Connect360: Making Your Reservation in Heaven

• Lesson 7 in the Connect360 unit “Heaven & Angels: Our Eternal Home and Its Heavenly Hosts” focuses onRevelation 21:22-27.

If you wait until the last minute to book a vacation, there is a good chance all the flights to your destination already will be overbooked. Although you might get a room in a hotel, you would be much wiser to make a reservation in advance.

The same is true about heaven. Have you confirmed your reservation? I am asking because all the rooms in heaven must be reserved in advance. How do you do that? Very simple. The Bible says you must confess Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead in order to be saved (Romans 10:9-10).

The good news about your reservation in heaven is that it can never be canceled. Once your name is written in heaven’s book, it can never be erased. In his first epistle, John wrote, “These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13).

I have heard people say many untrue things about heaven over the years, but one of the most perplexing has to do with the confirmation process of making your reservation in heaven. “Well, nobody can know for certain that you’re going to heaven when you die,” some propose. Wrong. Or sometimes someone will say, “You’ll just have to wait until you die to see if you were good enough to go to heaven.” Not true. John was saying in this verse that we can know for certain our salvation.

Some of the sweetest people I know, people whom I believe have been Christians for most of their lives, have told me they wake up in the night wondering if in the end God will not let them into heaven because of something they have done or not done. That is not grace (Ephesians 2:8-9). That is still trying to earn it. That kind of thinking has a lot more to do with false religions than the gospel of grace that Jesus taught.

If you are a Christian and you struggle with assurance that you are saved and going to Heaven when you die, something is wrong. Either you are not grounded in the truth about salvation, or you have become a victim of the devil’s lies. One of Satan’s lies is to keep people from being saved by convincing them salvation has to be earned. If he cannot do that, his other great lie is to convince saved people they must work to keep it, or they will lose it. I call that the lie of legalism compared to the gospel of grace.

If you have placed your eternal trust in Jesus, and your answer is still “I don’t know” when someone asks you where you will go after you die, then I have good news for you. God wants you to move to a place of confidence and assurance—not confidence or assurance in yourself, but in God’s word. This is what 1 John 5:13 is all about. Let go of doubt and stand on the rock-solid word of God and come to full assurance of your salvation. Then you can say by faith, “I will be with Jesus in heaven.”

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