On the four Sundays in Advent we are asked to think about the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. Since I’ve no means of knowing which, if any, of these your preachers have dealt with in the previous three Sundays, my sermon today is entitled "And the life everlasting. Amen" and it will consist of an overview of all four of these serious matters.

And serious they are – although it’s not unusual to hear people, even committed Christians if you please, say that they’re "not really interested" in what is going to happen to them after they die. So that is a good point to begin, since it’s like saying that they’re not interested in whether they are in good or bad health, happy or miserable: in other words it’s a good, thumping lie which needs to be firmly nailed. To that lie we shall return in a minute.

But first there’s a question which these people need to be ask themselves: whose future are they so unconcerned about? Are they seriously suggesting that they will stand beside the deathbed of someone they have loved deeply and say to them, "Well, my dear, I don’t know what is going to happen to you and frankly I’m not interested"?

We might – just – admire someone who said they weren’t interested in their own welfare after death; we should have nothing but contempt for someone who brazenly claimed to be disinterested about the welfare of someone else, especially someone to whom they are related by marriage, kinship or close affection.

So whatever anyone says, we have an unavoidable duty to interest ourselves in the eternal prospects of those whom we love; but we also have a duty to ourselves. Yes, it sounds all very noble and unselfish to claim that one isn’t interested in one’s own well-being – on a par with the soldier, a fireman or a missionary doctor endangering their own lives on behalf of others. But the person whose care-lessness leads them to takes no thought for their own well-being are fundamentally self-centred people and cause a lot of grief and trouble to their nearest and dearest. We blame them, whereas we praise those who lay down their lives for others.

So let’s ask ourselves now why people unthinkingly and untruthfully should claim to be "not interested" in something which so obviously concerns their welfare.

There’s a simple answer. Think for a moment of the picture-language which has been traditionally associated with heaven. Music, light, gold, jewellery, fine clothes, feasting and riches are what the Bible provides us with; and it’s easy to see why these ideas fail to resonate or make as much sense to people living nowadays as they did to those for whose benefit they were originally devised.

The reason is this: until, say, a hundred years ago, ordinary people were often hungry, their clothes were full of holes or at the pawnbrokers, they had no money or beautiful possessions to speak of, and much of their life was spent in the darkness of the coal-mine or the factory with the only noise being that of heavy machinery to listen to. For us, thankfully, these are things of the past: but we can still understand why those people thought of heaven in terms of those very things they’d never enjoyed in this life: food, wealth, comfort and beauty, for example, and hell in terms of everything they most dreaded: darkness, pain, destruction, illness and poverty.

The picture language which resonates with one lot of people doesn’t immediately "speak" to others: not because these images have outlived their usefulness because it only takes a little imagination to see what hunger still means today to civilians in Afghanistan, or fear to child-prostitutes in Thailand. But getting secular-minded people today to use a little bit of imagination is a problem, not because it is difficult, but because it’s disturbing and uncomfortable.

So what you and I as Christians need to discover are those everyday experiences in well-fed, adequately clothed and reasonably affluent and satisfied society correspond which today most closely correspond to those things that their less fortunate forebears found so attractive on the one hand and repellent on the other.

My candidates for such experiences would be the two words fulfilment and frustration respectively.

Heaven represents our true fulfilment "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever" is one relevant text; "[God] has made us for himself and our hearts are restless till they rest in him" is a second, and a third is "The glory of God is the living man; the end of man is the vision of God". Notice in passing that all three of these truths have God at the centre of them. He alone is the source of our joy and our fulfilment both in this life and in the life of the world to come.

So far from the joys and pleasures of this world preventing us enjoying life eternal (unless, of course, we abuse them), these sayings tell us that such joys are meant by God to be appetisers for what we can expect to enjoy hereafter. That explains, incidentally, why God will never allow such joys and pleasures to be too intense or to last too long, for if he did then we would certainly cease to look any further. In other words, any life which is intended to be a prelude to the "real thing" must give rise to a certain sense of longing, to a realisation that the pleasures of this world are both finite and temporary, whilst those of heaven are infinite and permanent.

A good way, then, of thinking about heaven is to get people thinking in terms of those things which give them as individuals most pleasure and satisfaction in this world: a good meal, that would be to go no further than the humble poor man we were thought about earlier on. But let’s hope that people today have other, more valuable experiences than this. So for one person such an experience may be the passing of an examination; for another, winning a prize in an athletic competition; for yet another it may be writing the last page of a book; for yet another, taking part in an orchestral performance in which everything "just goes right".

All of these experiences, and many others besides, have about them this sense of fulfilment or achievement; but don’t ignore the humbler, more mundane events which to some people, though not necessarily everyone, "mean" so much: getting married; giving birth to a child; the vicarious joy when one’s child or friend receives a decoration from the Queen for their bravery; or the simple joy of being restored to health after a serious illness thanks to the care and skill of other people.

It’s a profound mistake, you see, to imagine that glory is something which only happens as the result of what we ourselves do. The fact is that most of us are never going to be great Achievers in this world; a world that was populated exclusively by Great Achievers would be one of permanent strife and envy. That is why so much of the imagery of Heaven is concerned not with what man had done for God, but on what God has done for man. The focal point of van Eyck’s famous painting in Bruges is the Lamb of God. All the other figures in the picture are looking towards him. It reminds us, in the words of James Montgomery’s famous hymn that:

and