Our Sermons

Bible Passage: Daniel 12:2-3
Pastor: Pastor Schlicht
Sermon Date:  November 18, 2018

The Marshmallow Test was a psychology experiment from the late 1960s designed by a guy named Walter Mischel. The idea is you place one marshmallow in front of a young child  and say, “You can eat it right away or if you don’t eat it and wait for ten minutes you will get a second marshmallow.” Then they leave the child in the room all alone with the marshmallow and watch. Some children failed instantly, some passed. Many agonizing minutes went by and in every cased marshmallows were eaten. In all these experiments, Mischel found that the crucial factor in success was the child’s ability to stay focused on the thought of 2 marshmallows. I think this has a lot to do with us today on Saints Triumphant as we focus on the delayed gratification of our heavenly home.

Perhaps it was stoicism, which denied emotion, or asceticism, which separated from physical pleasures,  but over the years some in the Christian church began to emphasize self-denial to an unbiblical extent. The Bible certainly has a lot to say about self-denial, but not as an end in and of itself. We deny ourselves, we take up our crosses and follow Jesus, not in order to suffer for fun, but in order to love others, to resist sin, to live eternally! Self-denial, delaying gratification, is part of the program, but it is done in order to indulge in pleasures eternal. We want our second marshmallow served in heaven. People often think that to desire your own good is unchristian but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I mean, if you consider the rewards promised in the Gospels to those who believe you’ll soon find that they often appeal to a personal desire. Jesus said, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” He appeals to our desire for our own life.

It may be that God finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. It may sound odd, but perhaps our hedonism is just not fully developed. Maybe our desire for our own good needs to be strengthened because God has held out to us infinite pleasure and we often settle for much less. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (The Weight of Glory)” The Devil wants us to give up eternal joy and focus on the instant gratification of trivial, temporary things right in front of us. I’m not talking necessarily about committing conscious sin. I’m talking about the temptation underneath it all: to focus our desires in this world, rather than in eternity.

If you need any evidence of this temptation, just think back to your first reaction of hearing the words of Daniel read this morning. “Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens,..like the stars forever and ever.”  What was your reaction? I pray a part of you felt some excitement and earnest longing for heavenly glory. God be praised for that! But maybe, you also found it hard to focus on these words because they don’t seem practical at first. The truth is that anything abstract or far off does not capture our attention quite as much as the current and the concrete. The next episode of our favorite show, the balance in our bank account, that certain guy or gal at school, our next vacation, career goals, these things seem to hold our desire much more than words about “stars forever and ever”. We are far too easily pleased with drink, sex, and ambition, as Lewis said, than we are expectant for the eternal joys of heaven which God has prepared for us.

Thankfully, it is for people just like you and me that Daniel was inspired to write. Daniel wrote for those exiles in the Babylonian empire, an empire which would come to symbolize all secular governments in years to come, including the one under which we live today. America is a type of Babylon all its own. Daniel wrote to fellow exiles who were called, just as we are, to be in the world but not of it.

Daniel didn’t tell them to put their life on hold, he didn’t tell them to separate themselves from everyone, no in fact, through his own life he demonstrated the opposite. He rose to become an official in the foreign government and yet still lived out his faith boldly. That is why he was thrown into a lion’s den. He followed the words of his fellow prophet Jeremiah: This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters…seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile…You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from exile. (Jeremiah 4-6; 13, 14)  As Jeremiah reflects, Daniel was inspired to tell his people that they were to live in love, to care for this world and all people, but ultimately to remember that they were still in exile. They were not permanent residents of the country in which they lived and were still to seek the Lord with all their heart.

The last half of his book then applies this on a larger scale. The final chapters include great prophecies of nations falling and rising by the hand of God. In vivid pictures, Daniel tells his readers that only will their present exile end, but eventually, all earthly kingdoms will pass away and only God’s eternal kingdom will remain. In other words, we are all exiles on this earth. No matter where we live on the globe it not our true country. Our truest joy and sense of belonging are in heaven.  As Daniel writes in our text today, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” The Bible clearly teaches that there is another life coming and whether you awake to life or shame and contempt, Daniel tells us that it will be everlasting.

Everlasting is an impossible concept to wrap our minds around, but this illustration may be helpful. [Rope Illustration] Imagine this rope goes on forever and imagine that this rope is a timeline of your existence. You see this red part? This would represent your time on earth. You’ve got a few short years on earth and then you’ll spend all of eternity somewhere else [white rope]. This is your existence. Sometimes we get so consumed with thinking about this small red part, don’t we?  (Ah I can’t wait until this part[middle of the red part], I’m going to save and work hard so I can really enjoy this part. I hope I can travel and eat well! But what about this part? [all the white rope]) It is so easy to be consumed with these short years, which really could end at any time. This very night your life could be demanded of you. Let’s focus our hearts and minds on this infinitely longer portion of our existence.

Saints Triumphant is a good day to focus on eternity, isn’t it? When we think about the memory of loved ones who have gone before us, when we see the Holy Spirit claim a child in faith at the baptismal font, when we celebrate being called saints of God. It is good to understand what it means to be a saint because it helps us understand what to stay focused on for eternity. Saint means holy. Here’s what holy means: If God kept a book filled with everything you ever did, there would be not a single thing bad in it. There wouldn’t be a single thought or action or word you’d be ashamed to have him read. But that’s not what we said about ourselves today. When we confessed our sins earlier in this service we admitted that some of the things written in our book are terrible. But yet, by faith we are still bold to call each other saints, the holy ones of God. How can we say that?

The answer is God doesn’t read our book. God chose to write a different book. In Revelation, it is called “The Lamb’s book of life.” And Daniel tells us today that everyone whose name is found written in the book will be delivered. This is an amazing book. It tells how Jesus, God’s own Son, humbled himself and came to earth to live a perfect and holy life before God. As the book goes on we see his love and kindness; we see miracles and power, but toward the end, it takes a dark turn. It shows Jesus, though innocent, brutally murdered on a cross. But the final chapter is beautiful: it shows a man emerging from a tomb on Easter morning, never to die again. It is an incredible book, but when God opens it, he doesn’t see read about Jesus. He reads about you. Your name is there, etched in the blood of Christ. You are given full credit for his perfect life. He has taken away your sin and presented you holy before God, a triumphant saint. You can be confident in Christ that when you lay your head down in death, whether tonight or 70 years from now, you will awake, not to shame and contempt, but to life, perfect, joyous life everlasting. Focus on your Savior and he will take you heaven.

Daniel gives us just a hint at what that life will be like in verse 3: “Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.” Here we need to remember to understand that Daniel is using a simile, not a literal picture. The Bible talks elsewhere about heaven having golden streets and a sapphire throne. We sang about a land flowing with milk and honey. Don’t mistake these pictures for the idea behind them. The Holy Spirit inspired the writers of Scripture to give us the richest pictures possible to describe the idea of an unimaginably glorious existence. Heaven is too wonderful to explain or comprehend in human experience. Thus we can only get a sense of it through pictures or comparison.

Daniel uses the word “like”. Those who are wise will shine “like” the brightness of the heavens, “like” the stars forever and ever. “Like”  is a small word from which you can derive many points of comparison. We will not be “like” ourselves in heaven in that we will be wrinkle free and wearing wings. We aren’t just going to be ourselves 2.0. We will be completely and incredibly changed. I’ll move from Daniel to the Apostle Paul gives us can help. In 1 Cor. 15, the chapter on the resurrection of the dead, Paul says that our bodies are like a grain of wheat which turns, amazingly, into wheat: the body is “sown” (buried) in the ground as a natural body and is raised a “spiritual body”. It will be a physical resurrection, but we will be changed. Heaven is like this world, our future bodies are like our present bodies, but only as a wheat field is like a sack of grain. That is why it is unimaginable. Living in the world we know and trying to imagine heaven is like living in a world where wheat only exists in the form of grain and trying to imagine acres of wheat shining in the sun and swaying in the wind.

So what does it mean that we will shine like stars?  I can’t quite comprehend it, but the idea speaks of an amazingly powerful transformation, an existence worth earnestly longing for, a glory which makes the pursuit of Christ and his kingdom worth every second here on earth. What will it be like to reflect the light of Jesus Christ, the great Morning Star, the Sun of Righteousness? What will it be like to live in perfect joy with all of our loved ones and fellow saints? What will it feel like to shine like the stars forever and ever? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. As old Job would say, How my heart yearns within me!  Job 19:27) Amen.