Today is, of course, Mother’s Day. And I imagine it is a hard one for many who long to be home with their mothers but can’t be because of the coronavirus. This Mother’s Day is my first without my mother. She passed away last August at the age of 90.
Years ago, I read a story that, intriguingly, may sum up some of the feelings some of us may have this weekend. It was the story of a couple who went away for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Grandma came to stay with her two grandchildren, who were seven and five years old at the time. After the first day without their parents, the older of the two children summed up his feelings by saying, “Grandma, I’m homesick, and I am home. How can that be?”
I believe those profound words are a rather precise diagnosis of a problem faced by every one of us as human beings. We are all homesick for our ultimate home, but we try to cover that homesickness with busyness, distractions, entertainments that we think will satisfy. We try to pretend we are home when we really aren’t.
I believe our Gospel reading for today is all about the power of home. Listen for God’s word to you from John 14:1-6. On the night before his death, Jesus said to his disciples…
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
The disciples had just received the disturbing news that Jesus was not going to be with them much longer and so, like the two boys in my opening story, the disciples began to feel homesick.
Jesus says to us today what he said to his disciples two thousand years ago: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”
How do we keep our hearts from being troubled when we have to face death, our own or that of a loved one?
Jesus gives us the answer: trust in God and in Jesus. This is the cure for spiritual heart trouble.
However, we must be clear about this. True faith in God and in Jesus is more than just believing that they exist. True faith involves entrusting our lives to the Father’s hands through his Son Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the same way, Jesus entrusted his life to the Father every day, and even at the very end he said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” That’s real faith.
If we have that sort of faith in God and in his Son Jesus then we can be sure, just as he told his disciples, he has gone to prepare a place for us.
Over the course of my thirty plus years in ministry I have performed many funerals. I have lost track of the number. But you learn some interesting things about people when you conduct their funeral. One funeral I performed many years ago was for an elderly woman in my congregation at that time. In preparing for the funeral, the woman’s daughter told me that her mother always used to quote old, country sayings. One of those sayings was: “There’s never a jar so crooked there isn’t a lid to fit.”
Now, you can take that saying in a number of ways. But I think it has special application to our text today. That is this: Jesus has prepared a place for believers in him that is a perfect fit.
I wonder: what will your room in heaven be like? What will mine be like? Whatever our rooms will be like, we can be sure that they will each be a perfect fit for us, because no one knows us better than Jesus. He knows exactly what we need and what will please us.
When my mother came to live with us in 2012, she occupied the bedroom that used to belong to my son Jonathan. When James went to college, Jon moved into that room and we did a little bit or redecorating for him. When my mother moved in, we re-decorated again for her. The likes of a grandmother are not the same as the likes of a teenage boy. In the end, I think we came up with something that made my mother happy.
Now, if we take time to decorate a room so that one of our family members will be happy in it, how much more do you think Jesus cares about preparing a room just right for you in heaven?
I don’t know exactly what your room or my room in heaven will be like, but I imagine they are going to be wonderful because Jesus has spent the last two thousand years preparing them.
I wonder: is Jesus preparing a room for you?
You might say, “O Lord, don’t be preparing a room for me just yet. I’m not ready to go.”
But you know what? If you only knew how good the rooms are in heaven, you’d be dying to get there right now.
You know, the most interesting thing about the word that is translated “room” or “dwelling place” or “mansion” in John 14? The word means “a temporary resting place”.
Now, why are our rooms in heaven, temporary? They are temporary because those believers in heaven are waiting, just as we are, for the resurrection of the body that will take place when Jesus returns to earth to set up his eternal kingdom. Though we can’t help but think of heaven, as it is now, in physical terms, the Bible teaches that the only person in heaven right now with a physical body is Jesus.
When a believer in Jesus dies, we put their body in the ground, but their soul is already in heaven. Then one day, their physical body will be raised to rejoin that soul. It will be a glorious new body, free of all mental and physical illness. It will be a perfect body that will never get sick again, never grow old, and never die, just like Jesus’ new body that was raised three days after his crucifixion.
And this will all be possible for us precisely because of the cross. Right now, we live, in a sense, between Good Friday and Easter as we all await the final resurrection.
So, if we are trusting in Jesus, we can be sure that he is preparing a place for us in heaven. And we can be sure that one day he will come back and take us to be with him.
Sometimes we wonder when a loved one dies: did something go wrong? Why did he or she have to die now?
But I think Jesus teaches us in this passage that he comes to get us when it is time for us to go home and be with him. Furthermore, I believe that when we hear Jesus’ voice calling us home, we will be glad to be there.
Many people wonder what happens after death. There have been a number of books written on this subject. But I believe the greatest book that could ever be written about it was completed two thousand years ago. What greater authority could there be on this subject than the authority of the one who came from heaven, and is now reigning there, and who promises to come back for us?
Jesus says, to those who trust in him, I will come back and take you to be with me. That’s what he does for every believer in him. That’s what I believe he will do for me when it is time for me to go to heaven. He will come and get me. And I am looking forward to that.
One of my favorite preachers of all time was Peter Marshall, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C. and Chaplain of the United States Senate in the 1940s. In a sermon entitled “Go Down Death” he told the story of a little boy named Kenneth whom he knew and who had suffered from an incurable illness. The boy knew about death, and as he grew weaker, he began to worry about what it would be like. Finally, he asked his mother, “What is it like to die? Does it hurt?”
Caught off guard by the question, Kenneth’s mother was overcome by emotion. To gain composure, she left the room on a pretext and prayed that the Lord would give her an answer for her son. Then she returned to the room and said, “Kenneth, you remember when you were a tiny boy how you used to play so hard all day that when night came you would be too tired even to undress, and you would tumble into mother’s bed and fall asleep?
“That was not your bed… it was not where you belonged.
“And you would only stay there a little while. In the morning, much to your surprise, you would wake up and find yourself in your own bed in your own room.
“You were there because someone had loved you and taken care of you. Your father had come—with big strong arms—and carried you away.
“Kenneth, death is just like that. We just wake up some morning to find ourselves in the other room—our own room where we belong—because the Lord Jesus loved us.”[1]
What more do we need to know than that? What greater news is there?
Now this doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with asking honest questions. Thomas asked honest questions. And he asked a reliable source: Jesus.
Jesus said, “You know the way to the place where I am going.”
And Thomas replied, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
That’s an honest question. Many of us have questions like that. What happens after death? Is there a heaven and a hell? The Bible gives reliable answers to these questions.
Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Now, it is just at this point that many people have trouble with the claims of Christianity. The claims feel far too exclusive.
But let’s forget about Christianity for a moment. This is not the claim of a religion. This is the claim of a person. Jesus did not invent a new religion. He called us to follow him as a person. Furthermore, Jesus is not just for Christians. Jesus himself was not a Christian; he was a Jew. Jesus is for Jews, he is for Christians, he is for Muslims, he is for Hindus, he is for Buddhists, he is for atheists. Jesus is for everyone. And either Jesus said the words in John 14:6, or he didn’t. And if he said it, then we have to decide whether we think it is true or not, and what we are going to do about it.
Personally, I believe that Jesus said this. And secondly, I believe it is true. And thirdly, I have made the personal decision to come to God through Jesus. I believe that Jesus is the only way to God the Father. But there are many ways of coming to Jesus, even some I may know nothing about.
Trusting in Jesus gives me great comfort. I love the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism. The question is: “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?” And the answer is:
That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.
When my mother-in-law, Barbara, lay dying in hospital, we went to visit her. I read to her one of her favorite Bible verses, Jeremiah 29:11.
For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.
After I read that verse, Barbara spoke just one word: “Home.” She was ready to go home to heaven, and she knew who was going to take her there.
I hope you do too…
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