Greg Laurie - As It Is in Heaven: How Eternity Brings Focus to What Really Matters

H ave you ever seen that show on television called Inside the Actors Workshop? On this program, which has been around since 1994, all kinds of celebrities get to talk about their craft. But even more interesting to me is that they get to share their personal life philosophies. At the end of every program, interviewer James Lipton asks his guests a series of questions:

1. 1. What is your favorite word?
2. 2. What is your least favorite word?
3. 3. What turns you on?
4. 4. What turns you off?
5. 5. What sound or noise do you love?
6. 6. What sound or noise do you hate?
7. 7. What is your favorite curse word?
8. 8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. 9. What profession would you not like to do?

These questions are great for getting real insight into a persons thinking and character. You can use them at parties, in small group Bible studies, or even as a way to break the ice in personal evangelism. But I think that Lipton saved his best question for last. Here it is:

The answers run the gamut. Here are a few (paraphrased) that have stuck with me over the years:

• Ben Affleck: Your friends are in the back. They are expecting you.
• Ellen Barkin: Come in. Have a drink. Sit down. Smoke a cigarette.
• Angelina Jolie: You are allowed in.
• Johnny Depp: Wow.
• Richard Dreyfuss: Come in. It is not as boring as you might have thought.
• Anthony Hopkins: What were you doing down there?
• Will Smith: Good work, Dog.
• Robert Redford: You are too early.
• Tom Cruise: Come on in. You did a good job.
• Susan Sarandon says what she will say to God: Lets party.
• Robert De Niro, for his part, says, If Heaven exists, God has a lot of explaining to do. (That is one of my favorites. Really? A lot of explaining to Robert De Niro? I wonder if the Lord would look at De Niro and say, What? Are you looking at Me?)
• James Lipton (responding to his own question): See, Jim, you were wrong.

Our culture, supposedly so fixated on getting ahead in the here and now, is fascinated with Heaven and the afterlife, but I probably didnt even need to tell you that. You can see it for yourself. According to one public opinion survey by the Gallup organization, 81 percent of Americans believe in Heaven (while a smaller share, 69 percent, believes in Hell).

According to LifeWay Research and Christianity Today, 33 percent of Americans who never attend worship services wonder, at least some

Type Do you believe you are going to Heaven or Hell? into Google and you will get a variety of quizzes and answers from instant experts. Wiki.answers.com, Quizrocket.com, Patheos.com, Answers.yahoo.com, and many more will all endeavor to tell youor help you find the answer for yourself. And lets face it, if the Web tells you where you will end up in the afterlife, it must be true!

Movies about Heaven abound. One of my favorites is Its a Wonderful Life, a 1946 classic starring Jimmy Stewart, who plays George Bailey, a good but tortured man who attempts to kill himself because his life seemingly has fallen apart. On the night of Georges suicide attempt, Heaven sends him Clarence Odbody (played by Henry Travers), a man who has died and is trying to earn his wings as a bumbling angel. Its a great story, but the theology is odd, to say the least! Then there is Ghost, a 1990 film starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. Swayzes character is murdered, but he loves Moore so much that he comes back to earth asyou guessed ita ghost. And you can choose from two movies called Heaven Can Wait, one from 1947 starring Gene Tierney and Don Ameche, and another from 1978 starring Warren Beatty and Buck Henry.

The classic Star Trek television series and movies, of course, mixed in lots of references to Heaven, a Paradise lost by mankind, and God. While the franchise didnt always get these serious subjects right amid all the science fiction and pop psychology, I have to give it an A for effort. For example, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khanthe one in which the funeral music for Spock is Amazing Graceearly on the philosopher James T. Kirk tells a young Vulcan officer, How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldnt you say? I sure would!

Heaven is a major theme in American business, too. If you go to Amazon.com and type in the word Heaven, you will be confronted with more than 200,000 options, ranging from books to music to other things that you can purchase about the subject. Im talking about Heaven-themed T-shirts, wristbands, food, gambling opportunities, and so on. Lots of people hope to earn some treasure here on earth by selling something pointing to our hoped-for treasure in Heaven.

Then there are the books (including this one). While the afterlife is of perennial reading interestthink The Weight of Glory and The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, for examplethe subject got a huge boost with books by doctors reporting on the so-called near death experiences, or NDEs, of their patients. Elisabeth Kbler-Ross wrote the ground-breaking book,