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ALWAYS TRADING UP #3
250 AIRLINE BAGS OF PEANUTS
There’s a gag about a sharp-tongued wife who looked
out the kitchen window one morning, surveying the neighborhood landscape
with a scowl on her face. Finally the old battle-ax turned back and snapped
off a complaint at her husband. “Well, I see that Mr. JONES got a new
CAR for HIS wife.”
The little milquetoast man thought about that for a second, and then sighed
out loud: “Boy, I sure wish I could make a trade like that.”
Well, I hope when you study the Automotive Blue Book at your house, wanting
to make a good deal on one of the 2003 models out there, your spouse isn’t
what YOU’RE planning to use for trade bait. But as we study the Bible
topic of heaven, and use this series title, ALWAYS TRADING UP, the concept
of “turning IN” something at the dealership is one we relate to. All the
car ads are shouting: “We need your trade!” But you know, friend, when
you make a car deal involving a trade, there are two things that are always
true.
First of all, you have to leave your old car THERE. I mean, that’s what
trading IN is all about. And we sometimes find it hard as human beings
to think about trading UP for the realities of heaven . . . IF that means
we leave behind the familiar things here below. Do we REALLY have to “trade
in” our houses, our cars, our jobs, our romances, our toys and trips?
How about our pet prejudices, our resentments, our grudges? It’s true
that trading in for what heaven offers does mean that we leave the old
car in the lot, give the keys and the pink slip to the salesperson, and
never look back. You remember that Jesus said to a would-be buyer we know
as the “rich young ruler” — the story’s in Mark chapter 10 — “In order
to complete the deal, you have to trade in EVERYTHING. ‘Sell all you have,’
it says in verse 21, ‘and give it to the poor. Then come follow Me.’”
And the guy wouldn’t do it. It didn’t seem to him like he really WAS trading
UP.
The second thing that’s going to be true down at the Ventura Auto Mall
this weekend is this: when you “trade in” the old car for a new one, there’s
almost always going to be a price differential. Someone’s got to pay the
difference. If they give you “low Blue” for your trade-in, and apply that
against the full MSRP of a brand new car, you’re going to be writing a
check, or taking out a 48-month loan, for the difference between those
two numbers. And believe me, the longer you sit in that salesman’s cubicle,
the bigger the gap is going to grow. They’ll keep sneering down the value
of your old car until you remonstrate with them: “Isn’t this the same
dazzling beauty you talked me INto back in 1995? That you said would HOLD
its value? You ARE the same salesman, aren’t you?”
The same “pay the difference” phenomenon happens in a spiritual sense,
of course, when we trade in our earthly possessions for our heavenly mansions.
The price difference there is staggering . . . except for this: Someone
else already paid it. Isn’t that good news?
But our contention this week has been this: when you and I finally make
that grandest of trades — earth for heaven — we’re going to be, IN EVERY
RESPECT, trading UP. ALWAYS TRADING UP. I don’t care what aspect of life
you consider: housing, food, recreation, leisure, comfort, worship, fellowship
and friendship. Go down any list you can compile; think of any THING you
like to do or try or own down here. When we stand on the sea of glass,
we’re going to be, in the words of that old theme song from The Jeffersons,
“movin’ on up.”
So often we think that this world is filled with pleasure . . . and thank
God, it is. But along with that thought, we think we’ll GIVE UP all pleasure
when Jesus comes again. There won’t be any martini glasses up there, we’re
told. No poker parlors or discos. Nothing but clouds and white robes and
the plink plink plink of the harp choirs.
I’d like to share with you one of our favorite quotes, taken from the
book, Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis. Many of you know the premise:
a “senior” devil writing letters of training to an apprentice demon who’s
just learning how to harass his human subject. To these demons, of course,
God is the great Enemy. But notice what these demons have to say about
pleasure and who really has a market on it.
“I know we have won many a soul through pleasure,”
the older, wiser devil writes. “All the same, it is His invention — [God’s]
— not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled
us to produce one.” Then this sad, bedeviled devil moans further: “Out
at sea, out in His sea” — again, God’s — “there is pleasure and more pleasure.
He makes no secret of it: at His right hand are ‘pleasures forever.’ Ugh!
He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There
are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least
— sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying,
working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight
under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is NATURALLY on our side.”
Now, these two devils are actually pouting about things
on this earth — how all the pleasures, even down here, are really God’s
inventions. Which, when you think about it, is true. Everything we normally
think of as being the devil’s tool is really something good twisted into
bad. Good things used too much, or at the wrong time, or for the wrong
purposes.
But how much MORE will the good pleasures of God explode to new life,
new reality in the kingdom where Satan’s “twisting” influence will be
gone?
I guess when we think about car deals and trading in the old car for the
new one — even if you have to pay through the nose FOR the new car — one
of the joys of the transaction CAN be leaving the old car behind. Especially
if it was a clunker that smoked and drank and often left you stranded
by the side of the road. Am I right? I love a paragraph from the recent
Christian book, Immortality or Resurrection? Listen to this:
“It is hard to imagine what it will be like to live
in the new world where there will be NO MORE hate, jealousy, fear, hostility,
discrimination, deception, oppression, killing, cutthroat competition,
political rivalries, arms races, economic recessions, racial tensions,
starvation, disparity between the rich and the poor, or sickness and death.”
That’s a whale of a list. Listen, friend, this is one
CLUNKER of a beat-up car you’re leaving behind in the lot — if we think
of it in those terms. When we trade UP for what heaven offers, we leave
behind the Edsel of all time.
The same writer goes on to point out that here in this world, in this
life, you and I are FOREVER beaten down by deadlines. There’s only so
much time to pursue your dreams. On the Internet just this morning was
a banner ad about “Are you close to getting that million dollars?” Not
by going on Regis’ show, but by simply realizing our dreams, scoring in
our dot.com stock selections. And a lot of us say no. Time is passing
us by. Back in late July there was a story here in the L.A. Times about
a lady named Laura O’Brien, who flies from our Burbank airport up to San
Jose EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS DAY OF THE WEEK! That’s right! Her family’s
down here, her real estate bosses and colleagues are up in the Silicon
Valley, and she’s so good that they spend the bucks to fly her on Southwest
Airlines back and forth to San Jose every single Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, and Friday of every single week. You read a story like that,
and you just want to collapse in fatigue. Two hundred thousand air miles
a year, not to mention bags of peanuts. But she’s busy. She wants to achieve
a certain status. And she knows there aren’t that many years to get there.
Well, friend — and maybe even Laura’s listening there in her rental car,
or in the RoadRunner van to the airport — God is going to invite us to
TRADE UP that hectic schedule. Here’s the same writer again:
“In our present life, sickness or death” — or an airline
strike, in Laura’s case — “often terminates the ambitious projects we
are pursuing. On the new earth, everyone will have UNLIMITED time and
resources to achieve the highest goals.”
That’s a thought, isn’t it? To trade 40 years for 40
billion? Twenty-four-hour days for the vast expanse of God’s timeless
forever? Our tiny, time-limited goals for the INFINITE ones we can set
for ourselves in God’s eternal kingdom? You talk about trading UP!
Let’s close with this thought by C. S. Lewis, and it has to do, perhaps,
with some secret dream you’ve just KNOWN you’d never get to down here.
“The Christian says,” he writes, “‘Creatures were not
made with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby
feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to
swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well,
there is such a thing as sex.” Then he quietly adds this thought: “If
I find in myself a desire which NO experience in THIS world can satisfy,
the most probable explanation is that I was made for ANOTHER world.”
And friend, we’ll be trading up for it soon.
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