Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What's up, you guys? I want to talk about preparing for heaven by practicing it Now. I'm going to give you some practical ways to actually practice living in heaven here and now. And I want to talk about a prayer that's gone viral in the past week from Theo Vaughn, a famous podcaster and comedian that ties into how to prepare your heart for heaven. I want to ask you to pray for me. It's been a very fruitful, joyful time. Before I jump into that, I'm at my kids car line waiting to pick my kid up from school.
Just landed from a reboot in Gaylord, Michigan, where there was 800 people. Had to land in Grand Rapids and drive three hours. So, dude, when you're in the middle of nowhere, usa, sometimes you're going to find the best people on earth. And that's certainly where I found them in Gaylord. The bishop there is an incredible man of God. Pray for him. He was just diagnosed with cancer and he's fighting the good fight with a lot of joy. And then tomorrow I fly to. Yeah, like I said, busy, but also joyful. Tomorrow I fly to give a commencement speech at Waltz University, where they're going to give me an honorary doctorate.
So after my next reboot, I will have. I'll be a doctor. I will be able to perform appendectomies for anyone who needs one of those tonsillectomies. They didn't specify what it's for, so whatever you need, I got you covered. All right, now, sorry.
Diving into the gospel of the week. Jesus said, in my Father's house, there are many dwellings, and if it weren't so, I wouldn't have told you so. And I'm going to go to my Father, prepare a place for you, and come back and take you to myself.
I love the language Jesus uses here because it's so gentle. You see, a lot of times people think about heaven, eternity, and it's very overwhelming. Even people I know who are looking forward to heaven or who are believers get some anxiety sometimes when they think about eternity because there's nothing within our sphere of life, within our experiences that we can use to measure what the heck that means.
Like, usually if you're looking at something that's really big, you know, you look at a building, it's a thousand feet tall. Well, first what you do is you take something within your grasp. Okay, here's a foot. It's like about that. And okay, times a thousand. I can conceive of that. There's no measure to help you Gauge eternity. It's not like a thousand years or 10,000 years or a billion years. No, it's forever.
Can't really relate. So he uses this language that's not going to freak us out. It's, in my father's house there are many dwellings.
And another beautiful thing about this imagery is that this is actually for the Jew that lived in Jesus time. He would have heard that and heard marital imagery.
Follow me here.
When a man was betrothed to a woman, he would go and prepare a dwelling place for her at his father's house. He'd add on an addition, and then when it was ready, he would come and take her into his home and they would get officially married.
So when people heard him say that, in my father's house there are many dwellings, I'm going to repair a place, I'll come bring you back to myself.
What they heard was a message of profound love. Not just you're dying and going to heaven, It's, I'm embracing you. I'm embracing you through the experience of your death or your martyrdom or the end of time, whatever we're gonna be here for.
But it's all an embrace from Jesus, who's taking us to himself. Isn't that awesome? But the deeper context, the only other time in the New Testament that the word he uses for dwelling here is used a couple verses later, and he talks about, if you love me, the Father will love you, and we will come and dwell with you.
So in that larger context of the verses that follow what he's saying, there is, on one level, you can legitimately use the word he used there to describe a dwelling, a room.
But also he's driving home the reality that this is more of a presence and abiding with than a place.
And that's what heaven is. God is heaven. And St. Thomas Aquinas, and I think St. Augustine also talked about these verses to describe the many dwelling places are actually the many levels of heaven. And in some sense, there are as many levels of heaven as there are people in heaven. Why is that? Because God fills everyone to their max capacity. No one's going to feel like they're lacking anything in heaven. And yet your max capacity for God is going to shift based on how holy and how close to him you are. Right. So there's the people who get in at the last hour. Right? Right. But if their hearts aren't full from a lifetime of following Jesus, their experience of heaven is not going to be quite as full as Mother Teresa. Let's Say, all right. So I maybe will have a thimble in heaven. It'll be a very full thimble and I'll be as happy as a thimble could be. The Blessed Mother is going to be like an ocean. St. Catherine or St. Anne will be like an Olympic sized swimming pool. So how cool is that? What we want to do is practice heaven so that in the here and now we're open more and more to, to expanding the size of our pool and being with the Lord, dwelling with him. So how do you do that? I'm going to give you a couple ways. Number one, never pass up an opportunity for grace, ever. There's an eternal payoff, guys. Everything you do to widen your heart's capacity for love, forgiveness, mercy, prayer, just being with the Lord, everything you did in the here and now has eternal fruit in your enjoyment of heaven forever.
If there's anything you long for from heaven, from the other side, it would be, yeah, I would go back and go to one more mass. Yeah, I would go back and perform that. One more act of charity to expand my soul more and more again. People aren't going to feel like they're lacking in heaven. And you're going to from wherever you're at, whether you're a thimble or a swimming pool. One of the beautiful things about heaven is it's not stagnant. All right? I believe you're going to keep growing in love because you'll grow in knowledge. You'll see him and then as you see him, you'll love him more. As you love him, you'll want to see more and all these capacities will grow. You'll be diving deeper for all eternity. But the place we start matters, right? So let's widen our hearts right now. That's number one. Number two, when he talks about heaven as not just a spot, but a dwelling with, I would say, a great way we practice heaven is learning to just dwell in the presence of our Lord. Now, are you good at that? Can I be honest? I'm not that good at that. Most of us aren't because we actually celebrate busyness nowadays. You know, I've talked about this before, that luxury ads used to be someone sitting on a yacht and sipping sherry or, you know, or a nice glass of champagne. Now a luxury ad that shows, oh, this guy's made it. He's got an expensive watch on. He's racing down a hallway and his secretary's behind him trying to keep up with him as she takes notes.
That's success.
That's where we landed. That's where you have made it. No, no, no, guys. And we live this way. And I, like, I just described the week that I'm asking you to pray for. It's a joyous time, it's a fruitful time. We're passing major milestones. I just recorded a bunch of stuff for core too, by the way. Thanks. If you're helping with that, click below the video. Learn about core, help us inspire and change the trajectory of the next generation. But I did all this stuff and I'm not always good at switching gears from fifth or sixth. Like, I've broken the stick off sometimes come down to first gear again and just be.
And that's actually really important. That's actually practice for heaven. I was with my parents recently and they came over my house and it was after a busy week and, you know, I'm cooking, I'm picking things up, I'm serving them a drink, and they're like, dude, sit down, Sit down with us. Like, ah, all right.
How nice to be reminded that there are people in your life who don't just want you to do things for them, but just want you to be.
By the way, that's your entire family, your kids, et cetera, et cetera. So many. Who you are is a blessing, right? But the Lord also wants you to just be with him, because that's what heaven is.
Jesus didn't say, if you love me, the Father will love you, will come to you, and we'll do a lot of stuff.
We will dwell with you, and isn't that enough? And you'll dwell with us. I mean, when you're with your beloved, that's the state, like, I've arrived. Now I can sit, I can have a meal, I can enjoy life.
Practice that, practice that. And here's something I gotta be real intentional about. With my adhd, fast moving brain and lots of stuff going on that's exciting stuff, it's not all bad stuff. It fills me with life, actually. I have to have a time each day and it helps to have a little ritual. Cal Newport wrote about this, that at the end of a busy day, he'll simply take his laptop and close it and say, work done.
And you switch right away because your brain hears your mouth say that and is teed up to say, oh, I can. It's okay. It's okay to stop, to switch from sixth gear down to first gear and just learn to be with the people you love. Learn to be with yourself. Learn to be with the Lord and He also commands us to do this on the Sabbath. That's not the day to catch up on stuff. That's a day to do nothing utilitarian or productive. I mean, you could pray, you could maybe do acts of service, play a board game with your family, but don't do stuff. It's part of the regular machine of everyday life. Because the Lord's saying, look, we're practicing heaven right now, buddy. Push all the to do's and the busyness aside. Take a deep breath and be. Just be. That's extremely important.
So one, lean into every opportunity for grace in the here and now so you can expand your heart's capacity for the Lord, for him dwelling with you so that you have a beautiful dwelling with him in heaven. Number two, learn to just relax a little and be intentional about that part of your life. The busy is not the only important part. And number three, Guys, here's where Theo Vaughn comes in. Theo had dealt with a past with addiction, with a lot of. A lot of dysfunction, a lot of wounds. And he talked about on his podcast how he prays. And he got choked up talking about this.
And he said when he prays, he tries to be as honest with God as possible.
And even he's come to be honest with God about the ways that he knows in his heart of hearts that he's lying to God about how he wants to change. And he says, lord, come into that part of me too.
If heaven is described as dwelling with God, if you're going to really let him dwell with you, practice that when you pray by not shutting him out of parts of your life and heart. He sees all those parts. Anyway, guys, and he loves you. Invite him even into the most broken, dysfunctional part. Can you do that? Don't hide that part from him. He can take it. You're not too much for him. He even loves that part of you. Say, lord, come into the parts of me where I don't want you.
And you can name those parts. That part of me that's attracted and attached to this particular sin. That part of me that feels like I'm not safe unless I stay angry. That part of me that knows that I'm lying when I tell you I want to be better. I don't really want to be better, Lord. I want my sin. But you know what? I want you more. And I want to invite you into that part of me. That part of me, of me that doesn't want to be holy. Help me want to be holy. Come into that part of me, too. When you could sit in your junk and you're not afraid to pray as the psalmist did, out of the depths I cried to you, hear me, O Lord. You're actually not just being more honest with God in prayer, who can see it all anyway. You can't hide from him.
You're practicing heaven. You're practicing allowing him to come with his Father and to dwell with you without you running away from that presence of love. Here's that clip from Theo von Let it blow your mind.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: You know, sometimes I, I realized for myself I would pray to God to, to help me get away from certain behaviors in my life. Like I be God, please help me to. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't wanna have this behavior.
But there'll be a little part of me that was like, I know even as I ask, ask for God's help that I'm gonna do it again. I would know, I would know that.
So I started praying like this. I started praying like, God, please help me with this.
You know, this is a broken part of me that I bring to you. I need help with it. And then I would add to my prayer, I would say, and even God, even as I pray to you right now, there's a part of me that knows I'm probably lying to you.
There's a part of me that knows I'm going to do that behavior again. So can you come into that part of me and help me there?
Help me in the part of me that knows as I pray that I am, that I'm lying.
And so something that's just been helping me recently is just praying differently, you know, because whatever's inside of me that's broken is really, it's manipulative and it's, you know, it would be good at pool because it's good at, it's good, it's good at the angles.
But. So, yeah, so I just been praying that God comes into those parts of me, you know, don't just come into like the water inside of me. Come into the what? Come into the well. Come into the walls of the well.
Come into the, the, the, the mortar or whatever that's in between the bricks. That because I'm, Because I'm broken.
Because I'm broken all the way there, you know, And I don't mean that like in self pity. I don't need an. I don't.
But if there's a part of me that doesn't even want the best for me, then that there's something inside of me. That is off.
So that's something that's been helping me.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Boom. Isn't that beautiful? Okay, let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for loving us. Thank you for all the opportunities you give us in our daily life, to grow in grace and to widen our capacity to be with you forever in heaven. We ask you to help us to recognize those opportunities and to lean into every one of them. We thank you for loving us. We thank you for calling us just as we are. Help us to not hide from you in prayer. And, Lord, we also ask you to help us to rest better when it comes time to Sabbath at the end of each day. Help us to know when work is done and to dwell with you, with ourselves, with others. And when it comes to Sabbath every week, help us to push our work aside for a day every week just to be.
Thank you, Jesus. Prepare us for what you have prepared for us.
Amen. Love you guys. See you next week.
