In his sermon 'God Himself Will Be With Them,' Scott Brown discusses the importance of understanding heaven and its relevance to Christians. He points out that there are two dangers in thinking about heaven: having false views and presumption. The Bible provides a description of the New Jerusalem, highlighting its holiness, newness, and its role as a bride and tabernacle. Brown emphasizes the significance of the tabernacle as a symbol of God's presence and communion with His people. The church, as a bride, is being prepared and adorned by God for a heavenly union. It is crucial for Christians to understand and focus on heaven, as it can provide a strong magnet, drawing them closer to the holy and pure things of God.

Open your Bibles to Revelation 21, and we'll be reading this section, verses one through four. This is the inerrant, all sufficient, sweeter than honey, word of God. Verse 1 in Revelation 21. Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea.

Then I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people. God himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying.

There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. Let's pray. Father, we are before these beautiful words to shape the way that we think about this earth and heaven above, the New Jerusalem, all of these works of your presence are so precious. I pray, oh Lord, that you would give us such a clear movement from these words in our hearts. Amen.

Please be seated. So this is obviously a glorious section in the book of Revelation. It's the crescendo of the entire letter of Revelation, this epistle to the churches. And the section that we're in now is the most extensive and complete explanation of heaven. And of course, there have been many descriptions of heaven in Revelation.

We may loop back to see some of those as we're in this series on heaven which will take us several weeks to complete. But what we find here is the new heavens and the new earth. And the central matter of the new heavens and the new earth is that God is there. There are two dangers in thinking about heaven. And the first is the danger of having false views of heaven.

There are lots of books that have been written, children saying that they've gone to heaven and then saying that they lied about it. Some of the best selling books on heaven were false. You have to have a right view of heaven. The Bible is your only guide. But there's a second danger and it's the greater danger and that is presumption.

To think that heaven is a place for you. Most people believe that they are going to heaven. And so these verses explain what is in heaven and also what is not in heaven. Of course the context is the new heavens and the new earth. God is regenerating the earth.

He is making all things new. The regeneration of the earth has its picture in the regeneration of the soul, where God takes a sinner and he breaks the power of sin, he raises them up into new life, and he begins to regenerate them, that regeneration will finally be consummated in heaven, where God regenerates everything completely. So that's that's the context that we have here. And I've I've thought about this church in this matter of heaven. Why does it matter that we understand heaven?

It's out there. It's something to come. If you're young, you think it'll be forever. Because you won't die young. But heaven is so pivotal for us to understand because what is in heaven actually shows us shadows of what can be on Earth.

Heaven shows us the resources that we have on Earth. The Bible makes it clear that encouraging one another in matters of heaven is key to our spiritual growth. And these metaphors about heaven tell us what heaven is like and what it is not like. So there really are just two words. I have a very simple focus here this morning.

Two phrases, with God and no more. That really summarizes what I want to share with us about heaven in Revelation 21. Spurgeon said, if we don't get to heaven before we die, we shall never get there afterwards. If we don't get to heaven before we die, we shall never get there afterwards. Today we can commune with the Lord in heaven.

The son of God who sits on the throne. We can pray now, Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. It's the responsibility of the Christian to bring heaven down. Heaven is so relevant to earth, it's not just something to wait for out there. This is why someone once said of Richard Sibbes, heaven was in him before he was in heaven.

So we're gonna spend a lot of time in heaven so that we'll understand more about earth. I spoke last week that heaven was a magnet and that earth was a foretaste. The things in heaven really are designed to draw the soul into God. And heaven is a magnet, but I wanna take it a little further. Heaven is really designed to magnetize you toward heaven.

These visions of heaven are meant to magnetize you for the holy and the pure and the beautiful things of God. Everything you see in heaven is mirrored on earth. And earth contains the shadows of things that are in heaven. I tried to make that clear last week. Everything in Revelation 21, 22, these images, you already experience them here on Earth, but you experience them there as foretastes.

And hence, so heaven is there to magnetize you toward heaven. You need a strong magnet with a gravitational pull and so God gives us heaven to consider. Do you know how you make a magnet? You can actually make a magnet. You make a magnet by taking a strong magnet with a gravitational pull and you place it next to something that has no magnetism and you put them together and you rub them together and you rub them together over and over again and the unmagnetized becomes magnetized.

A lot of people magnetize their screwdrivers that way. You can do it. You can go home and do that. You can magnetize your screwdriver so the screws won't fall off. And you can also magnetize metal by banging it with a hammer.

You turn it toward the north, and you bang it on the end, and it will magnetize the end. But God uses heaven to magnetize His people. And I want these sections to magnetize me more than I have been, and you too, as well. You know, God shepherds His church by His word. And this morning, we're being shepherded by the word of God to be a church that's heavenly minded.

We ought to be heavenly minded in order to be some earthly good. And I love these metaphors that are in Revelation. We've seen so many of them, and they're so remarkable. It reminds me of something that Gregory the Great, He compared the Bible to a great river, shallow enough for a lamb to go wading and deep enough for an elephant to swim. And that's what the metaphors of Revelation are for.

The youngest child can see them because Revelation is a book of pictures. It's pictorial theology, and those pictures are clear enough for a child. Many have called Revelation a great children's book because it's full of pictures. And so we have these pictures of heaven. Calvin called scripture God's baby talk.

Maybe these earthly metaphors, these anthropomorphic visions, they are baby talk for us. God is trying to explain heavenly things with earthly things and earthly things with heavenly things. So that's what these metaphors are all about And as we're here in this section over these next few weeks, the question I'm asking is, what kind of church do we want to become? And Revelation 21 and 22 is teaching us to be a church that has their eyes on heaven. To see what's up ahead.

To understand what's happening here. Revelation teaches us to be a church that brings heaven down. But Revelation teaches us to be a church fed from heaven. Revelation teaches us to look to heaven to bring it down. Bring it down into our hearts, bring it down into our families, bring it down into our workplaces, bring it down into the heart of our sorrows and our crying and our pain, bring it on down.

You know, if there's, there's always someone who's afraid in a church, bring it down, bring heaven down. There's always somebody in a church that's having a problem with their children. Bring heaven down. There's always someone in our church that's with a person that's hard to love. You can bring heaven down on earth as it is in heaven.

Oh, you're facing a difficult conversation, not a problem, bring heaven down. That's what the Christian life really is. So we begin at verse two with the New Jerusalem. Then I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband. Now remember, I told you last week that this section is the introduction.

And this is the introduction to the New Jerusalem. We're not gonna spend a lot of time on the New Jerusalem. We'll spend a lot of time on the New Jerusalem soon. But I just want to say a few things about this new Jerusalem, this city. Notice the descriptive words.

It's a holy city. It is new. It is a bride. It is a tabernacle. And remember the principle that is critical to understand Revelation that is communicated in the first three verses of the book, and that is that this is a book of symbols.

It's this figurative language. And the figurative language is meant to make an impression. When we read symbolism, you're not necessarily reading what something looks like. You're reading about what something is like. Like for example, in the first chapter, Jesus has a sword coming out of his mouth.

Is that what Jesus looks like? No, that's what he is like. And it's like that here as well. We're reading about what something is like and it's very critical that we understand that. And what we understand right here in this verse is that Jerusalem is a city, it's a people, it's a bride, It's all these things at one time.

God is not going to leave you with one picture. He's gonna leave you with dozens of pictures to form the range of understanding about a particular thing. And in this picture here, where the tabernacle is a bride, and the bride is a city, and they're all the same. They're all talking about the same thing. One way to explain this is that in the resurrection, Jerusalem becomes a people.

It dissolves into the church. It dissolves into the temple. It dissolves into a bride. It dissolves into a tabernacle. It dissolves into Zion.

It dissolves into the mountain of the Lord. All of these things are one thing. They are the people of God unified with God. That's the new Jerusalem. And we're given this language of a city because in cities there are people there And it's it's a city of holiness It's a holy City, it's not like Sodom.

It's not like Egypt. It's not like the bloody city Nineveh, not the compromised cities. We all live in tyrannical cities today, dirty cities, dangerous cities. You know, the people of God cried out in Psalm 108, Lord who will bring me into a strong city? You know just this morning.

I was reading in Isaiah 24, 25 and 26 and it talks about just the the terrible the terrible Babylon and how everything will fall apart at God's hand. And then in chapter 26, the opening lines are, Lord, We have a strong city. We have a strong city. It's the holy city. It's a holy city.

And that holy city is making the people on earth holy. Earth is heavenized by heaven. It's a holy city. And it is New Jerusalem. Jerusalem, That word appears hundreds of times in the Bible.

It's composed of two Hebrew words, yeru, to flow, and Shalom, which is wholeness, completeness, peace. Jerusalem is the city of peace. It's pointing, It's the city that points to wholeness and completeness. That's Jerusalem. Paul said the Jerusalem above is free by the free grace of God.

You don't go to Jerusalem because of your works. You go to Jerusalem because of the free grace of God. The Jerusalem above is free. And then it's a city, but wait, wait, no. It's also a bride.

It's a bride. It's a bride adorned for her husband. The church is like a bride. There's much we could say about this and we will elaborate on this More because John doesn't leave this metaphor of the bride. So we will return to it again, but what is a bride?

A bride is cherished, a bride is beautiful. When you have a wedding, you prepare for months. And this is a bride who's been prepared, prepared for her husband. Brides are prepared beings. And they're being prepared for their husbands.

And we go to great lengths to prepare a bride, and by the time she gets to the altar, there's not a single hair out of place, and it took months to pull that off. But the church is a bride being prepared, adorned for her husband. Somebody said that heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people. And right now, in this church, you have a people who are being prepared, being adorned for her husband. Everything we do in this church is an attempt to adorn the church.

That's why when we come together, we read the word of God. We read the word of God several times. I don't know if you've counted. We read it over and over again. We sing, we sing to God, to one another.

We sing the word of God. We fix our eyes on Jesus. Then we have people who pray, they pray to God. And then we open up the word of God and we do what we're doing right now. And then we'll take the bread of God in the Lord's Supper.

All of these things are to prepare the bride for her husband. That's why it's so tragic to take the worship of God lightly because it's a great part of the preparation of the people of God. God's preparing you. Well, hey, when your pastors stand up here, they're working really hard to prepare you and themselves as well. The other thing too is that you are a bride.

That's how the Lord thinks about his people. That's how he thinks about you. He loves his church. And he uses the most astonishing illustration of a bride. It's shocking, actually.

Is that how you think about the church, these people here? Well, we're trying to learn how to think about the church the way that Jesus does. And part of that for us is to think of one another as a cherished, beautiful bride. When you talk to your brothers and sisters, you should look for the beauty of the Lord and not camp on the ugliness that's still there. And there's a lot of ugliness still in us.

But God looks at the church as a bride. He looks into the eyes of his people with adoring eyes, and he's preparing the bride. Adorned with forgiveness, adorned with the word of God, adorned with the light of the world, adorned with bread from heaven. This is how God adorns his church. And what we understand from the Bible is that Jesus is on his throne and he's continuing to prepare the bride for himself, and he's interceding constantly.

He's always praying for his church. And He's beautifying his bride from heaven. The church is being adorned from heaven by the life of Jesus. There's power from on high adorning the church. So the church is adorned with treasures in heaven.

The church is adorned with the energy that it gets from the bread of life. The church is shaped by looking at the one seated on the throne. Oh, and then we're going to get to a phrase in Revelation later on, and they shall see his face. Oh, but guess what? You can see his face today.

We with unveiled face beholding the face of Jesus Christ being transformed. We're being transformed from heaven. That's what's happening. The church is strengthened by lifting up her eyes unto the hills from whence her help comes. And heaven comes down.

You know, I want to be more, I want to be changed by this. I want myself and all of us to be a people who are so profoundly aware of the treasures in heaven and keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus Christ the greatest treasure of your broken life and This is where our health comes from. This is where our hope comes from This is where our help comes from. All these things come from God. Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.

Jesus said in Matthew 25, the king will say to those on his right, come you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. James said, every good gift comes down from the Father of lights. It's coming down. Do you see that imagery?

We don't know exactly what that means, but there's a sense of it's descending down to man. The New Jerusalem is descending. It comes down from the Father of lights. It's a gift of God. It's a gift of God's grace.

And notice in verse three, This language is so gripping to describe what heaven is like you really should be very clear about what heaven is like and it's It's so succinctly stated here in verse 3 And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men. Notice the number of times the word with is in this verse. And He will dwell with them and they shall be his people. God himself will be with them, and be their God. God is with his people.

This is his presence. The clearest, most irreducible, most accurate thing you will ever say about heaven is that God is there. God is there. That's why Spurgeon said if you don't go to heaven while you're here, you will not go to heaven later on, because God is there. If God is not attractive to you now, you will not go to heaven, Because heaven is the place where God is.

These two words in verse three, God and with. The language is pulled from the Old Testament in a number of places, Ezekiel 48, 35, God's new name, you know what God's new name for Jerusalem is? The Lord is there, Yahweh-shammah. The Lord is there, that's the name of the city in the prophets. God is there, the Lord is there.

So to go to heaven is to have God. Now if you ask anybody if they wanna go to heaven, they're gonna tell you yes. I mean, you can ask your children, do you want to go to heaven? And they'll always say yes, of course they'll say yes, but that's not the right question. The right question is, do you want God?

Do you want God to fill your mind, your senses? Do you want him to be everything? Do you want to follow him? That's the right question. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but not everybody wants God.

You know, one time I was at a gathering. It was actually kind of a wedding-ish gathering. There were all these people, and I went and sat down at this table with about six people, and one of the women said, oh no, not him. She did not want me at that table. She did not want what I bring to the table.

I sat down there anyway kind of sheepishly, but I did sit down. But the question, you know, do you want God? Do you want to be at his table? That's the question. The question is do you wanna go to heaven?

Forget that question. Everybody wants streets of gold and eternal happiness. But there's only one way to have that, and that is with God. And, you know, has God, has God changed your life so that you want God? That's what it means to be a Christian.

You want the things of God. You are hungry for the word of God. You are hungry for God. And you never think you have enough of God as a Christian. You just only want more.

And you're sorrowful because you don't want enough and you don't have enough of Him. That's what a Christian does. He wants God, he wants more of God. You know, the world is full of people who say, who say they want God, but They're just drowning in the songs of this world and the ways of this world. They don't really want God.

They just say they do. Do you want God? Because heaven, Heaven is, it's the most beautiful place ever. But heaven is face to face with God, personal, infinite, rejoicing in God. In the other pictures of heaven in Revelation in chapter four and five and chapter seven and chapter 14, what you find there is that people who just can't contain themselves are so happy.

They just can't stop giving thanks. They've never been so thankful in their whole life. And it just keeps getting better and better. They just keep getting more thankful. He also uses the word tabernacle here.

The tabernacle is another metaphor. It's another angle. It's another way of seeing heaven. There's this constellation of metaphors. You know, Revelation 21, 22 is like a mashup of all the metaphors of the glory of God that's in the Bible.

You know, it's, well, It's a garden, it's a tabernacle, it's a temple, it's a mountain, it's a city, it's a nation, it's a building, it's a family, it's all these things. All these things are just mashed up as imagery for heaven. But the meaning of the tabernacle, of course, goes back to the Old Testament, way back to Leviticus chapter 26, because heaven is described here as a tabernacle. And it's very important we understand that. Leviticus 26, 11, I will set my tabernacle among you.

My soul shall not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God and you shall be my people. The whole message of the tabernacle is that God is with his people. God speaks to his people. God walks with his people as they walk through the wilderness wasteland coming out of Egypt.

The tabernacle was a place where God met with his people. It was called the tent of meeting. Meeting. And it was a symbol of God's presence among his people. Because heaven is about a tabernacle, it's a God's presence.

There's so many places that this idea comes about. You see the tabernacle in the gospels. The language of the tabernacle or the tent of God's presence is carried into the Gospel of John, where we are told that Christ dwelt among us. Christ's coming to earth was to pitch his tent among us. That's a foretaste of heaven.

John 1 14, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. That's tabernacled. It's the Greek word for tabernacle, for tent, for the presence of God. He dwelt among us, He pitched His tent among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. If you wanna know what it's like to be with God in heaven, it's like to be with Jesus, the one that you know a lot about from the gospels.

That's who you're with. In 2 Corinthians 5, this imagery has changed. Your body is a tabernacle of God. In 2 Corinthians 5, For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God whose house, not made with hands, is eternal in the heavens. In St.

Corinthians 6 16, we learn that the church is also a tabernacle. It's the dwelling place of God. The church is the place where you should come to know God. The people know God and they speak of God. They come together to rejoice in God.

The church is a tabernacle and the Apostle Paul there in 1st St. Corinthians 6, he's contrasting the world, the ways of the world with the ways of God. He says, and what Agreement has the temple of God with idols, for you are the temple of the living God. He says, and I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

And then he says, therefore come out from among them, and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Almighty. All this language is in Revelation 21 and 22. It's all brought forward.

This is that, that's what. This tabernacle is that which is in heaven. That tabernacle is what is this on earth in its imperfect form. And of course the ultimate aim of Jesus, Jesus' desire, his total desire for his people was to tabernacle with his disciples. In John 21, or in John 17, Father, I desire that they also whom you gave me may be with me where I am That they may behold my glory Which you have given me for you loved me before the foundation of the world.

So this tabernacling is all about communion with God. Heaven is about seeing the face of Jesus Christ. It's heaven is interacting with God, seeing and responding and interacting with God. It's communion with God. The tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and God Himself will be their God.

So that's, if you want to know if you're going to be in heaven, the question that you should ask is, Do I want God now on earth? Because that's what you get in heaven. Do you see God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit as the ones you want in your life now? Do you want their presence? Do you want God's word?

Do you want God's ways? Do you want God? That's the question of heaven. And by the way, there won't be people that go to heaven and say, oh no, not him. They won't say that.

They have wanted him already for their whole life long, since they became a Christian. Now saving faith, believe that Jesus Christ is your greatest treasure. Saving faith is to want His word, His bread, His water, His ways. That's what saving faith is. And heaven teaches us that.

And what is God like? I'm gonna give you three illustrations what is God like the first illustration is that God reveals himself in the created world. If you want to know what God is like, then we're told that his invisible attributes are clearly seen by what he has made in Romans 1. But God shows his character through the created world so that we're not confused. God is the giver of life.

God created all the colors. God created the rivers and the stars. This beautiful world, He gives food. You remember Jesus' first miracle? He was demonstrating his glory.

He was demonstrating his creative power to satisfy. His first miracle was at the wedding of Cana, and he turned water into wine. He created something. You know what he is like by his created world. And in that event at the wedding, the conclusion was he serves the best wine last.

He's always serving the best as time goes on. That's what heaven is. It's the last. Secondly, God reveals himself in His attributes. If you desire to have the attributes of God, then you will know what it will be like to be with God.

His righteousness and mercy, His judgment and His grace, His faithfulness and His sovereignty, His compassion, His wisdom, His infinite, omniscient, never-changing love. God is love. He's described in the Bible as compassionate. He's the forgiver of sinners. He's unchangeably good.

Everything about him is good. If you don't love good things and you love bad things, you probably might not end up in heaven you won't like heaven if you like bad things I realized that God is sanctifying All of us and he's he's weaning us from bad things so I'm not saying that if you Have any bad thing you're not going to heaven But if you want to keep that bad thing, it should be a warning To you If you want to get away from that bad thing that you have engaged in, that's good news. But there's nothing bad in heaven. There's no impurity. Do you like impurity?

Like when you go to your computer, Are you looking for impurity? None of that's in heaven. You don't belong there. Those desires won't survive. That's really a good thing.

That's the best news. Like if that's good news to you, Praise the Lord. You know the the impure things that you're attracted to now you don't want to be attracted to. It's good news to you that there's nothing impure in heaven. Praise the Lord.

Thirdly, God reveals himself in what he has done for sinners We will be with the one Who Obeied the law in our place That's who we'll be with We will be the one who voluntarily stood in our place and Absorbed the wrath for our sins. He took the wrath. He did it for the joy set before him. He did it for joy. He did it so that he could be with his people.

He endured the cross, despising the shame for the joy that was set before him because he wanted to enjoy his blood bought people in heaven for all eternity. He obeyed the law. Matthew Henry says it like this, the presence of God with his church is the glory of the church. It is a matter of wonder that a holy God would ever dwell with any of the children of men. And then he says this, the presence of God with His people in heaven will not be interrupted as it is on earth.

But he will dwell with them continually. That's heaven. So you see his glory in the created world, you see it in his attributes, and you see it in what he has done for sinners. If you want to go to heaven, then you will know what he's like through those three lenses. Now the Bible teaches us that the Christian on earth is already seated with Christ in heaven.

The Christian has experienced a resurrection and they've been raised up with Christ into the heavenly places where Jesus reigns. Ephesians 2 verse four, "'And you He made alive who are dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air. And then he says, but God who is rich in mercy, he raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ, that In the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. So the Bible teaches us that there's a sense in which we've already been raised up with Christ in the heavenly places. We have our minds set on heaven.

We rejoice when we read the words in Colossians 3, one. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things on the earth. And so you're sort of taken to heaven. You're thinking thoughts of heaven, but there you are on the earth. Your being raised up with Christ and seated with him has an effect on your life today.

Heaven comes down. The presence of God comes down in your life. There's a note in the Reformation Study Bible, Reformation Heritage Study Bible. The believer's union in and through Christ implies that he already shares Christ's exaltation in heavenly places and one day we'll experience that glory. So you have the shadow, you have the foretaste, and you have the magnet of heaven.

So on earth we experience indirectly through nature, through the ordinary means of grace, through the word of God, through preaching, through the fellowship of the saints, we experience heaven in an imperfect way. But this church really should be a little piece of heaven you know in a lot of ways I thought it was true I do think it is true this place is like a refuge Wasn't it a refuge from the storm of what they so-called COVID? It was such a refuge. These people you know coming in here the whole world is masked up they won't go more than six feet from each other. And then you had the mashup of all the attributes of God, of God being with his people.

You know, God is with his people. He's with you at all times and forever, Ezekiel 37, 27. My sanctuary is in their midst forever. Moses, in the last few days of his life, he's 120 years old, and he tells all of Israel, he said, for the Lord your God, he goes with you. He will never leave you or forsake you.

When the Lord spoke to Joshua after Moses' death, he said, have I not commanded you be strong and courageous? Do not be afraid or dismayed, for the Lord your God, the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. Heaven has come down, God is with you. Yes, God is in the New Jerusalem. He is the New Jerusalem, but He is also with you.

In the hardest providences, When hard things fall, Psalm 23, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Why? For you are with me. You are with me. There's nothing sweeter than to have a sense that God is with you.

His presence is in the midst of the fire and the flood. Isaiah tells us, He says, the Lord who created you, who formed you, who redeemed you, who I've called by my name, by I've called your name and you are mine. He says, when you pass through the waters, I will be with you. In Zephaniah 3.17 we're told that God's disposition toward us is gladness. The Lord your God is in your midst, mighty to save.

He will rejoice over you a singing. He's with you. He's rejoicing over you a singing. Do you feel that that's your condition right now as a child of God? Remember the virgin will be with child and he shall be called Immanuel, which means God with us, God is with us.

In Revelation 3.20, we learn that His presence on earth is like breaking bread. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and dine with him and he with me. This is on earth as it is in heaven, in the great supper of the Lamb. You know, we're told in 1 Thessalonians 4 to encourage one another with these words.

And thus we will always be with the Lord. We will always be with the Lord, therefore comfort one another with these words. That's why Jesus said to the thief on the cross, today you will be with me, with me in paradise. Because heaven is a place where God is. Rutherford says in the sands of time, that song, the springs of earth I've tasted, I'll drink more above.

So That's what heaven is. Heaven is the presence of God. And you can have God now. Jesus Christ is God with us. God is with his people.

What's not in heaven? God is in heaven, but what's not? We'll elaborate more next time on this. There are five things that are listed here in verse four. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

That's not in heaven. And there should be no more death. That's not in heaven. Nor sorrow, nor crying, nor shall there be pain for the former things have passed away. You know, God, God dries tears on earth as it is in heaven.

Let God dry your tears. It's very fashionable today to just wallow in your tears. But God is wiping your tears away. He's wiping your tears away here. And there are many places in the Bible.

The Bible says God keeps your tears in a bottle. He sees your tears. But He also dries your tears here. Now, I think we're aware that, you know, any time in a church, but especially now in our church, there's pain. People are experiencing pain, a chronic pain.

And Some of our greatest heroes of the faith experience terrible pain. Martin Luther, Martin Luther suffered with hemorrhoids, vertigo, fainting fits, ulcers, ringing in his ears, headaches, severe constipation, kidney failure, gout, a kidney stone that he thought he would die from the bleeding. And he did what everybody did there, he tried a mixture of garlic and raw manure. He took the best of the medical advice at the time. One time he fainted in the pulpit, he was so sick.

He praised medicines coming from what was called in German the excrement pharmacy, where he took slurries of swine feces for reducing blood flow and horse dung for better breathing. There's sickness, and sometimes the remedies are worse than the sickness. In every generation, in yours too. Luther said, what man would not prefer pestilence or famine or war being these mere bodily calamities to a famine of the word of God? You know, this morning we sang, We were going to sing a song Dear refuge of my weary soul by Anne Steele.

I love this song but Anne Steele living in the 1700s She struggled with horrific pain a recurring unrelenting pain in her stomach. She suffered from recurring symptoms of malaria, pain in her teeth. She lived into her 60s. But if you read her poems and her songs, They are so full of God. She referred to God in her hymns as, Dear Refuge of my weary soul, thou lovely source of true delight, eternal source of joys divine, great source of boundless power and grace, Father of mercies in thy word, dear center of my best desires.

And people say that, you know, people who knew her said that in her trials that her she possessed a cheerfulness even in the midst of the agonizing pain and she gave pleasure to all around her why she was bringing heaven down. She was bringing heaven down. She'd been magnetized from heaven. And the things of heaven were coming down upon her head. So a glorious church brings heaven down in her trials, in her relationships, in her homes.

And so let it be true of us that what is in heaven is magnetizing us for life on earth, for a glorious eternity with the only good in the universe. The God who is good. The God who is love. And that's why Spurgeon said if we don't get to heaven before we die, we shall never get there afterwards. So let's get to heaven and let's keep sinking into the great doctrine of heaven as we will for the next several weeks.

Revelation 1 3, blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it. Would you pray with me? Oh Lord, we thank you for this remarkable, beautiful world that you put us into to show us the beauties of heaven, the beauty of holiness, this city, this mountain, this tabernacle, this bride, this people, all of, all in you, all consumed in your glorious beauty. Lord, I pray that you would set this church on heaven amen