Greg Laurie
speaker
159 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Greg Laurie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it'll take a lot of time. And it's okay to cry. And you should cry. Because the depth of your sorrow is an indication of the depth of your love. But I would find as I would say those things, I'd kind of be speaking to myself a little bit. Because you can be okay, relatively speaking. You get your head above water. You get a gulp of air. I'm going to survive this.
And then you go into a deep time of grief and you're turned upside down. And you just need to be reminded over and over again that as a Christian, I believe I'll see my son again because he believed in Jesus. So he won't be in heaven because I'm his dad. He'll be in heaven because he put his faith in Christ and he had that relationship with God. So I know he's not just a part of my past.
He's a part of my future as well. So that gives me hope. But also I realize that God can allow these things in our life. I don't know why. I can't explain it. I don't even try to explain it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes.
But then there's the afterlife. And I believe in the afterlife. And I believe in heaven. And I believe in it more than I've ever believed. I've always been a student of heaven as a Christian, and the Bible speaks so much of heaven. But when my son went to be there, I wanted to know more about it. And as you read the Bible, you realize that heaven is a real place for real people to do real things.
You know, Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you. And heaven in the Bible is pictured as a city. It's pictured as a country. It's pictured as a paradise. The Bible tells us we'll eat in heaven. We'll be reunited with loved ones in heaven. We'll be active. And then one day heaven comes to earth in what we call the millennium. Heaven and earth become one. So I believe very strongly in that.
Now, can I prove it?
Well, I think coming back to the statement of Jesus, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. Bottom line, nobody can be perfect. We fall short. So the point of that to me is, is we sin against God. Now, some of us sin more than others, but we all sin. We had a little Halloween event at our church and we had one of those, you know, the bell where you hit the thing with the hammer.
And so I've hit that and hit the bell in the past. So I got it out and I hit it and I got so close, but I never got it. I think I spent a half hour trying to ring that bell and I fell short. So God has said, perfection, that's the standard for humanity. Well, who can be perfect? Answer, no one. That's where Jesus comes in. Because the Bible says, why were we yet sinners? Christ died for us.
So going back to the Garden of Eden, our first parents sinned. And because they ate of the forbidden fruit, which by the way, the Bible never says was an apple. I don't know where the apple came from. But, you know, it was something that was very attractive. If you ate of it, it would give you this supernatural wisdom, knowing good and evil. Supposedly, that's what the lie was.
They ate of the fruit and sin came into the world. So if Adam and Eve had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't die. If they had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, we wouldn't age and get sick. If they hadn't eaten of the forbidden fruit, I'd probably have hair right now, right? So these are the effects of aging. But here's the thing. The earth, life on earth is not everything.
This is the before life. Then there's the afterlife. C.S. Lewis, you know, what did he call it? He had a phrase for it that he used often in his writings about shadowlands. That's right, shadowlands. So the idea of Lewis was that what we're seeing now at its very best, take the greatest moment of your life with your friends, having a meal, enjoying life together, maybe a beautiful sunset.
It's a shadow of greater things to come. It's not like earth is the real thing and heaven is the imitation. It's actually, according to the Bible, the other way around. Heaven is the real thing. See, going back to Abraham, he was looking for a city that had foundations, whose builder and maker was God. He was looking for something he never found in all of his journeys.
And I think it was a longing for the afterlife. And we all have that longing. And one day when we get to heaven, I think we'll see that the greatest experiences of earth were only a shadow of greater things to come. So I believe very firmly in a real heaven where I'll do real things and I'll be reunited with my son.
Well, that's one of the biggest questions of all. You know, what happens after we die? You hear these near-death experiences, and they're hard to quantify because... How can we know, you know, really what happens? But we hear certain similarities that people say, I went up and I looked down and I saw my family grieving over me. So I prefer to go to a reliable source, which is the Bible.
And there actually is a story in the Bible of a man who died and came back to life again. I'm not talking about Christ, that's obvious. But it was the Apostle Paul. And, you know, he was beaten many times and on one occasion he was stoned. and left for dead. They thought he had died. And so Paul, in the book of Corinthians, writes about being caught up into the third heaven.
He says, I knew a man in Christ, whether he was in the body or out of the body, I'm not sure, but such a one was caught into the third heaven and he heard things he can't describe. You know, it's interesting because people write entire books about their experiences in heaven, but the apostle Paul, who actually had this happen, didn't write a book, but he did write a little bit of a chapter on it.
And but he says it was paradise. So the word paradise is translated like the royal garden of a king. So I don't know if we would have even a parallel to this today. But if you go to some of these incredible British estates where these gardens go on endlessly. Maybe that gives us a sense of what he was talking about. But he just used the word paradise.
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