No Tissues Found

The man was walking around. He had a shopping list. On the list were many things. He went into a large store – everything was in the store, it was the largest store he had ever shopped in. There were wonderful steaks, lobsters, beautiful fruit, snacks and desserts. There were all sorts of clothing, all sorts of electronics, all sorts of housewares. He rapidly went up and down the aisles, finding all the things he needed. But one thing on his list could not be found. Where was it?

Up and down the aisles he went again, looking for that last thing on his list. No where was the item. Finally, he stopped a man and asked him about the missing item. The man’s eyes grew wide, and then he began to chuckle.

“Sorry, sorry! Man, don’t you realize that that is the one thing you can’t find here?”

“It isn’t here? Surely they’ve got some!”

“No, man. You won’t find any tissues or Kleenex or such here, because you are now in Heaven. Nobody needs tissues! There are no tears left! God has wiped them away!”

Revelation 21:1-8; I Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 26:26-30 
As the Apostle John wrote in Revelation 21:

Then I heard a loud voice from the throne:

Look! God’s dwelling is with humanity,
and He will live with them.
They will be His people,
and God Himself will be with them
and be their God.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will no longer exist;
grief, crying, and pain will exist no longer,
because the previous things have passed away.
All Saints Day is the day we remember all those people who have believed and gone before us. This is the day when we ponder the greatest promise of Jesus Christ, that all who follow Him will have eternal life. Today is the day when we consider one more time what it means to be mortal, to live in the world, to become the children of the immortal Father.

Think about the world before Jesus came to us...

As far as everyone knew, there was no hope. We were born, we lived in despair, we worked under Adam’s curse, and we died. While we lived, we made sacrifices of our livestock to a god to keep that god from being angry at us and making our lives even more miserable. Some worshiped the Jewish God – we still had to make the sacrifices. Eternal life was only a possibility for a handful of specially chosen people. For the rest of us, a minefield of law told us what our sins were, and what our sacrifices needed to be.

Then Jesus arrived, taught, claimed to be God walking upon the earth. And our despair began to clear. For this claim, though, Jesus was arrested and executed. And once again, all seemed lost. But on that glorious Sunday morning, Jesus rose from the dead, restored to life by the Heavenly Father, His claim to be God shown to be true by the Father Himself. And Jesus told us that all who follow Him will also be resurrected, living eternally with Him and the Father. Hallelujah!

The Apostle Paul in Romans 10 promises that all who state that “Jesus is Lord” and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead will be saved from God’s wrath. Is Jesus your Lord? Do you believe that God raised Him from the dead?

Notice that the statement is Jesus is Lord. It is not “Jesus is my buddy”. It is not “Jesus is my friend.” It is not “Jesus is my copilot”. The statement is “Jesus is Lord”.

The word “Lord” has meaning – it had a particular meaning in the day. If you said that a particular man was your Lord, you accepted him as your boss, as your commander, as your leader, as the man you respected more than anyone else. If your Lord said “Jump!”, you said, “How high, Lord?”

Is Jesus your Lord? Or is Jesus just your friend? Are you really willing to do whatever Jesus asks you to do?

Consider this question this afternoon after you go home. Is Jesus truly your Lord. Have you made that level of commitment?

If you have made that level of commitment, God the Father makes a double commitment back to us:

First, He promises us eternal life with Him if God knows that you are willing to follow Jesus.

And this promise does not depend upon us still walking upon the earth until Christ returns. It is also for those whose physical bodies have died. As The Apostle Paul wrote:

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, in the same way God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus. For we say this to you by a revelation from the Lord: We who are still alive at the Lord’s coming will certainly have no advantage over those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the archangel’s voice, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Next, God treats us as adopted sons and daughters. We become princes and princesses of the kingdom, with right of access to God's ear and power that that implies.

One way we know this is because Christ chose to eat with the disciples, to share bread and to share drink as if we were a family. One loaf. One cup.

 As they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take and eat it; this is My body.” Then He took a cup, and after giving thanks, He gave it to them and said, “Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood that establishes the covenant; it is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins. But I tell you, from this moment I will not drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it in a new way in My Father’s kingdom with you.” After singing psalms, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

That Thursday evening at the Last Supper when Jesus shared the meal with His disciples, His words must have seemed strange to everyone around. But the next 24 hours would showed them that Jesus was really ready to sacrifice His body and blood for His disciples – for them and for us who continue to follow Him.

Through His blood, our sins are forgiven as Jesus became the sacrifice that replaced all those hundreds and thousands of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigeons that had been sacrificed through the ages. Jesus, whose Father was God, was the only sacrifice that was valuable enough to pay all of the sacrificial fines we owed. For even if we paid with those cattle, sheep, pigeons – like people who receive a bill for speeding from a traffic camera, we never knew what sins we committed that we didn’t know, we didn’t understand, we simply did and immediately forgot about. But Christ paid for all of those sins…yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s sins.

And His body was broken for us. What there was of God in Him is shared with us time and again whenever we eat the consecrated bread, food not only for our bodies, but spiritual food for our souls. In some way we just don’t understand, Jesus is present when we come together for Holy Communion, bringing us all together – those of us in this room, those Christians around the world, those Christians for centuries in the past who have participated, even those grandchildren who have not yet been born but will one day join us in this family meal. We share the one loaf, bringing us together in unity – and Christ is here with us, even today. 

May we join together with Christ and all the saints who have ate this meal together over the centuries, all who eat with us this day, and all who will eat with us in the future in New Jerusalem, without any tissues or Kleenex for the joy that we shall know together.