Mike Novotny - Where Is Heaven?
The other day I got a really great question from a grade school girl at our church. And it's a question maybe you've wondered about in your life too. The question was, "Where is heaven"? She had heard me talk about heaven as not being "here" but I referred to it as "there" and she asked herself, "Well where is 'there'"? Where's heaven? I thought that was a good question, so just my biblical answer. We know that heaven is there and not here because here isn't a better place.
You know when you look around in this earth, in our solar system, in the universe, we see things that don't make us happy. We see brokenness, we see sin, we see people fighting, we see countries going to war. But when Jesus talked about heaven, he didn't talk about any of that. In fact, do you remember when Jesus was dying on the cross? There was a man next to him who, at the very last second, confessed his faith in Christ and Jesus said to him, I love that word. Paradise. It wasn't like going to Hawaii, paradise. It was not here, paradise. No brokenness paradise. No weeping paradise. No mourning, no crying, no death, no sickness, no anxiety, no worry. That's what heaven is like.
So I was trying to think, "Exactly where is that"? Ah, yeah. I don't know. I can't say where it is but I can say what heaven is. Heaven is a place that is so much better by far that the Apostle Paul longed to be there. That even though he had amazing friends and a great mission from God, purpose, scriptures that he was inspired to write, it was nothing compared to that moment when he would get to heaven and see the face of his Savior Jesus.
I remember when I was a freshman in college, I had a doctor in class to kind of catch people like me up. I hadn't gone to a Christian school once in my life, and we had a brilliant professor. He said this. That if you could get the most powerful rocket and blast off from earth and you could land at a space station and refuel and blast off from there and land at another space station and refuel again and blast off from there and do that a thousand times, you still wouldn't get to heaven. Because heaven isn't part of this broken universe. It's a whole other place.
And while I couldn't find it on a Google map, I can tell you this. That God has given us the destination. Through Jesus who is the way, the truth and the life, we get to be in a place that is better by far. And we get to spend forever there with our Savior Jesus. So to this same girl, all of you who are wondering, where is heaven? It's not here. It's paradise. And we can't wait to get there.