Sunday, January 7, 2018

Great is Your Reward in Heaven (My Dream about Heaven)



In the greatest sermon in the history of the world, the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord Jesus Christ repeatedly speaks about God rewarding us. While we experience many blessings and much help from God in this life, Jesus is focusing on future reward for those who suffer for God.

"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
 (Matt. 5:11-12 NIV)

God only gives us hints and glimpses of what our reward in Heaven will be like. It will certainly be far better than whatever we can imagine. Yet, if Jesus did not want us to think about reward in Heaven, He would not have mentioned it repeatedly as a motivation to keep serving God when serving is difficult and costly.

All Christians will sometimes be asked to make sacrifices and suffer in some ways for Christ. I remember reading a book by Elizabeth Elliot about suffering. She defined suffering as having what you do not want or wanting what you do not have. That’s a very insightful definition of suffering from a Christian who experienced a lot of suffering. Her definition covers big examples of suffering and small ones. Defined that way, it is easier to see how God does ask all Christians to suffer for Christ.

Sometimes the suffering is more obvious. I was blessed to live in a Muslim majority nation for fourteen years. While living there I constantly shared the Good News about Jesus with my Muslim neighbors, urged them to follow Christ, and I constantly encouraged other Christians to also share the truth and love of Christ with all their neighbors. I knew that any of my Muslim neighbors who came to Christ as a result would likely suffer in many ways. And some of them did suffer. I believed it is worth it.

Once, while living in Indonesia, God blessed me with a dream which reaffirmed that following Jesus is worth it no matter what we suffer here. I don’t expect or want anyone (even myself) to believe this is true just because of my dream. We believe this is true because of God’s Word. Nevertheless, my dream did reinforce this truth in my heart.

In the dream I was in Heaven. I was just walking around the streets. I did not see Jesus or God. In the dream, the streets were in fact made of gold. But that is not what made a lasting impact on me. I did notice that there was absolutely no darkness anywhere. Not even a shade of shadow under the benches along the road. This was a very unusual visual effect and different from anything I have ever seen with my waking eyes. This visual effect was unusual, but it is not what impacted me so powerfully and caused me to weep every time I remembered the dream for some time afterwards.

What impacted me most was not anything I saw or anything I heard. It is was what I felt. For just a few minutes, for the dream was not very long, I felt absolutely pure joy. Even now as I write, it brings tears to my eyes. I’ve never felt anything like it before or since. I’ve been blessed with happy days and occasions. But even on the happiest days of my life, like my wedding day, or the day Joy was born, or seeing people saved, my joy has always been mixed with other feelings. There was always some worry, fear, or anxiety, at least a little, mixed in with the joy. But for those few moments in that dream about Heaven I felt pure, unalloyed, undiluted, joy.

When I woke up from the dream I wept and wept. I could no longer feel that pure joy, but just remembering feeling it moved me. I could not even share the dream with Hope immediately because the feelings were too strong to talk about it. I couldn’t even think about it without crying, partly out of joy and partly out of longing.

My friends, I have no doubt that pure joy, and much, much more, await us who follow Jesus. God blessed me with a tiny sample of that joy in a dream, and I believe the dream was accurate because of God's Word:

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
(Revelation 21:4 NIV)

Any sacrifice God asks us to make, any suffering He asks us to endure, is very small compared to the glories of eternal life in the New Heaven and New Earth:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing
 with the glory that will be revealed in us.
(Rom. 8:18 NIV)

Whatever you’re facing, don’t give up and don’t give in. Follow Jesus, even on the path of suffering that leads to a cross, especially on that path. For “great is your reward in Heaven”.


Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .

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