An Invitation to Heaven

The Sunday morning worship service in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on July 9, 2023.  The Bible verses used are Matthew 22:1-14.

            Jesus starts his story by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like…”  And that gets our attention, because we’d all like to know what heaven is like.  We’d like to be able to picture it.  We’d like to know what it looks like.  We’d like to know what we’ll look like there.  We’d like to know what we’ll be doing while we’re there.  So when Jesus says, “the kingdom of heaven is like…”, we perk up.  We listen.

            But, in our reading for today, even though Jesus starts by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like…”, Jesus does not tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like.  Instead, Jesus tells us something more important.  Jesus tells us who is going to go to heaven.

            That the thing we really need to know.  I mean, we’d like to believe everyone goes to heaven.  I’d like to believe that, too.  If you really take the concept of hell seriously, you would not want your worst enemy to go there.  Hell is awful beyond our ability to imagine.  

I wish no one ever went to hell.  But that’s not what the Bible tells us.  The Bible tells us, first, that we all deserve to go to hell, because we’re all sinners who deserve to be condemned.  But God, out of His great love for us, has given us a way to escape hell.  And it’s not even a very hard way.  All we have to do is believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior.  If we do that, we receive salvation and eternal life.  It’s as easy as that.

            God deliberately made it easy.  Because God really does not want anyone to go to hell, either.  In fact, I suspect God dislikes it when people go to hell even more than we do, because God understands hell better than we do.  God wants everyone to be in heaven with Him.  That’s why God made it so simple, and so easy, for us to go there.  

            God could’ve made it a lot harder, you know.  God could’ve made us do some great, difficult thing to get to heaven.  God could’ve made us live perfect, or at least close to perfect, lives to get to heaven.  God could’ve given us a long list of things we had to do or not do in order to get to heaven.  But God did not want it to be hard for us to get to heaven.  Again, God wanted it to be easy, because God loves us so much.  God does not make us earn our way into heaven.  God invites us into heaven.  God is eager for us to go to heaven.  All we have to do is believe in His divine Son, Jesus Christ, as the Savior.  That’s it.  Period.

            But as easy as God made it, there are people who refuse to do it.  There are people who refuse to go to heaven.  There are people who choose hell over heaven.  That’s a really sad thing.  It makes me sad.  It probably makes you sad, too.  And if it makes us sad, think about how sad it makes God.  Because, again, God understands hell better than we do.  God knows how awful it is there.  But, because God wants us to have free will, God allows us to choose hell, if that’s what we want to do.  God is incredibly sad when we make that choice, but God allows us to make it.

            In our Bible reading for today, Jesus tells us how eager God is for us to go to heaven.  Jesus says God invites everyone to come to Him.  God starts out by inviting His special, chosen people.  The people of Israel.  God invites them–and they refuse to come.

            Now, God could’ve gotten really upset about that.  But God does not.  Instead, God gives them another chance.  God sends out more invitations, this time sending them through Jesus Christ.  And in these invitations, God tries to tell His people how great it’s going to be in heaven.  He says, everything’s prepared.  I’ve got all kinds of things ready for you.  And they’re really great things.  They’re the best things you could ever imagine.  Please, just come.  You’ll love it.  Really, you will.  Please, just come.

            Such an awesome invitation God gave them.  And yet, they still refused.  They could not be bothered.  They just went about their business.  Doing whatever they did.  Completely ignoring God.  It’s like the invitation had never been made.  They paid no attention to it whatsoever.

            But that’s not all.  Some of them did even worse than ignoring the invitation.  They killed the one who delivered the invitation.  Jesus came to earth, inviting God’s people to come to the kingdom of heaven.  Again, all they had to do was believe in Him.  And not only did they refuse to believe, they killed Him.

            We’re told, in verse seven, that God was “enraged.  He sent his armies and destroyed thos murderers and burned their city.”  

            But God still wanted people to come to the kingdom of heaven.  So, He invited others.  He invited everyone.  He said to His messengers, the apostles, go out and invite everyone.  Don’t worry about whether they’re worthy or not.  Find them all.  Gather them all in.  God is just as eager for those people–in other words, you and me–to come as he was for His chosen people to come.

            In other words, the message of Jesus Christ applies to us just as much as anyone.  All we need to do is accept God’s invitation–believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior–and we can go to be with God in heaven.  It does not matter whether we belong there.  It does not matter if we deserve to be there.  We don’t have to pass any tests to get there.  All we need to do is believe in Jesus.  Period.

            And it would be wonderful if the story ended there.  Because we like all this.  I mean, maybe we don’t like the part about God’s rage too much.  But the rest of it, we like.  We especially like the part where all the people, the bad and the good, are gathered into the kingdom of heaven.  I mean, we might like to think we’re pretty good, sometimes, but deep down, we know we’re a long way from perfect.  It’s kind of a relief to read that both the bad and the good are gathered into the kingdom of heaven.

            But the story does not end there.  In Jesus’ story, after the guests have all been gathered, there’s a problem with one of them.  We’re told that this is like a wedding banquet, and this guest is not wearing wedding clothes.  And he’s thrown out.

            You see, it is wonderful to know that God invites everyone to be part of the kingdom of heaven.  It is wonderful to know that we don’t have to be “good enough” to get to heaven, that all we need to do is believe in Jesus.  But the thing is, we cannot just say we believe in Jesus.  We have to really believe in Jesus.  

            And if we really believe in Jesus, we cannot just go on the way we were before we met Jesus.  Our belief in Jesus has to change us somehow.  Not because we’re trying to earn our way into heaven, but because we want to honor God.  We want to glorify God.  In other words, if we truly believe Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God, then we will want to do the things Jesus told us to do.  We will want to live the way Jesus told us to live.  Not perfectly–as we’ve said before, we’re not capable of perfection.  But we’ll try.  We’ll do the best we can.

            If our belief in Jesus Christ does not change us somehow, then it’s not a real belief.  We cannot read the gospels and find anyone who came to belief in Jesus whose life was not changed by that belief.  And we cannot find anyone to today who comes to belief in Jesus whose life is not changed by that belief.  We may tell ourselves we believe in Jesus.  We may even be able to fool ourselves into believing that.  But if our lives are not changed as a result of that belief, it’s not real.  And while we may be able to fool ourselves, we will not fool God.  God will see that our claimed belief in Jesus is not real.  And a phony belief in Jesus will not get us into the kingdom of heaven.  Only a real belief will.

            We may not know exactly what the kingdom of heaven is like, but we know we all want to go there.  We know God wants us to go there, too.  God wants everyone to go to heaven.  God is eager for everyone to go to heaven.  That’s why God sent Jesus to earth–to give us all an invitation to heaven.  

            God will allow us to refuse His invitation.  God is sad when we refuse it, but God allows us to.  It seems like such an awful thing, to have a chance to go to heaven and refuse it.  But it happens.  And the chances are, you know someone it may happen to.

            So let’s not make God sad.  Let’s accept God’s invitation to the kingdom of heaven.  Let’s believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior, and let’s let that belief change our lives.  And let’s do what we can to encourage others to accept that invitation, too.  Let’s do what we can to bring everyone we know with us to salvation and eternal life in heaven.