Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

We’ve been in this series on our Blessed Hope … our hope of Heaven.

We have assurance in Jesus Christ that we will one day rule with Him in a place of unspeakable glory…in a place where joy explodes into praises and worship of our God and King, and He will lavish upon us untold pleasures....our minds will be captured by the wonder of His glory, and our eyes will be fixed with delight on his face.

I love that song…O Praise the Name…especially the last verse:

“He shall return in robes of white.

The blazing Son shall split the night.

And I will rise among the saints, my gaze transfixed on Jesus face”....O PRAISE HIS Mighty Holy Righteous Eternal name.

Last week I showed you that Heaven is not our default destination, though, and that we are all headed for a very real and very terrible and a very eternal hell without a course correction in Jesus Christ.

Hell is real.

Hell is literal.

Hell is eternal..forever.

Just like heaven.

But unlike heaven, hell is marked by the torment of its residents....real, physical and mental torment…not figurative…not temporary....no relief....never ending darkness, decay, pain and suffering.

But I’m not afraid of Hell…and you don’t need to be either.

I’m not even afraid of Death…and you shouldn’t be either.

If your hope is in Christ, you have no reason to worry or to be afraid.

I’ve told you before that fear isn’t a very good motivator anyway.

Sure…you can get things done through fear.

If you can make people afraid of you, you can get them to do your bidding, and they’ll do it out of fear…fear for their lives, fear for their well being…fear for the lives of their loved ones.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not saying that fear isn’t a powerful motivator…just that it’s not a Good motivator.

As strong as fear can be…it is weak in the presence of hope.

You give someone a spark of hope, and you’ll see them overcome all kinds of fear.

Just a little hope will move mountains of fear.

Just a little hope will summon bravery and tenacity and strength like you never knew you had.

Just a little hope and I can keep on pressing on.

As long as I have a little hope, I can make it.

As long as I have a little hope, I can endure

With just a little hope, fear loses it’s power over me.

And i’m hear to tell you church…my faith may be small…it may just look like a mustard seed, but my small faith is in a BIG hope.

Not a wish…not a dream…but a secure hope that is bedrock solid…a firm foundation.

Unshakable.

Immovable.

Blessed hope.

With just a little hope, I can survive....but with big hope..with blessed hope, can FIGHT.

With a little hope, I can endure…with blessed hope, I can CONQUER.

I can do ALL Things through Christ who strengthens me.

That’s why Paul said “These three remain…faith, HOPE, and love.”

You can’t kill it.

My hope is secured…so you may be able to knock me down…but you won’t ever knock me out.

You might catch me off guard…but you won’t ever throw me off course.

My eye is fixed on the prize of the high calling of God

I’ve told you before that the root of Hope is Joy and the promise of joy.

Joy is what fuels hope…the expectation of better times, joyful times, relief from this present affliction, increased joy....that is what fuels our hope, and gives fire to that flame.

Christians…redeemed, blood-bought, born again, regenerated Christians have so much reason for hope.

In His presence is fullness of joy, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore....that’s something to hope for.

With all the language in the bible about what we have to hope for, though, there remains a lot of confusion among believes about what happens to us when we die.

Paul said in 1 Thes 4:13 “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.”

He’s saying “I want you to know..and you SHOULD know…so that you won’t be sorrowful like those who have no HOPE”..

You have hope.

I want you to know what happens to everyone when we die, and what awaits those who have already died....so that you will not be defeated in sorrow, but instead, you will have the hope of Joy.

Death is not the end.

I have as my goal today to show you 3 things from the scriptures about what happens to us when we die.

It has been long debated.

The fact is we don’t have ALL of the answers, but we do have enough of the answers that we ought to be able to overcome any fear or anxiety that we might have it through the hope we have in the promises given to us.

So, Number 1, I want to show you that when we die, we do not cease to exist, neither do we go to sleep and remain unaware of the passage of time or of the events happening here on Earth.

Number 2, the place that we go to…we’ll call it the Present Heaven... is not our final, eternal destination…it is intermediate…in-between the present heaven and earth and the eternal heaven and earth.

Number 3, It is both spiritual AND physical…a preview of what the eternal heaven will be like.

So let’s look at the 1st one.

Number 1.

We stay awake

Remember in Genesis 2, God made man from the dust, and he put spirit in him…the pneuma…the breath of God…and the two together, Flesh from the dust, and Spirit from God…those two together become a living soul.

You as a human being exist as a creation that is both physical and spiritual

Don’t read..skip

Then in Ecclesiastes 12:7, we see that upon death, the dust…that’s the flesh...returns to the Earth, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

Don’t read …Skip

That’s the picture from first breath until last breath in this life…on this earth.

But what happens After the last breath?

.. the bible says that the body decays, and we can verify that very easily.

We have plenty bodies in plenty of graves that we can examine to prove that Ecclesiastes is right that the dust returns to the earth.

Dead flesh decays…and given long enough, the process of biological decay breaks it down enough that it effectively “returns to dust”

The spirit, though…what happens to that spirit is a little more difficult to prove because we live in strictly physical world where the spiritual has been veiled or hidden from us.

So we must look to the scriptures for matters of the spirit.

Two Schools of Thought

There are two schools of thought on this…what happens when we die, and both can be coherently argued in the scriptures.

This is not a salvation issue.

So If you believe one way on this, and I believe another, it should not divide us as family in Christ.

You can be just as saved as I am if you disagree with me here.

I just want to give you the two arguments and tell you why I stand where I do…you can decide for yourself.

but I believe it is important that you decide.

If the afterlife is some ambiguous, nebulous uncertainty for you, than that is not a strong basis for your hope, and you need a sure, solid basis for hope that endures.

Soul Sleep

The first position on what happens to us when we die is that we simply go to sleep…we lose consciousness … as if we are just paused… until Christ returns, and we are all given new, glorified, physical bodies.

This is called “soul sleep”

Scriptures for soul sleep

Those who hold to this belief point to scriptures such as Psalm 6:5

No one ever told about their death experience.

Anther argument they use is that if we have a conscious existence immediately after we die, then why don't we find any of those had been dead telling about what they saw and heard?

In both the New Testament and in the Old Testament, we have examples of people who were brought back to life from, but none of them gave any explanation or told any story that we have recorded of what it was like in the next world…after they died.

And since none of these people gave us an explanation, it is assumed by those who believe in “soul sleep” that they were unconscious or “paused” and could not tell anything about their after-death experience because there was no after-death experience, and there will be no after-death experience until Christ returns.

Arguments against Soul Sleep

I do not believe that scripture teaches that we lose our consciousness when we die.

Yes, there is language in scripture that seems to suggest so, but we must look at the passages in the bible in relation to the whole counsel of God.

Remember, scripture was not written in a vacuum.

We cannot take one text here, and one text there and build a theology on it.

We must read the whole counsel of God.

And as we discussed a few weeks ago, the Bible is true and without error.

so it cannot contradict.

Where we see apparent contradictions, those are reconcilable with a little more knowledge, a little more context, a little fuller view of the scriptures.

Look at what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:8