The question of where we go from here when we die was answered last week. If we die in Jesus Christ, having received Him as Lord and Savior and walked in His commandments, then heaven will be our home. But if after we have received Jesus we are again entangled in the pollutions of the world, when we die we will go to hell together with the unbelievers, and our punishment will be worse than theirs (2 Peter 2:20).
Concerning the second question of how we go to heaven, the Holy Scriptures are clear that God does not expect us to go empty-handed. God wants us to get into heaven having accomplished His purposes for our lives. The accomplished works for which we were born should follow us to heaven, and we shall be rewarded by God for a work well-done.
The Bible says that “In Your book (God’s book), they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them” (Psalm 139:16). This means that before we were born, God knew us and assigned us work for our earthly lives. When we are born and mature, God requires us to discover that work for which we were born, and to accomplish it before we exit this world. The same was true of Jesus who should be our example. “When He came into the world, He said: ‘Behold, I have come – In the volume of the book it is written of Me – to do Your will, O God’“ (Hebrews 10:5-7). And when He, Jesus, had accomplished the work for which He was born, “He said, ‘It is finished’” (John 19:30).
Our earnest desire should be that at the end of our lives we can confidently say, concerning the purpose for which we were born, that, “It is finished.” If we are to depart from this world by death and God does not give us the opportunity of saying those words at the moment of our expiration, we should at least say them a few months or days before we depart, just like Paul who said: “The time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:6-7).
Folks, we shouldn’t go to heaven empty-handed. Let us die, or be raptured, when we have accomplished our Father’s will, when we have ticked off our to-do list for which we were born. Then we shall hear Him say unto us that, “Well done, good and faithful servant . . . Enter into the joy of your lord” (Matthew 25:21).
Hallelujah!