This Earth is Not my Home.

Our text is Revelation 22:5. It tells us about heaven and says,

“There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun. For the Lord God will give them light.”

For 40 years I have rarely preached a funeral when I did not relate the following story.  I want you to have it because if you don’t need it now, you will one day. As the church song says, this earth is not my home, I’m just pass through. Along this line, one man said,

As a boy I used to think that heaven was a place with streets of gold and gates of pearl and with angels everywhere. But there was nobody there that I knew and wasn’t sure I wanted to go there.

By and by my little brother died, and I thought of heaven as a place with streets of gold, gates of pearl, with angels everywhere, but with one inhabitant that I knew. 

Then my mother and father died, and heaven was a place with streets of gold, gates of pearl, angels everywhere and one little boy that I knew and my mother and my father.

Then other of my acquaintances died and so in time I began to think of heaven as containing several people that I knew. 

But it was not until one of my own little children died that I began to think I had treasure in heaven myself. 

Afterward another loved one went, and then another. By that time I had so many acquaintances and loved ones in heaven that I no longer thought of it as a city merely with streets of gold but as a place full of people I love. Now there are so many loved ones there I sometimes think I know more people in heaven than I do on earth.”

Lonnie Davis