This morning we're looking in a lot of different scriptures, but we'll be in the book of Revelation, and Revelation chapter 21. I'll read that in just a moment and then not even reference it until later on, like towards the end of the sermon, but I'll look at several other scriptures that you can kind of follow along with as I call them out. Or just listen to me and I'll read them to you. We're in the last of, I think we got 2 more weeks after this in the series that we've been in, this whole thing that is showing that the Scriptures are all about Jesus. And what we're looking at today is kind of the culmination of what God has been working towards from the very moment of creation, that He's been working towards this whole thing.

There's something that I've been studying a lot lately, and it's what you know, what had gone wrong. You know, we look back and we say, well, of course, in the Garden of Eden, the people, you know, Adam and Eve, they sinned, they did what God told them not to do, and then after that, you know, just everything kind of went bad, and then there was a flood, and then there was a covenant with Abraham, and all these things that go on and on and on, and then it comes down to it, and then there's Jesus, He dies for our sins, He dies so that we can have forgiveness and the hope of eternity in heaven and new life here on this earth, and we await His return. And that's kind of a lot of the Bible in a nutshell. There's several different nutshells you can put the Bible in, like you can look at one aspect or another and kind of, you know, summarize it in a little bit. But that's kind of a summary of what we've been looking at, and then also throwing in there what is happening in the time between Christ's initial coming and His return, what is happening in that time with the Church, the days that we live in, this 2,000-year and counting period of time in which Christ has commissioned the church to fulfill His mission on this earth.

We call that the Great Commission. And so I want to read to you in Revelation 21:1-8, but I also encourage you today or this week to read especially the last couple chapters, or maybe even chapters 20 through 22, You can even back up to 19:18. It's a great book is what I'm saying. People want to avoid Revelation. And the thing is, God says that there is a blessing for those who read this, right?

Like, it's actually a blessing to read Revelation. There's some people that have been scared of it because sadly, I think what a lot of ministers, preachers, and teachers have explained about Revelation puts people to fear rather than to praising God that that He has finished. When Jesus was on the cross, He said a word in Greek that's "tetelestai," which means "it is finished," is how we would translate that in our language in English. And when He said, "It is finished," it was finished for all time and eternity. The fulfillment of that finishing or completion of His work is yet to happen still.

Like, we haven't seen the completion of that yet, but He did finish His work on the cross, which brings salvation for all time and eternity. So I want to read to you from Revelation 21, and what I want to say to you is, um, I taught this one time in a class when I was a young minister. We were sitting in a little class. I think we held it in my office. That was the classroom that we had.

I was on staff at a church, and we sat in this office. There was about 6 or 8 of us that would fit in there, and we would have these ongoing classes that we would do just kind of on a rotation. There was 3 sections to it, And this was one of the days in the third section of that class, and I was the one that taught that section. And there was this couple that was there. The husband had to work on Wednesday night, so the wife was there.

The two girls were in children's classes. And I'm teaching something along these lines—not this sermon, but from this chapter—and teaching about the new heavens and the new earth, and saying that you don't actually go to heaven. Like, I'm sorry, I hate to break that to you, the Bible never talks about you going to Heaven. I don't know if you've noticed that or heard that. I don't know if you're going to hate me for it and say, "That pastor's a heretic and I can't listen to him anymore." Well, that's what this couple did.

The Bible actually says Heaven, new Heaven and new Earth, comes to us, that Jesus brings it with Him. In fact, Jesus said in the Gospel of John 14 that He said He is going to prepare a place for us. Now, we've always taken that to mean that we have to go to that place, and while that would make sense, especially with what we talked a few weeks ago about the wedding and betrothal analogy that the Jewish people had, we see the kind of the picture unfolding throughout the Scriptures, and we see that Christ is in fact preparing a place for us, but that He will bring that with Him when He returns, and upon His return. And I want to confess something to you: I don't have all the answers. Like, I don't have it all figured out.

In fact, I'm liable to kind of like look at this in, you know, a year or 2 years or 10 years from now and say, "What was that guy thinking?" You know, like me, that guy, you know, "What was I thinking?" But as we look at this, there are some things that are clear, and the sad thing was on that one Wednesday night when I was teaching this section, the lady heard this. They had been attending, the family had been attending our church for just a short amount of time, a few months, and we loved them, and they loved us. But she went home, and she told her husband about what I had taught, and she said, "That's not what our pastor back up in the town they had moved from in the other state—" She said, "That's not what our pastor from that state taught. That's not what he believed. I don't know if we can go to this church anymore." So they called up the pastor, my boss, and they said, "We need to talk with you." And so they met with him, and they talked with him, and they said, "Pastor, can you believe what your associate pastor Nick was teaching this?" And he says, "Well, I'm glad he taught that." That's how I would have taught it too.

And they're like, "Oh, what? That's not how our pastor back home taught it." So I want you to be aware of two things. One, this is nothing that will change your salvation or your eternity. If you disagree with anything that I say today, we can still be friends. You can still trust me, and I can still trust you.

We had a— there was some of us talking in the lobby earlier, and I'm not going to say what it's about, but we were talking about some stuff. That there's a massive worldview, and I disagree with the person, and we talk all the time about it. Like, we're still friends and we can have these disagreements, so it's fine. But this here, this idea that you don't actually go to heaven, that Christ brings heaven to you, is, I believe, what the point of Scripture is. I believe that's what it's teaching.

And yet, at the same time, even if I happen to be wrong and the teachers that I've listened to that kind of help interpret the Scriptures this way if they're wrong and that I've followed back the wrong horse, so to speak, if we're all wrong, then guess what? We all end up going to heaven rather than heaven coming to us, and we'll all still be there together. Amen? Because if you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, nothing changes the fact that you have eternity with Him. However that works out.

So I wanted to disclaimer that a little bit. I also want to say one other thing. Sadly, that family quit coming to our church. They were our friends. We loved them.

We cared about them. We loved their girls. I helped change the tire when my pastor and I were driving around one day, and we bumped into the lady, and she had a flat tire in a parking lot. We changed the tire for her, like we cared about them. They decided, though, that on this one issue, it was worth it for them to part ways with us, and that makes me sad to this day.

I hope that none of that ever happens here when we open the book of Revelation. But I want to read to you from Revelation 21. This is the Apostle John speaking. He has been seeing this revelation, this vision of heaven and this vision of God and of the exalted Christ and of things that will happen at the end of days. And he says this, "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had ceased to exist, and the sea existed no more.

And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, made ready like a bride and adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Look, the residence of God is among human beings. He will live among them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist anymore, or mourning, or crying, or pain.' 'For the former things have ceased to exist.' And the one seated on the throne said, 'Look, I am making all things new.' Then he said to me, 'Write it down because these words are trustworthy and true.' He also said to me, 'It is done.' Same words John heard, by the way, at the foot of the cross as he was watching his Lord and Savior being crucified. John was the only disciple that stayed there at His feet while this was happening, and he had heard back then the words, "It is finished," "Tetelestai," and now he is hearing it here, "Tetelestai," "It is finished." "I am the Alpha and the Omega." Those are Greek letters, the first one and the last one.

It'd be like us saying A to Z. "I'm the beginning and the end. To the one who is thirsty, I will give water free of charge from the spring of the water of life." Remember, John had sat next to Jesus and he was in Samaria, and there was a woman at the well going to pull water out of it. He said, "Can you give me something to drink?" And she said, "Who are you though? Why are you talking to me?

You're a man and I'm a woman. You're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan." And he says, "Well, if you knew who you were talking to, you would say, 'Can you give me living water to drink?'" She's like, "Sir, you don't have anything to dip into the well to get it, so where are you getting this living water?" He said that that He was that living water. And so now Jesus is saying to John, who had heard Him talking to that woman, He's saying, "To the one who is thirsty, I will give the water free of charge from the spring of the water of life. The one who conquers will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But to the cowards, the unbelievers, detestable persons, murderers, the sexually immoral, and those who practice magic spells, idol worshipers, and those who lie, Their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.

That is the second death. Whew! It's a lot. I wonder, what do you, or at least maybe up until now, what have you pictured heaven as? You know, I think a lot of times, you know, you'll have kids saying, you know, "My doggy died.

Will my dog be in heaven?" My old pastor always said this way, If that's what's required for you to enjoy eternity in heaven, then I'm sure your dog will be there. That was like a politician answer, right? Like, you know, not quite the whole like, "On the advice of my counsel, I plead the Fifth." None of that stuff necessarily. But like, you know, the politicians that like answer a question but don't answer it, you know, you're like, "Okay, you didn't really say anything though with that answer," you know?

And so, I'm going to get in trouble for that. I'm not sorry. But anyway, this answer that he gave was like, "If that's what it takes for you to enjoy heaven, I'm sure that'll be what's going on there." The truth of that is you won't need your pet that was here on earth to be resurrected in heaven for you to enjoy all eternity in the presence of God. You won't need that. Why?

There's things like, first of all, look at what's not there, like the vile things, the unbelievers, the all this immorality that he talks about, the liars, all these cheaters, all these things that are not present there. Like, our world, I think we can agree, would be better without these things in it. Now, I'm not saying without the people. There are people in this room that are doing some of these things. I've done some of these things.

I'm not going to tell you which ones. I forgot the list. But anyway, I'm sure I have. Like, there's liars listed in there. I know I've done that.

Like, at least we can all admit there. We're on the list somewhere, right? You know? It's not that it's better because those people aren't there. It's better because those actions aren't there.

Those actions aren't there because there are a group of people in heaven who have been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. They've been cleansed of their immorality. They've been called to leave that life of sin and to follow Christ wholeheartedly. And in eternity, uh, we can do that. And so heaven is great because those things are absent, those behaviors are absent, but it's also great because there's no need for tears, there's no need for crying, for mourning, for pain.

It's all wiped away. Jesus breaks in in that conversation, He says, "Behold, I am making all things new." That includes your body, that includes the earth, that includes the way that we live and worship. It's all being made new. And so, so much of what we look forward to may or may not be there, and you may or may not need it to be there to enjoy eternity in heaven. So much of what is wrong with this earth, or everything that is wrong with this earth, will be gone.

It'll all be washed away and wiped away.

One core belief that I have when it comes to eternity and to heaven is that there is no way that you and I can possibly even come close to grasping just how wonderful eternity will be there. You just can't quite get a hold of it. There's some people who are living on this earth who aren't following Christ, that this earth is the closest they'll ever see to what heaven is. This is the best that it gets for them. But there are people, as we live on this earth and we see the struggles, and we see the trials, and we see everything that's going on, all the pain that's being caused, I got to tell you, if you believe in Jesus Christ, this is the closest to hell you'll ever have to be.

Right? And I'm not saying that life is hell on this earth. I mean, for some times, for some people, in some situations, it feels that way. And I got to tell you, if you believe in Jesus Christ for salvation, this is the closest you'll ever have to be to hell. You will never have to experience that in eternity, in the afterlife.

But the whole earth, all of creation is struggling and suffering right now. I want to read to you a verse from Romans. It's in Romans chapter 8. And in Romans chapter 8, the Apostle Paul is writing this, and he says— this is verses 18 through 25— he says, For I consider that our present sufferings cannot even be compared to the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation eagerly awaits for the revelation of the sons of God.

For the creation was subject to futility, not willingly, but because God who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of God's children. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now. Not only this, but we ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we are saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees?

But if we hope for what we do not yet see, we eagerly await for it. With endurance. You see, we have this hope that there is something that God has been doing and will continue to do. And the hope that we have right now, we have hope in what He will be bringing into the future for us. It is not yet visible to us, so we— you can't hope for something that's in your hand.

You hope for something that you don't yet have, and so we look forward to that day. But all of creation right now is even groaning and struggling with the effects of sin right now. You feel it. You feel it in your body. You see it around you.

You hear it going on in the world all over the place.

God had made Eden pure and perfect. In Eden, it wasn't just a garden where everything was like handed to them, like they just go off, you know, "What's for lunch?" "Whatever you want to pick off a tree, babe. That's what it is." Like, it wasn't just that. It was actually set up like a temple. Eden was like a temple of God, a place where it was full of beautiful imagery and perfection and provision, but that God had provided His presence there for them as well.

Like, God Himself would come and meet with them in the garden in the middle of the evening, or in the cool part of the day, it says, and He would commune with them. They had a connection with God. They had a connection with Him.

Things went wrong when mankind decided to sin, when they decided to leave Him, when they decided to go their own way. But Jesus wasn't just God's Plan B. He was God's Plan A. In Revelation 13:8, it says, that He was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Now, it doesn't quite say that.

I want to clear something up real quick. It actually says that there will be people who are protected because their names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life who was slain since the foundation of the world. And some of your translations in your Bible, or a footnote, it'll say, well, actually, if you look later in Revelation 17 or 18 or something like that, it has this, and what it really meant was that the book was written since the foundation of the world, but the Lamb wasn't slain since the foundation. Okay, cool. We're arguing semantics now because why would there be the Lamb's Book of Life unless He was the Lamb that was slain?

So either way, whether it was the book that was made at the creation of the world, or the Lamb who was planned to be slain since the creation of the world, doesn't really matter. The fact is that God was providing salvation even before we had sinned. That God knew that creation was just like, like this is just a temporary thing, a placeholder, until He brings His ultimate perfection. To bear. That the world that we live in, even Eden, the perfect place that He had created, was only for a limited time.

And that even if Adam and Eve and all their descendants had never sinned, that He would still bring His Son to provide eternity for us, and that that was God's plan from the beginning. So if Eden is this kind of temple or meeting place, and it's the place where the divine God meets with those who are created in His image, How much more beautiful will the new heavens and the new earth be where God simply dwells with us all the time?

There's this guy named Peter, you've heard of him, he's one of the disciples of Jesus.

He had said a lot of dumb stuff, he had said a lot of brilliant stuff. As he's older, he has a lot of time to kind of meditate on what's going on, and I believe he had meditated on the words that come from Matthew 24:29-31 in that Jesus talks about the end of times and what will happen, and here's how Peter sums it up. This is 2 Peter 3:10-13.

I have so many things underlined in 1 and 2 Peter, I've got to find it here. Here it is: The day of the Lord will come like a thief. When it comes, the heavens will disappear with a horrific noise, and the celestial bodies will melt away in a blaze, and the earth and every deed done on it will be laid bare. That's one of the scariest verses in the Bible for me, by the way. Everything you've done, everything you've thought, it all gets laid bare at this time of judgment.

So verse 11, "Since all these things are to melt away in this manner, what sort of people must we be, conducting our lives in holiness and godliness while waiting for and hastening the day of the coming of the Lord?" 'Because of this day the heavens will be burned up and dissolve, and the celestial bodies will melt away in a blaze. But according to His promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness truly resides.'" Peter echoes what Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew that after this time of great trial and tribulation has happened, immediately after that, everything, poof, goes away. Like, I don't know if it explodes, implodes, I don't know. Like the same way God who can create everything from nothing, He can also make it all go away and then all come back new, made new, made right. And all this stuff that's going on, we're waiting for it to happen.

I believe Peter had some time to meditate on that and to pray about it and to ask the Holy Spirit what God was really doing and what He was talking about. He had created it in a flash, He can destroy it in a flash, and bring the new heavens and new earth in a flash, at which point the world will be resurrected, renewed. It'll be a forever earth. And our bodies that we have, if you've died, we talked about this last week, if you'd already died, you'll be brought back to life to meet Christ as He returns to His creation.

If you were one of the ones that was so lucky to be alive in that moment of the return of Jesus Christ, you will go to meet Him, but in the flesh your bodies will be changed, and they will be changed into your everlasting eternal body, your resurrected body, your glorified body. These are the bodies that can't die, that can't experience pain, the body that while we still bear the marks of what happened on this earth, like Jesus when He was resurrected still had the marks of His crucifixion in Him where He had been wounded on the cross, while that still appears, it can no longer evermore harm Him. It can never anymore harm Him ever again. And so you will experience that in your resurrected body as well.

So, I got to look at my notes here on this. After all the stuff in Revelation takes place, we see that God has allowed evil to reign for a little while.

There's a section in Deuteronomy 32, there's 2 verses in there, a lot of stuff hangs on these 2 verses. In these 2 verses it tells us, well, let me just read it for you and then explain it a little bit. I've got it marked, I might as well open up to it. Deuteronomy 32:8-9, "When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided up humankind. He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the heavenly host, or according to the— in another translation it says the sons of God.

For the Lord's allotment is His people, and Jacob is His special possession.

You won't find this in most of your Bible commentaries that were written a long time ago, what I'm about to say. What I'm about to say, some of you will be like, he's gone off the deep end.

I don't believe so. The Apostle Paul also was faced with somebody telling him, "Paul, your extreme learning has driven you insane." He's like, "I'm not insane." I got to tell you, this resonates with me more and more the more I study the Word of God. God had originally had divine beings, sons of God they're called. These are not sons of God like Jesus is His Son. Jesus is His only begotten Son.

But He had divine rulers, spiritual beings that He had placed in charge to rule over the peoples of the earth. Think of viceroys, or vice regents, or governors that we might have, where they are placed in charge of an area or a group of people. And He placed them in charge of that. He gives them the role to lead over the nations. He divided up the nations, and His allotment, or inheritance, His treasured possession, as the Scripture tells us, that Israel was and is, was the sons of Jacob, the children of Israel.

And those are God's chosen people, the ones that He has chosen for Himself as His inheritance to keep from generation to generation. But these other nations were given rulership underneath these divine beings. Now here's where, here's where I think it gets a little bit sketchy, and I want to just give a disclaimer. We don't see the full picture painted clearly in the Scriptures. There's bits and pieces, there's little puzzle pieces that come together that show what I'm about to say.

There is a clarity in a non-scriptural book that many of you have read and dug into and have pleaded with me to teach on, the Book of Enoch. Who's familiar or heard of it, this at least? Okay, keep your hands up if you've actually read it. Okay, some of it. Okay, so a good 15% here, right?

So some of you are interested in this. You're familiar, if you've read the Book of Enoch, that there was this group of angelic beings called the Watchers. That's what Enoch calls them. And although Enoch, the— it was not written by the man Enoch in the Bible, it's just attributed to him. This book was actually written in the 1st century before Christ.

So it's not as ancient as the times in which it speaks of. It was also never considered part of Scripture by any group of Jews or Christians. So it hasn't been hidden from you. It hasn't been kept from you. It's literally just been lost to time.

And I believe came to light, I think, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And that's kind of how it started coming back into, like, knowledge of people. But anyway, it is historically attested that it's a book that was written at that time. We don't know who it was written by or necessarily who it was written to. But it does, it does reflect or explain the belief of a lot of people in the Jewish faith in the time in which it was written.

And how they understood and interpreted some of the Scriptures.

What Enoch talks about is this group of heavenly beings called the Watchers, and that they were the ones that Deuteronomy 32 was talking about, that God had given them the authority to view the earth or to kind of rule over their sections. The Watchers were given rule over the earth, and yet they rebelled against God, and they led His people astray. There's a whole lot more to that that I don't feel like getting into today, but the idea being that the ones that God had placed in charge to rule over the earth turned against Him and led the people astray, and that's why all these nations had been not following God. Now again, that part, that little portion, is not directly from Scripture, and I don't want to claim that it is. I just want to say that that was some background into what the people in Jesus' day were thinking and believing and listening to.

Peter directly quotes from the Book of Enoch. Jude, the brother of Jesus, directly quotes from it. And Jesus alludes to, not a direct quote, but He talks like He's very familiar with it Himself. And so I'm not saying you have to read that. I'm not saying that you necessarily should or shouldn't.

I'm just saying it was a book that was in circulation at the time of Christ and the apostles. They were quite familiar with it. They read it and studied it. And it did affect what they believed and how they lived in some way. And so these nations, all these nations that were not the nation of Israel, not God's chosen people, had been working against God all the way through.

You can see it in the building of the Tower of Babel. You can see it in the lead-up to the flood. You can see it in every nation that fought against Abraham and all of his descendants and fought against the kings of Israel. You can see it in them rising up to crucify our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You can feel it as a Christian anytime you're out in the world and you say, man, there's some reason, like why is this person or this group seeming to fight against me?

They're being influenced by those same rulers, those same ones that had gone astray that are leading them and pushing them to fight against the people of God. Because one day in the book of Revelation talks about this several different ways, but it culminates in all these nations coming together to draw up battle lines against Christ. Christ, the Lamb of God who has finished it all. And they draw up lines. You've probably heard of things like Gog and Magog, this big huge battle that's supposed to happen, Armageddon.

You've heard all these things about the book of Revelation, and you've probably seen a teacher, or if you're old enough, which most of you are, you saw a tape series someday in a Sunday school class. Some of you might have seen it on those reel ones, I'm not sure. But anyway, I've watched films on reels, like I'm Anyway, you saw a tape series or a DVD or streaming series where somebody explained the book of Revelation, and of course it vastly disagreed with the last one that you watched, but hey, this one is great because it's the new and updated and improved version and whatever. Somewhere in there though, all these scary things like Magog and Armageddon and the Beast and all these things that are rising together, they have one central focus. Their goal is to destroy the Lamb of God, to destroy those who follow Him, and to make sure that He can never reign or rule or bring His new heavens and new earth to bear.

Because when that happens, that means their time is done. The problem is for them, and the glory for us, is that when they draw up those battle lines, Revelation just shares all of a sudden that there was victory. He doesn't even describe a battle. Like, there's nothing that we have to do to fight this battle because Jesus has already won this battle. He's already won the battle, and there's nothing that we have to do except to stay faithful to following the Lamb of God, the one who has been our salvation, the one who is making all things new.

We just have to maintain our faithfulness to Him and wait patiently for His return. So I want to finish up with this. There's just a couple practical items, like, to bring all of that together, into one thing to prepare you for being part of this one day, this new heavens and new earth, is this: you're a citizen of two kingdoms or two realms. You live here on this earth. You're a citizen of the country in which you live, and yet your true citizenship, the Scriptures tell us, is in heaven.

Like, that's where your citizenship actually resides. It's not just like people that might have dual citizenship where they're they're actually a citizen of two nations. No, you're a citizen of this earth. You live here. You have to live according to the rules and laws of this earth, and yet we serve Christ and we ultimately give our allegiance to Him and Him alone.

I think if you follow any kind of politics lately, you'll understand that there is none really worth following except living for Jesus Christ. There's no salvation in a political party or a politician or any group.

Only in Jesus Christ.

You and this current earth will pass away, but the earth and all of creation will be reborn or remade.

You will have an eternal destiny. Whether you have been living for Christ or not living for Christ and you're right now an enemy of God, you will have an eternal destiny. We're gonna talk about this tomorrow, like, next week. I mean, we can talk tomorrow too. I won't be here.

I'll be traveling somewhere. But anyway, you can call me. But no, like, next week we'll be talking about this. That's like the whole thing. It's like my— I don't know if you want to call it— it's not like a turn-or-burn message.

It's not like the, you know, it's not the hellfire and brimstone. It's just simple reality that Scripture lays on us. And we're gonna talk about that next week, but I want to touch on it right here and right now. You have two options for eternity, and what you decide here on this earth determines your eternity. If you decide to live for Christ here on this earth, then you will enjoy eternity with Christ in the new heavens and the new earth.

If you choose that you don't want anything to do with Him right here and right now, and you live your whole life that way, God will not force you to live with Him. You will live in eternal separation from Him. Now, you might have heard a lot of things about hell, just like we started out saying, "What do you believe about heaven?" There's a lot of things you might have heard of, you might have read in Scripture, and we could talk about that for a long time, but simply put, heaven or hell is— if heaven is the total presence of God, hell is the total removal of the presence of God. People will live and do anything that they want, as wicked and evil as they can come up with, that's how they will live their lives. And they will harm one another eternally.

The absence of the presence of God is literally hell. You don't want to be part of that. You won't enjoy a minute of it. You won't be like some of these people that have said, "Oh, you know what? It's going to be a party in hell with all of my friends that have been there." Or people that say like, when they're about to go off on some dangerous thing that they're going to do, they're like, "Ah, see you in Valhalla," you know, and all that, where the warriors go.

This is nothing to celebrate, folks. This is nothing that you would ever enjoy, not even for a moment. There's no enjoyment where the presence of God is totally absent. The last thing that I want to share with you is from what we had initially started out with, is Revelation 21:6-7 specifically, and hear these for a blessing.

It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the one who is thirsty I will give water free of charge from the spring of the water of life. The one who conquers will inherit these things, and I will be his God 'And he will be my son. But to the cowards, the unbelievers, the detestable persons, the murderers, the sexually immoral, and those who practice magic spells, idol worshipers, and those who lie, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, the second death.'" I want you to stand up if you will.

We'll close with this before we head over to lunch for those who are here and want to do that.

There's a group listed in those verses, those who are opposed to God. Don't find yourself in that group. Don't think, well, I enjoy it so much right now, I'm just going to kind of coast it out and see what happens, because you don't know what tomorrow holds. And I don't want to be one of those preachers that's like, "If you died tonight, you know where you'd be?" But that is a legitimate question. Like, that's not the only thing I want you to think of when you think about eternity is just like, "What happens when I die?" Because here on this earth, God calls us to live a certain way, to love others a certain way, and what we're doing is we're helping usher in, as that verse in 2 Peter had said, we're helping to speed along His coming or to usher in His second coming.

We are actually part of the return of Jesus Christ. And the way we live on this earth now is what helps to speed it along or set up that timeline. So your salvation is for all of eternity, but it starts today. Your salvation is for how you live today. I don't want you to leave because some of you might say, "You know what?

Next week I'm going to show up and I'm going to listen to him talk about our two options, our heaven and our hell, but you know what? Something might happen between now and then where you just aren't around." maybe an accident happens and you can't make it. I don't want to be one of those preachers. I just did that thing I said I'd never do. But maybe that happens, or maybe something happens where you're like, "Ah, you know what?

Something came up and I really need to be over here and I can't be at church," and you miss that. And I don't want you to miss an opportunity today when we've laid all this groundwork. If God's speaking to you— and I'm just gonna say it this simply— if God is speaking to you and you have not ever committed your life to him, what we call being reborn, when Christ makes you new, when He takes you as an already living person, but He creates something new in you, something built for eternity with Him. If you've never made that step, or if you've made that step, you've walked away from Him, and God's calling you to return to Him, I don't want you to leave this room today unless you've done business with Him. I'm not going to hold everybody up.

In fact, I think it would be great if there's somebody that's dealing with that right now, that you would— I'm gonna stay up here. Usually I go in the back to meet people as they're leaving. I'll see you in the other building, but if there's anybody that has to do business with God today, I'm gonna meet with you up here up front after everybody's leaving. I want you to work your way against that crowd and come up here, and I'm gonna pray with you, okay?