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The sermon teaches that heaven cannot be earned by works but is received by those born again through the Spirit and united to Christ. Present experiences of rest, joyful service, fellowship, illumination, victory over sin, and communion with Jesus function as foretastes and pledges of eternal glory. Spurgeon also strongly affirms conscious eternal punishment for those who remain without God and reject Christ. The sermon culminates in an evangelistic appeal to repent, trust Christ’s blood, and find salvation, peace, and assurance in Him.
Theological center: Heaven is the gracious inheritance of those regenerated and adopted through faith in Christ, whose Spirit gives present foretastes and assurance of future glory.
Applications: Be born again through Christ · Believe and rest in Christ · Heaven is an inheritance · Present grace foreshadows glory
Primary texts: Ephesians 1:13-14 · Hebrews 4:9 · Mark 16:16
“That holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance.” Ephesians 1:13-14 SO then, heaven, with all its glories, is an inheritance! Now, an inheritance is not a thing which is bought with money, earned by labor, or won by conquest. If any man has an inheritance, in the proper sense of that term, it came to him by birth. It was not because of any special merit in him, but simply because he was his father’s son that he received the property of which he is now possessed. So is it with heaven. The man who shall receive this glorious heritage will not obtain it by the works of the law, nor by the efforts of the flesh. It will be given to him as a matter of most gracious right, because he has been “begotten again unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” and has thus become an heir of heaven by blood and birth. They who come unto glory are sons. For is it not written, “The captain of our salvation bringeth many sons unto glory”? They come not there as servants. No servant has any right to the inheritance of his master—let him be never so faithful, yet is he not his master’s heir. But because you are sons—sons by God’s adoption, sons by the Spirit’s regeneration—because by supernatural energy you have been born again—you become inheritors of eternal life, and you enter into the many mansions of our Father’s house above. Let us always understand, then, when we think of heaven, that it is a place which is to be ours, and a state which we are to enjoy as the result of birth—not as the result of work. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God”—that kingdom being an inheritance, until he has the new birth, he can have no claim to enter it. But is it possible for us, provided that heaven be our inheritance, and we are God’s sons—is it possible for us to know anything whatever of that land beyond the flood? Is there power in human intellect to fly into the land of the hereafter, and reach those islands of the happy, where God’s people rest in the bosom of their God eternally? We are met at the outset with a rebuff which staggers us—“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” If we paused here, we might give up all idea of beholding from our houses of clay that goodly land and Lebanon. But we do not pause, for like the apostle, we go on with the text and we add, “But he hath revealed it unto us by his Spirit.” It is possible to look within the vail. God’s Spirit can turn it aside for a moment, and bid us take…