The best question may not be: will you go to heaven when you die. The best question might be: if heaven invaded your life tomorrow, what parts of you would survive, and what parts of you would be burned up?
I started getting fascinated by this from one question. An older friend of mine, he's a pastor, and he asked me if I reckoned I would enjoy heaven. I said well of course I'm going to enjoy heaven, you can't stuff heaven up right? He said: I'm not so sure for myself. He said: the Holy Spirit's challenged me to do something that's changed my life forever. He said: I'd like to challenge you to do it. I said: sure. He said: go back and re-read everything Jesus said about heaven, and ask yourself if you would enjoy it - and be honest. Be honest! Read Jesus' descriptions of heaven, and then ask yourself if you would enjoy it. For instance, Jesus said: in heaven all the secret conversations of your heart will be revealed for all to see. Are you ready for that?
Jesus said: heaven is a table with every tribe, tongue and race; so if you're a racist, are you ready for that? Jesus said: in heaven, what God gave you that you used to change this world will be celebrated and multiplied; but what you buried, will be uprooted and given to someone else. Are you ready for that? What are you doing with what God gave you? If that happened tomorrow, what would be buried, and what would be celebrated?
Jesus said that in heaven, whether you started working at 6am or at 5pm, you get the same wage. Are you okay with that? I realised I wasn't. I started looking at these descriptions of heaven, and I asked myself the question: if this happened to me tomorrow, would I be okay?
Jesus' invitation was not: be a certain way, in order to go somewhere. Jesus' invitation was: allow what is somewhere else to be established in you right now. So if there's something He's describing that's going on in heaven, that I'm not okay with, then there's a problem in my heart today.
I realized that central to discipleship, and becoming a follower of Jesus, is not just believing the right things, and doing the right motions. It's actually participating with Him to establish the kingdom on the earth, to prepare the earth for the new kingdom coming to the earth.
Let me ask you this. How many mentions are there of fire and hell in the whole Bible? Depending on your translation it's somewhere between zero and six. Okay, let's go with the mean one, let's go six okay? So there are six mentions of fire and hell in the Bible.
How many mentions are there of fire in heaven? 229 - so how many sermons have you ever heard on fire in hell? Lots, grrr! How many sermons have you heard on fire in heaven? None. How did we do that? How did we pull off something that's emphasised 229 times, versus six? How did we emphasise the six, over the 229? How did we do that?
Of course we do it with a lot of things - there are four verses in the Bible that say homosexuality is wrong. There are 2000 verses in the Bible that tell us to love each other! So it’s okay for me to hate, because they're different, and it's wrong, and it's a sin! Wait a minute! Hate? God doesn't love them? What? Wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe we've got our emphasis wrong.
229 mentions of fire in heaven, six mentions of fire in hell; so if your main goal in eternity is to avoid fire, then maybe hell's your better choice?
Hell will let you stay greedy, heaven won't. Hell will let you stay racist, heaven won't. Lots of fire in heaven!
If this group was smaller today, I would do this rabbinically, and I would say: somebody tell me of a scripture that talks about fire in heaven. Because there's so many of them, stuff would start going off; but the main one that come to my mind immediately is 1 Corinthians 3, where it talks about: if any person builds their foundation on the Lord Jesus Christ - right, that's a saved person, correct?
If any person builds their foundation on the Lord Jesus Christ, whether they use wood, hay and stubble, or gold, silver, costly stones, they're still on the foundation of Jesus. I like that.