come down and become the Jerusalem on earth. Now, is that something that is figurative? In our meeting together for the apologetics, the theology club, we call it now,

[00:27:58] we talk about how to interpret the Bible, do we take everything literally, or are some things to be taken metaphorically? Is this New Jerusalem mean all the Christians, is that what it means? Was a literal reconstruction, in fact, it gives all the dimensions that are given, it sounds like a globe, and you’ll have a lot of room for different people in it. Well, I’ll leave that in the air,

[00:28:22] because I like the idea of still having to see, but that’s not a good enough motive, or a good enough reason to interpret it that way. Prepared as a bride adorned for a husband, as Jesus is a husband, and we, the church, are like the bride. And I heard a loud voice upon the throne saying, “‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with men.'” Now, I want you to know that the proper old-fashioned, well, I see proper old-fashioned,

[00:28:51] the King James Version Bible, reads it, “‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men.'” By men, it means humans, right? The tabernacle of God. And the word for tabernacle is the same word that’s used for how the Jewish people used to have a time when God didn’t have the temple on earth, but he had a tabernacle, or he had a booth, he had a tent.

[00:29:20] When they struck their tents, when you pull out the plugs, not the plugs, pull out the spikes and move, the thing that God had moved with them, always kept in the center. So it was how God would have a fellowship with his people. But the word means a fellowship that you can have with someone, a tabernacle or dwelling place is a literal interpretation of the meaning of the word in Greek.

[00:29:51] “‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people,’ which was the purpose of their being. The Jewish experience of, first of all, a tabernacle-y thing, you know, I forget the other name for it, but the tent-like mechanism that represented the presence of God, and then was replaced by a proper temple.

[00:30:15] All of that was to signify that God’s intention was to be with his people. He had that in the beginning when he created the human race, we sinned and we were kicked out, and all of that was lost. But God made another attempt to have a group of people be his people, and they’re the Jews. “‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with men,

[00:30:34] and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.’ And then finally, and he’s going to be my final point to bring to you tonight, or I think I’ll make that the final one. He says he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore. For the former things have passed away. And what we know by this is that there’s something that we experience now And some of you may well have had times of sorrows.

[00:31:14] You’ve had a parent who died, or you’ve had a cousin who got run over and killed, or you got discovered that you had a problem of health that was going to be difficult all your life. You’re like the girl, I forget her name, who dived into a pool and broke her neck. And she could move her head like so. It’s a little bit of hands, I think. She came to speak at Wheaton College when I was there, amazing Christian woman.

[00:31:45] But all her life, from then on, from whatever 17-year-old on or whatever she was when she broke her neck, she was in a wheelchair. She came to speak to our students. And she had the paintbrush in her mouth. She did paintings. How many times do you wish when she’s in a chair and has to paint with the thing in her mouth, would she wish she could have all of her limbs to work properly?

[00:32:17] There are things that happen in this life, and you can have sorrows. Don’t think that this life on Earth, because you become a Christian, everything will work out sweet. There is a sweetness that Jesus can give to everything that happens. But sometimes we have to accept that there is pain. But what we are told is that in the new life, in glory, which is one reason why it’s so different, there’ll be no more mourning.

[00:32:50] Not mourning enough, no, but mourning as in crying. Look at the word. No more mourning or crying, nor pain anymore. And I don’t know what history some of you might have in having discovered things that weren’t what you would have yourself said you wanted to happen, but it happened, and you can’t change it. I don’t know what sorrows you might have from your past, the things that went wrong, or opportunities

[00:33:18] that didn’t turn out. I want to tell you, being a Christian, sometimes you have hopes that don’t get fulfilled, because God takes you another way. You have to just accept what he’s done. It is a fact of Christian experience that the Lord chooses what happened, and it includes sometimes people are sent off to war. I was almost sent off to war, and luckily my marble didn’t come up, but I had friends who did.

[00:33:50] Some came back. Bad things happened. How many were their parents crying during the Vietnam War? Because their kids’ marbles did come up, but then the young men didn’t come back. And there are griefs that we go through. Thankfully, we’ve got Jesus as an intercessor who promises. He says, I’ll never leave you nor forsake you. He wants to be with you. He wants to share those sorrows as well as all the others.

[00:34:25] That is the true Christian life. But then he gives you the promise that when we get to glory, when we get to heaven, there will be no more mourning or crying, no pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. That’s why heaven’s going to be so different, very different, that we trust in the glory of it and the fact that it will be the fulfillment of all of our hopes one way or another. Jesus understands when people have pains that you go through.

[00:35:01] And it’s a fantastic thing to know that he understands and that he’s got a future for us that’s going to really work. And there won’t be a lack of fulfillment in glory. There is fulfillment in this life too, but you have to let him be the Lord as to which parts he leads you in and which parts he doesn’t. I’ve had people I know whose whole lifetime from being a young Christian was that they became a missionary. And then they applied and got rejected.

[00:35:37] One girl I know went overseas and had a nervous breakdown. She couldn’t handle the problems of all that involved. And so she came back. She got her health back and went again. I think there were three attempts. She had to be a missionary, but she couldn’t take it. She had to sort of admit, well, I went along and spoke to her mission people. Don’t send her again. It wasn’t what God wanted, but it was what she wanted.

[00:36:08] There’s many a person that’s had a real deep thing that they wanted and it didn’t happen. And you can get angry at God, you know, because he didn’t give you the thing you wanted most. I want to say that when you don’t get what you wanted and he gives you something else, look at it carefully, you may discover that the thing that he gives you is something far better than you ever imagined. I wanted to be lots of silly things in my youth and God didn’t give them, but He’s given me to do something now that I like to do.

[00:36:49] That is to take this message of the Gospel and to know what it is when I get led to sit down next to somebody out of the blue and to tell them about Jesus and see the Spirit working in them. That’s more thrill for me than all the other things I used to think I wanted to do. What He gives you is better. It’s come from His hands. And there’s also a time when all the former things have passed away, but the things that He was in that He gave you to do, you take them with you into glory. So this is a fantastic passage and we should be glad for it, neither we’ll be there any morning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away.

[00:37:45] Death shall be no more is one thing. Well, I had some other passages, but I think that’s enough for tonight. Trust Jesus because He wants to give you His best and just rest in Him because the things that He gives you that He’s involved in are 10 times, not 10, a million times more precious than the things that you engineer for yourself. Let’s have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank You for these passages. I thank You for this Christian life. I thank You that the things in heaven are the truest of things and the things on earth have their place to how much they represent those true things of glory and that Jesus

[00:38:36] went to heaven to prepare a place for us. I go to prepare a place for You. And because He’s prepared a place for us, He’s gonna come back and collect us. That’s the Second Coming. It’s real. It’s real as a promise, in the sense that it will be realized when Jesus returns. And a part of what he’ll do is take us to be with him in glory. Thank you for his promise. I go to prepare a place for you. If it were not so, I would have told you.

[00:39:09] He’s preparing somewhere special for us in heaven. Thank you, Father, that this Christian life is not just one that we suffer the heartbreaks and we suffer the things that don’t go our way. And that’s the end. But thank you, Father, that there’s a time in glory when we’ll be glad that Jesus has been the one who led the way. And he’s going to take us to be with himself forever. We thank you in the Savior’s name. Amen.

[00:39:40] By the way, if you don’t know Jesus or you wonder whether you have ever come to know him properly, come and talk to us. Be nothing better to finish a night off of somebody who said, I really don’t know that I know him. You need to be able to say, the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. Can you say that? The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

[00:40:12] So when you’re sure you’ve got Jesus, and that Psalm 23 says he leads me beside the still waters. I’m going to hang on to those still waters. There may not be a big monstrous sea, but there may still be water and glory. But we’ll find out about that one day. He leads me beside the still waters. Thank you.