Sermon Tone Analysis

*Intro*

Well, I guess all good things must come to an end (except eternal life).

Our yearlong series, “Back to the Basics: Knowing why you believe what you believe,” going over our doctrinal statement, will end today.

Hope it was a fruitful journey for you as it has been for me, to consider the basics of why we follow Christ.

I want to look point 12 as we close this series: 

/12.

//That in the last day, as the consummation of redemption, Christ will come again personally and visibly to the earth to judge the living and the dead; that there will be a bodily resurrection of the dead, of the believers through the Holy Spirit unto the inheritance of eternal life, and the unbelievers unto condemnation; and that a new heaven and a new earth will be ushered in./

As you can see, there are a lot of topics within this point we could discuss (like all the other points), but we are just going over the basics.

Again, we will simply go over one passage and draw out as much as we can for now.

I don’t know any other topic than the end times, or eschatology, that divides Christians.

My point here today is not to throw endless charts and graphs at you (though it might be interesting one day to study), but that the Lord would cause our hearts to have a soul-shaking longing to be with the One for whom our hearts were made for.

Just like that C.S. Lewis, in /Mere Christianity,/ says, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[1]

We were made for another world.

We are waiting for home.

The saying goes that “home is where the heart is.”

Home is where you can be you.

And we are not home yet, our citizenship is in Heaven (Phil.

3:21).

Lewis adds that every blessing that God gives us is a shadow, a copy or mirage of the true thing waiting for us.

So he urges, “I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of my life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”[2]

But in our sin and blindness, we make good things the ultimate things.

We hug the shadows and chase the mirages all of our life.

So what consumes our hearts?

What do we long for?

Do we long for Christ to come back?

Do we wake up in the morning thinking that day might be the day?

Most people have hope, but their main hope is that they will get married, or climb the corporate ladder, or hope that they win the lottery or buy that dream house or car.

Lewis says in another work, the /Weight of Glory/, that “…it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

We are far too easily pleased.”[3]

Sometimes we get so caught up with the burdens of this earthly life, we forget that this is not all there is.

God reminds us sometimes when a loved one dies of this truth.

Other times when we are collapsing under the weight of this broken world, we find in ourselves a longing.

Yet other times, we notice that everything in life has an expiration date on it.

New clothes wear down.

Our body starts to hurt.

Sports championships and celebrities are forgotten.

New presidents are elected and old ones are gone.

The grass withers, the flowers fail (1 Pet.

1:24).

We said that God’s glory was all that was real, permanent and important, compared to everything else.

His glory will last forever.

So all of this to say that today I hope the Lord would help us refocus, arouse again and keep alive within our hearts for the true country, for which we are preparing and Jesus died for, where we will celebrate God’s glory forever.

The church at Thessalonica loved the teaching of the Lord’s return.

You may remember when we talked about the early church that I said if I had to pick a church to be part of in the 1st century, I would have picked the Thessalonian church.

They faced persecution, but they truly did love the Lord and was a growing community that Paul felt real joy for them (1 Thess.

2:20).

However, they did have some questions.

There was an inscription in Thessalonica, which read: “After death, no reviving, after the grave, no meeting again.”[4]

Their culture was telling them that once their Christian loved ones died, that was the end.

They knew Jesus was coming.

The Kingdom was coming, probably in their lifetime.

But they wondered, will our dead brothers and sisters in Christ experience it too?

So Paul had correct their way of thinking.

In addition, though the believers properly longed for Jesus’ return, some of them felt they did not need to work anymore as a result, so they became lazy and were busybodies (1 Thess.

4:11; 5:14; cf. 2 Thess.

3:6, 7, 11).

Paul calls that out as well.

The hard thing about the epistles is that we only have one side of the conversation.

It’s like watching a person talking on the phone with someone and trying to figure out what the whole conversation is about.

And if there is one letter I wished we could have heard both sides, it would be 1 Thessalonians because there is a lot of mention of the end times in Paul’s letters to them and perhaps a lot of the confusion we get in our circles today would have been avoided.

Regardless, most Christians agree on some of the big things regarding end times and death, and that is what I want to focus on.

For example, 

*I.

**The death of a believer is a temporary separation, so we grieve with hope (v.13)*

Paul begins by wanting to clear up two things.

John Stott explains, “He wanted them neither /to be ignorant/ about the Christian dead, nor to /grieve/ over them in hopelessness.”[5]

The first issue is about Christians who have died.

What happens to them?

Notice the word used as a euphemism for death: sleep.

The NT often uses “sleep” as a way to talk about Christian death (Mark 5:35, John 11:11).

If you were sleeping over at my house tonight and I said good night to you, what I’m saying is “it’s been good hanging out with you, but we shall be temporarily separated and we will soon hang out again.”

But when the Bible talks about death as a sleep, it means it is only the body that sleeps, not the soul.

Some groups teach “soul sleep” that when believers die they go into a state of unconscious existence, and the next thing that they are conscious of will be when Christ returns and raises them to eternal life.

This is incorrect!

Jot these other references down.

When Paul thinks about death he says, "We would rather be /away from the body and at home with the Lord"/ (2 Cor.

5:8).

To be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord.

He also says that his desire is "to /depart and be with Christ/ for that is far better" (Phil.

1:23).

And Jesus said to the thief who was dying on the cross next to him, "/Today/ you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43).

He didn’t say, “after thousands of years of sleeping, I’ll see you then.”

The author of Hebrews says that when Christians come together to worship they come not only into the presence of God in heaven, but also into the presence of "the spirits of just men made perfect" (Heb.

12:23).

However, unbelievers do not go to sleep either.

They are in a temporary hell, called Hades (Luke 16:22, 23).

They will be raised up on the last day to account for their sins (Rev.

20:11-15).

So no, everyone doesn’t go to a better place, according to the Word of God.

Pastor and Author Tim Keller says, “All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself.”[6]

So to be clear, the moment you die, if you truly have been saved in Christ, your body will make its bed in the grave, but your spirit or soul will go to be with Christ in Heaven, both waiting for the Rapture.

Notice Paul does /not/ say do not grieve at all.

He says do not grieve /as others who do not have hope/.

Christians grieve.

Paul is saying that he does not want us to grieve like the unbelievers.

So it is not wrong to feel sorrow when a loved one dies.

It would be unnatural if we didn’t!

But it is NOT a sign of the lack of faith when we do grieve.

Look at Acts 8:2, which records the death of Stephen.

There was a “great lamentation.”

Also, Jesus “wept”: literally “burst out into tears” in John 11:35, even knowing that He was about to raise Lazarus.

We grieve because we love (a good reason for not “grieving” the Holy Spirit in Eph.

4:30).

So if you are faced with the death of a loved one, you will grieve.

But if he~/she was a believer in Christ, you will grieve, but with hope.

The late preacher, Donald Grey Barnhouse, whose first wife died, was driving his kids from the funeral.

One of the kids said, “Daddy, I don’t understand, where did Mommy go?

I don’t understand what it means that she died.”

Barnhouse was trying to figure out how to explain death to his kids when, just then, a truck passed by and cast a shadow over the car.