Encore Interview: Heaven, Happiness, and Hope with Randy Alcorn

Hey everybody, Greg Laurie here. You're listening to the Greg Laurie Podcast, and my objective is to deliver, hopefully, compelling practical insights in faith, culture, and current events from a biblical perspective. To find out more about our ministry, just go to our website, harvest.org.

So thanks for joining me for this podcast. Randy is a rare combination of a theologian and a fiction writer. He is the author of over 50 books, and I think it's classic. There's many classics, but the one that he's best known for probably is his book on heaven, a large volume that I think is just an outstanding book that answers so many of the questions that people have about the afterlife. Another one he wrote on the issues of human suffering is called If God is Good. He's also written The Treasure Principle. Here's a little book he just did, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heaven.

Does God want us to be happy? We're gonna talk about that a little bit today. Giving is the Good Life. This is a good one. I like this. My granddaughter was reading it. Heaven for Kids, and here's this newest book, and I have to admit, I was a little offended by the title of this book, Randy Alcorn, Why Did I Ever Agree to Let Greg Laurie Interview Me?

What? Randy, come out here and explain this if you could. Let's welcome Randy Alcorn, your newest book, Randy.

This is a question I have asked myself many times, and we've done quite a few of these interviews over the years, and someone just on my social media commented and said how much one of our conversations had helped her because we deal with real life issues that people are facing right now and things that people have a lot of questions about. I just thought I'd just sort of dive in with Thanksgiving coming. Any thoughts on this special time of the year?

You know, it's a really amazing thing. You think in America, we have a national day of Thanksgiving set into motion by our first president, George Washington, ratified by both houses. I don't think they could agree on anything today, but they agreed that we should have a national day to give thanks to God Almighty in our country, and now when you hear Thanksgiving reference, they just call it Turkey Day. It's come from Thanksgiving to Turkey Day.

By the way, I had a full Thanksgiving meal yesterday with lots of turkey, and I think I gained five pounds doing that, but it was awfully good. Why is it important not only just on Thanksgiving but in general for a Christian to give thanks to God? I think God is our creator. God is the God of providence and our sustainer, the one who gives us every breath, the one who keeps our heart beating and all the things that go on in our bodies that we don't even think about until maybe something goes wrong.

He's the one who created the heavens and the earth, and he's the one who will create the new heavens and the new earth where we'll live forever. If you think about it, how much do we have to be thankful for? Even though we live in life under the curse, one day he's going to reverse the curse. We're going to be delivered from all that is bad.

He'll wipe away the tears from every eye. We can take our gratitude for the eternity that lies before us and front-load it into our lives now today. God, I'm grateful I'm alive today, and I'm grateful for what you have for me today even in the midst of suffering because you are who you are, and you have called me and gifted me, and you have a purpose for me, and you can use me today in the lives of other people. We have so much to be thankful for.

We really do, and that's right. Right on the heels of Thanksgiving, of course, is Christmas. To me, there are things I don't like about the modern Christmas celebration. People get so stressed out fighting for parking spaces, things like that, but there are many things I do like about Christmas. To me, Christmas is a promise.

It's a promise of things to come. When we were little kids, we'd get all excited about what am I getting for Christmas, but I think that longing was something that is really a longing for something even more that can't be satisfied by Christmas. It can't be satisfied by presents under a tree but by God's presence in our life. I think it's kind of a great thing when you walk through, say, a mall, and you hear songs, hark, the herald angels sing, silent night, joy to the world. You hear the name of Jesus being sung. For a person right now, as we enter into the Christmas season, what's something to remember so we can keep our perspective during this Christmas? You think of what Christmas is about, and it's about the gospel. God so loved the world, He sent His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. There's the incarnation of Jesus, but I also love the promise of the return of Jesus that's in that.

Nancy and my favorite Christmas song is Joy to the World, and I love the part about far as the curse is found. How far will His blessing go? Far as the curse is found, because He's going to reverse the curse, and He is going to one day change this world into what He meant it to be from the beginning. But we won't just go back to Eden and to that paradise. We will go forward to an Edenic paradise, but one that is greater, one where we will have not only innocence, lack of sin, but the very righteousness of Christ, and we will rejoice for all eternity. To me, I can't think of Christmas without thinking, of course, of the first coming of Jesus, and He came to die on the cross and to rise again, but the return of Christ when all things will be made right forever.

That's all wrapped up in Christmas for us. It really is, and you're touching on, really, afterlife issues, because when a Christian dies, we go immediately into the presence of the Lord in heaven, but then one day, heaven will come to earth. We even hear Jesus addressing it in what we call the Lord's Prayer. We pray, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. But it's hard for us to wrap our minds around heaven. Maybe our minds have been distorted by sort of the Hollywood version of heaven, what we've seen in movies, what we've seen in paintings and other things. And it seems like this, I don't know, for some, it might seem like, oh, man, heaven is going to be like a really long church service, kind of a lot of singing, and it's going to be boring, but nothing can be further from the truth, right? So tell us a little bit about what we can expect when we get to heaven. Well, the greatest thing about heaven is who we will be with, and that's Jesus, to be with Jesus, to be with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the triune God. You know, they had a happiness in them before the world was made. I love that promise of Jesus, where he says, and the words to Jesus, to the servant who has come into his presence, Well done, my good and faithful servant. Enter into your master's happiness.

And I love the idea of being with him forever and him being the source of all happiness. There's so many people who are looking for happiness, but they're looking in all the wrong places. And it can be found ultimately only and fully in God, not in the circumstances of our lives and how well our lives are going, because sometimes our lives don't go very well, do they? But he is there, and he is always our cause for rejoicing. That's the most important thing about heaven. Secondarily is just the fact that God is going to raise us from the dead. We don't pass our peaks in this life because our peaks won't be experienced until the resurrection, and we'll never pass that peak. So forever we will worship and enjoy his presence. He'll wipe away the tears from every eye.

No more death, no more suffering, no more pain, and forever we will celebrate with him the glories of his presence and the wonder of reunion with each other, our brothers and sisters in Christ. I mean, can you beat that? No, you just can't. Yeah, exactly right. Okay, so here's some practical questions. I hear these a lot. Well, my granddaughter, Allie, you wrote this book, Heaven for Kids. She actually asked me, will we wear clothes in heaven? Well, we do know that people in heaven are depicted as wearing robes. And lots of times people say, oh, so does that mean that we'll all wear robes? Well, I don't think that's what it means because robes is what they wore. When they came to the nice dinner, you know, they'd wear their white robes, the clean robes. And so I think, I mean, on the new earth and our resurrection bodies, will some people wear jeans or dresses, you know, pants?

Will people wear shirts, blouses, whatever? We may very well wear the kinds of things we wore in our culture that we grew up in and lived in, but the fascinating thing about that will be there are the people of God throughout the ages who have lived in different cultures, dressed differently, and I love it when Scripture talks about people of every tribe and nation and language. And it doesn't say that there are people in heaven who used to be of every tribe, nation, and language, but who are present tense of every tribe, nation, and language.

Well, and that's really, you're bringing up some interesting points now. You're showing how this is tangible, it's real. We think of it in an unreal way, like you're talking about different fashions or styles of dress, and then how in heaven, you know, your ethnicity or what country you came from, you're still you. Because sometimes I think people think when you get to heaven, you're not even you anymore. You're like, you know, we're a new creation in Christ, but we're still us. You know, after Jesus rose from the dead, he said to his disciples, it is I, not another. It was still Jesus bearing the marks of the crucifixion in his resurrection body. And Scripture says that our new bodies will be like his body, so we're going to eat food because Christ ate food after the resurrection. We're going to recognize one another because Christ recognized his own disciples after the resurrection.

There's a lot of practical things there that people sometimes don't understand. Exactly. I was just looking at Job 19, where Job talks about, I know that my Redeemer lives, and I'll see him, and he'll be on this earth. And then he says, I will see him with my own eyes.

Yes. And then he says, I and not another. That's right.

And that's explicitly saying what you were talking about, Greg, that we will still be us. And Jesus was still Jesus. And some people say, well, they didn't recognize Jesus because, well, Mary didn't recognize Jesus.

Well, wait a minute. This was the tomb. It was early in the morning. It was still darkish, and she thought he was the gardener. And in that culture, women did not look into the eyes of men that they didn't know and all this kind of stuff. But as soon as he speaks, she immediately recognizes his voice. So it was not a case of her not recognizing him. On the Emmaus road, some people say, well, yeah, they couldn't even recognize Jesus.

And it actually says they were kept from recognizing him. And then he reveals himself, and they know, of course, that this is really Jesus. Yeah, all those, those are myths that we have. Sometimes people say, yeah, well, once we get to heaven, we'll know everything. At last, we'll know everything.

No. Only God knows everything. We'll always be finite. And Ephesians 2, 7 says, in the ages to come, God will be revealing to us continuously the wonders of his kindness and his grace. So we'll learn in heaven.

We'll learn. So how should our belief in the afterlife affect us in this life? I believe there's a heaven. I believe I will go to heaven. I believe I could be in heaven sooner than I expected to be.

It could be through death. It could be through the Lord coming back for his church and being caught up to meet him. How should that affect me in day-to-day living and things I think and decisions I make? Well, one of the things that we're told in 2 Peter 3 is that we're looking forward to a new heavens and a new earth. That same context says, what sort of people, therefore, are we to be in terms of life and godliness? We are to live lives of purity.

When we see him, we'll see him as he is and those who are going to see him as he is, purify themselves even as he is pure. It changes the way we live now because we want to be the spotless bride of Christ. We want to please him and honor him because of who we will be forever in his presence. So why would we try to find pleasure in things that dishonor our Lord who is the source of pleasure? Not only is that wrong, but it's also stupid because we will never find fulfillment in the things that God has not wired us to find fulfillment in.

So if it's contrary to Jesus, it's not good for us. So the theme of our talk today is heaven, happiness, and hope. Let's transition to the topic of happiness. It seems to me if we have a proper biblical understanding of what heaven is and all that's awaiting us there, we should be happy. And after all, don't we follow a happy God? I bring that up because I think some people sort of view God as, I don't know, perpetually angry, austere, harsh. Do we follow a God who we could describe as happy?

Absolutely. In fact, in 1 Timothy 6, he is called the happy God. There's two passages that refer to him as a happy God. But because it's the English word blessed, which actually used to mean, you go to old English dictionaries, and the first meaning of blessed is happy.

It used to mean happy. But to us now, it sounds more like holy. So it sounds like he's saying the holy God, but it's really saying the happy God. Jesus Christ himself is called, in Hebrews 1, it says, God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond all your companions. In other words, Jesus Christ is the happiest person, human being, who has ever lived.

And that's actually what that passage says, beyond your companions, which would be the whole human race that he became part of. And I think sometimes we just think of Jesus as only the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, as we're told in Isaiah 53, 52 and 53. But the thing was that that passage is talking about his atoning work for us, his suffering on the cross. So was he miserable in Gethsemane and miserable on the cross? And you would say, yes, a man of sorrow is acquainted with grief.

But that's not how he was every hour of every day of his life. The great majority of the time, he was this person full of happiness, full of joy. I was reading earlier today in John 15 where he talks about, I have said these things to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. We are to derive our joy from his joy. So what are things that contribute to happiness and what are things that deplete happiness? Well, I think certainly the things that deplete happiness are the things that are in violation of the way God has designed the universe to operate. His best for our life, every time we violate us, it is sure to bring unhappiness. Every time we follow what God says, it brings happiness.

When you have Psalm 1, which starts with the word blessed, happy, happy are those who do not listen to the counsel of the wicked but who delight in the law of God, in the word of God. So if you want happiness, go to God's counsel. Seek his thoughts.

Seek his mind. But when you go to the world, and Greg and I were talking earlier about Twitter and what a nightmare it can be sometimes. There's some good things there, but there's a lot of just rudeness and hostility and pride and arrogance and critical spirit. If you're going there, if you're going to the political world to get your, if that's your source of where you spend your time, you are going to be a miserable person.

And people are not going to be drawn to Christ through you. Go to God and his word and the lights and the pleasures of what it means to follow him and that will bring happiness to your life. Yeah, you know, I think of people just scrolling through their phones constantly, you know, and you're reading tweets or you're looking at social media or whatever. You're reading news feeds and there's so many things that can bring you down.

It's like, don't look down so much, look up. You know, look up to God, look up to the imminent return of Jesus, look to the word of God and look to the needs of others. You know, studies have revealed, you know this Randy, you've talked about this in your books, but studies have revealed that when you focus on helping others, it actually improves your life, your outlook in general.

I read about one survey that was done and probably was from your book of 4,500 American adults, which revealed that those who volunteered an average of 100 hours a year, of them, 68% reported they were physically healthier, 73% said it lowered their stress levels, and 89% said it improved their sense of well-being. So, you know, now it seems like medical science is catching up with what the Bible has said all along because what did Jesus say? It's more blessed to give than it is to receive. Exactly, and that word blessed there is that word macarius, which means it is more happy making to give than to receive.

And this is so interesting. If you look at Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and some of the secular people, people that don't know the Lord, and hear them talk about what they have discovered about the joy of giving and just the giddiness, the happiness that they have experienced just by God's common grace, even as unbelievers in doing what they're wired to do. If you are – well, think of the word miser. Well, what word comes from the word miser? Miserable. So think of Scrooge, how unhappy he was when he was just accumulating all this wealth and hanging onto it and using it only for himself. And then what happens in the transformation in A Christmas Carol, Dickens' classic? What happens is Scrooge now becomes what? A new person. It's like regeneration.

It's as if he's been born again, and what is he doing now instead of being the miser who holds onto everything and is therefore miserable? He becomes the giver, and as he gives, Dickens observes, he became the happiest man in all of London. Why? Because when you give, you're happy. So don't wait to think, oh, well, if I become happy about it someday, I'll start giving.

No. Do the giving, and that will make you happy. Do the action that accords with happiness, and then you will become happy.

Very good. Do your giving while you're living, then you're knowing where it's going. Exactly. And, you know, there is a joy in giving. There really is, and I think we miss out on it. And so as we think about this subject, I don't know why, but there's a discomfort among Christians when you address the topic of money and giving. I think everyone sort of clutches their wallet, or, you know, you fasten your purse, or they're going to receive an offering now. Why are we so reluctant in this area?

Why is there discomfort? I mean, you can talk about heaven, awesome. You can talk about the promises of God, fantastic. You can talk about the imminent return of Jesus, I love it. You talk about money, and the Bible talks about it so much, and now all of a sudden I'm like, I'm uncomfortable, I don't want to hear about this.

Why is that? I don't get it. Well, I think we have turned to money to fulfill our deepest needs, and it doesn't do that. Now, it's a blessing of God, and we do need money to live on and provide food for our families and all of that. So it's not a bad thing in and of itself, but when we make it our God, the rich fool, you think about this in Luke 12.

Here's this man who just, he's successful, and so what does he do? He builds bigger barns just to store up all these things for himself, and then God says, You fool, this night your life is required of you, and you have been rich toward yourself, but you have not been rich toward God, and judgment falls upon him. But this reminds me of 1 Timothy chapter 6, which if you turn in your Bibles to 1 Timothy 6, that would be great. Yeah, let's turn there, 1 Timothy 6. That would be great, and this passage has a lot of great stuff in it, but in verses 9 and 10 of 1 Timothy 6, you have the bad news about wealth, and here it is. But those who desire to be rich, and at first you go, those who desire to be rich?

Well, wait a minute. I mean, everybody desires to be rich, right? I mean, whether you're a poor person or whether you're already a rich person, you just want to get richer.

It's kind of this natural human thing. Well, here's what falls upon those who desire to be rich. Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare. I'm counting on my fingers here, into many senseless, harmful desires that plunge people, and that word for plunge is a word that's often translated drown, that drown people, in ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evils. Not money itself, but the love of money is the root of all kinds of evils, and it is through this craving that some have wandered from the faith, and they have pierced themselves with many griefs.

We're onto a third hand now. There's about 14 negative statements about desiring to be rich, and you go, wow, we're all in trouble. We're all in trouble. And you could think it's just like James 5 where God can be pretty hard on rich people. He says, woe to you who are rich and weep and howl for the miseries that are going to come upon you. You go, wow, that is pretty depressing.

But then skip forward just about seven verses in 1 Timothy 6 to verse 17. As for the rich in this present age, and by the way, he's talking to all of us. Go to globalrichlist.com, put in your annual income, and find out how rich you are. I just put in the other day $25,000, which is considered U.S. poverty level for a family of four, for an income of $25,000, and guess where it puts you in terms of world wealth. It puts you in the top 2% of the wealthy people of the world. Yeah, it's pretty shocking. You put yours in there, and you are going to be way more likely in the 99th percentile, which happens to be the highest percentile, and you're sharing it with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, right?

It's just that they're in the 99.99, and you're maybe in the 99.3 or whatever you might be, but you'll be shocked at where you come out. So this is to all of us. As for the rich in this present age, charge them not, command them not to be prideful, or not to be haughty, one translation says, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches. Where do you put your hope? Hope is part of what we're talking about today. You put your hope in God, who is unchanging. Don't put your hope in riches, which are here today and gone tomorrow.

Either you will be taken away from your riches, or your riches will be taken away from you. One way or the other, you do not have an eternal relationship with your present wealth, but Jesus said you can take it and store it up for yourselves in heaven, and that's where Paul is going to go. He says, put your hope in God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy, which is so kind of God to say that because right when you think, wow, wealth is terrible and you should never even enjoy it. No, he's given it to us for us to enjoy, but he's given it to us for much larger reasons as well. What are we to do with what God has entrusted to us? Here's what the rich are to do.

The rich are, verse 18, to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and eager or ready to share. One translation says willing to share, but I don't like that. It's more than willing. It's eager. It's ready. It's just jump in there.

I want to jump in and help people. Those are four different expressions that are all about giving, and this is God's call and command to the rich, and it's the only solution to the problem of wealth that verses 9 and 10 warn us about. Then he says in verse 19, when you do this giving, thus storing up treasures for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, for the future that's after death. Well, that's just like Jesus said. Don't store up for yourself treasures on earth, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven in Matthew 6. But then he doesn't end there.

It's not just that our eternal future will be better and we'll enjoy the benefits of it, and it's not just that we'll be helping people and wonderful that we're loving our neighbor as ourself and doing that great thing. But then he says, so that they, who? The rich who give. Give.

That's the key. The givers, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. Not the false life. Not the money's going to make you happy. It doesn't buy happiness, and even secular people, when they're honest, acknowledge that. But it's present tense, so we've got our future that's going to be better and reward in heaven for all eternity. We've got the present and the future of other people who are the recipients of our gifts, and that's a wonderful thing. But it's so that we in the present may take hold now of the life that is truly life. It's not just that giving people will one day be happier when we're with Jesus. It's that giving people will be happier today because we are honoring Jesus and we are obeying Jesus and we are doing what we were made to do to become like Jesus himself in terms of being givers.

That's fantastic. Now let's think about, it gets all quiet. Still talking about money.

Move on quickly. Okay, so our theme is, it's heaven, happiness and hope. And we're living in a culture right now where a lot of people have lost hope. Of course, generation Z has been described by some experts as the hopeless generation, and your heart just goes out to folks who've lost hope.

You know, one person wrote, man can live 40 days without food, three days without water, six minutes without air, but only one second without hope. Randy, as we close today, let's talk to a person who maybe has lost hope. Maybe something bad has just happened to them, really bad.

They've got the worst news imaginable from a doctor. Or maybe an accident, they've lost a loved one. Or maybe they just feel like life isn't worth living anymore. You know, they're thinking no one loves me. Nobody cares about me. I don't matter to anybody.

I should just take my own life even. Address a hopeless person and tell them why they should have hope. You know, my mind, Greg, goes to Titus 2, verse 13, where it says that we are waiting for our blessed hope, and that's that word macarius again. And the proper literal translation is waiting for our happy hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. This is what I would say to the person who is suffering from that hopelessness, is to say God has given us this happy hope, and it's not just a wishful thinking hope. It's built on the blood-bought promises of Jesus Christ that he is going to make all things better.

He's going to wipe away the tears from every eye for all who believe and trust in him. Now, if your hope is in yourself, and your hope is in the economy and the stock market and your retirement plan, and your hope is always being healthy or wealthy or whatever, those things are not a solid or firm foundation for hope. Jesus Christ is the source of hope. So my wife Nancy has been suffering from cancer for the last two years. She has a big surgery on Tuesday. I would appreciate your prayers for her. Let me just pray for her right now. Let's pray for his wife. Father, we think of Nancy, Randy's beloved wife, such a sweet lady who loves you so much and has been growing so much spiritually through all of this she's been facing, but it is so difficult, and we're praying now for a miracle, that you will touch her, that you will heal her, that you will restore complete health to her.

Lord, we know you're in control, and we know we want your will above all things, but you have told us in Scripture, we have not because we ask not. So we ask you to touch and heal Nancy Alcorn right now in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. Amen.

Thank you for that, Greg. That just means a lot. Thanks to everybody for those prayers. That will mean a lot to Nancy.

I'll be sure that she gets a copy of this service. But anyway, so for the person without hope, just ground your hope in the proper place. See, our hope in this life is to be in Jesus, and the firm hope, the firm basis for our hope is the promise of Jesus that he is going to wipe away the tears from every eye.

We really will, this is not just a fairy tale, we really will live happily ever after. So when you're tempted to give up hope, just remember, there's every reason to hope. God understands, and if you wonder sometimes, does God really love me, because if he really loved me, why would he let me go through all this?

No, nothing shall separate us from the love of Christ. And I think when we stand before the Lord, we'll ask ourselves, we'll look at the scars in his hands and we'll ask ourselves, how could I have ever doubted whether he loved me and whether he cared? Look, do these look like the hands of a God who does not care?

No, he does care, he loves you. That's the basis for your hope. Amen.

That's right. God loves you, God cares about you, he has a plan for your life. Ultimately, that plan is for you to join him in heaven for all eternity. And then one day, heaven will come to earth and we'll live in the new earth. You'll be reunited with loved ones who've preceded you to heaven, who died in faith. And thus you can have happiness, not from things, not from experiences, but from a relationship with God himself.

And because of this, you can have hope. Life without Jesus is a hopeless end. Life with Jesus is endless hope. And in just a few days, we're gonna be celebrating his arrival on planet earth, his birth in Bethlehem, and Jesus was born to die so we might live.

The incarnation was so there would be the atonement of the birth of Jesus, so there would be the death of Jesus and ultimately the resurrection of Jesus. And then when we ask him to come into our life, he forgives us of our sin. And we can have this hope.

It only comes from a relationship with God. And we're gonna close now in prayer and I'm gonna lead a prayer, lead someone in prayer, I should say, who would like Jesus to come into their life and forgive them of their sin. So maybe today you find yourself an unhappy person. Maybe today you find yourself a frightened person because of the future and just thoughts of death freak you out.

Or maybe you find yourself completely hopeless. You need Jesus and you need him in your life and you need him right now. And he stands at the door of your life and he knocks and he says, if you'll hear his voice and open the door, he will come in. So I'd like to lead you in a simple prayer where you can ask Jesus to come in to your life and forgive you of your sin and give you the hope and give you the happiness and give you the purpose you want in life. So as we pray, you pray this after me if you want Christ to come into your life.

Let's all bow our heads. Father, thank you for this time of looking into your word. And now I pray for any person that is here with us or is watching or listening, wherever they may be, if they don't know Jesus yet, Lord, let this be the moment they believe and put their faith in him. And listen, today if you want Christ to come into your life, if you want him to forgive you of your sin, you could just pray this simple prayer after me. Just pray this after me. Lord Jesus, I know I'm a sinner, but I know you're the savior who died on the cross for my sin. I turn from my sin now and I choose to follow you in this moment forward as my savior and Lord, as my God and friend. Thank you for hearing this prayer and answering it.

In Jesus' name I pray, amen. Hey, let's give a round of applause to Randy Alcorn for coming today. Thank you.

Hey everybody, Greg Laurie here. Thanks for listening to our podcast and to learn more about Harvest Ministries, please subscribe and consider supporting this show. Just go to harvest.org. And by the way, if you want to find out how to come into a personal relationship with God, go to knowgod.org. That's K-N-O-W-G-O-D.org.