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My husband, Murray, spent a lot of time on the golf course. He loved playing golf and improving his game, but he also loved to interact with people there and had many conversations that went a lot deeper than how to hit a golf ball.
One day he came home and said he had talked to a young man. This guy was quite happy with how his life was going: he had gotten married, bought a house, and was getting his investments set up for retirement. He felt like he was prepared and ready for life. He had listened to the right advice and felt good about the work he had put into planning and preparation. Murray listened to him and agreed that he had made good choices, but then he asked him an important question: “You have worked really hard to prepare for life, but what kind of preparation have you made for after your life is over?” The young man had to admit that he hadn’t even thought of that. Murray had thought about that a lot because for many years his health was a teeter-totter between life and death. He had cancer, went through chemo, immunotherapy, a stem cell transplant, and then battled the effects of graft vs host disease when the stem cells fought against his body instead of for it until his final homegoing in 2021. But Murray’s preparation for life after death started long before that when he prayed asking God for forgiveness and deciding to live for Jesus at the young age of 5 years old.
C. S. Lewis was an author and theologian who thought a great deal about life after death, and the books I love the most are his Chronicles of Narnia. The Last Battle was a story of the Pevensie children finding the real Narnia, but it is actually a story about heaven. I love Lewis’ insights into what eternal life and heaven will be like. This is what he says, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I’ve been looking for all my life. . .” And he ended the book with this: “and for us, this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world, and all the adventures of Narnia had only been the cover, and the title page: now at last they will be getting chapter 1 of the great story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.” Isn’t that an amazing perspective of what heaven is? What we experience here is so real because it is our present reality, but this is only the preparation for everything else that happens eternally.
The Bible gives us little glimpses of heaven, just enough to pique our interest. I have always thought that God did not give us lots of information because we would not want to live here if we really knew or understood how wonderful heaven is. I Corinthians 2:9 gives us one of those little glimpses: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” Jesus said to His disciples and says to us: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” Jesus is preparing a place for us and best of all is that He will be there with us. No more fear and no more tears and no more anxiety.
So how do we live life fully here and also prepare for eternity? A few verses later in John 14:6 states “Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” We need to recognize that we are here on earth because we have been lovingly created by God. It is only in giving our lives to God and accepting His forgiveness through Jesus’ death on the cross that we are able to live life fully and completely here, and prepare for an eternity that will be so much more than our short time on earth. I want to ask you that same question that Murray asked the young man on the golf course: “What have you done to prepare for this life and what comes after?”
If you have been encouraged by this message and would like to grow more in your walk with Jesus, we invite you to come visit our website at www.humboldtbiblechurch.ca or come visit us Sunday mornings at 10 o’clock. See you there!
-Glenda Atamanchuk